Thursday, December 23, 2010
Don't Hold your Breath waiting for the Left to issue an Apology
academic radicalism for decades, the anti-democratic officials at the
head of Ben Gurion University just decided to prevent a small group of
leftwing extremists from distributing a libelous pamphlet on campus.
The pamphlet was a malicious personal attack against Avigdor
Lieberman. Campus heads were convinced the pamphlet was slanderous
and would result in the university being sued. See this story:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/left-wing-students-fight-university-ban-of-libelous-flyer-featuring-lieberman-1.332319
The pamphlet also warned against the "march towards fascism" in
Israel. This is ironic, since many of the leading anti-Israel
Neo-Fascists who battle against freedom of speech in Israel are
faculty members at Ben Gurion University, and one of the worst is now
Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities there.
The leftwing fascist students who prepared the pamphlet complained
that the ban violates "academic freedom" at BGU. But academic freedom
at BGU does not exist at all. Zionists and non-leftists may not teach
in the Politics department. The campus chiefs have led the jihad to
silence the Zionist students from Im Tirtzu. You also recall no doubt
that BGU's President, the cabbagehead Rivka Carmi, fired a professor
for expressing a politically unfashionable opinion about homosexual
couples raising children. She then defended the firing in the name of
the necessity of silencing opinions that can offend people. Except
she has long defended the rights of faculty members to cheer Hamas
rocket attacks against Jews and who also call for Israel to be
annihilated, opinions that also offend people.
And since when are the heads of BGU so upset about harassment libel
suits? After all, they have long SUPPORTED the neo-fascist attempt by
anti-Israel pseudo-academic Neve Gordon to silence ME by means of a
harassment SLAPP suit. Gordon wanted the court to punish me for
criticizing Gordon's published political opinions. The Israeli
Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in that matter any day
now.
Gordon's harassment SLAPP suit against me, by the way, was originally
filed in Nazareth Court because Gordon hoped (and succeeded) to get
the case assigned to an anti-Israel Arab radical judge. The Nazareth
Court has been in the press in recent days. Because so many of its
judges are Arabs, every Palestinian with any "grievance" against
Israel files suits THERE, and in many cases the sympathetic judges
award monetary awards to the Palestinians, including those injured
when involved in violence against Israel. Nazareth Court, according
to these media reports, has morphed into Israel's center for the
judicial intifada.
2. Don't hold your breath waiting for the Left to Apologize:
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: FINALLY, A HAMAS LEADER ADMITS THAT ISRAEL KILLED
MOSTLY COMBATANTS IN GAZA
By • Alan Dershowitz
Published in: Huffington Post December 21, 2010
Since the end of the Gaza War in January 2009, Israel has stood
accused of targeting civilians, rather than terrorist combatants. The
Israeli Defense Force has claimed that during Operation Cast Lead it
targeted only combatants in its efforts to protect its civilians from
rocket attacks. It has also claimed that most of the dead were
combatants and issued lists of names of many of the combatants killed
and identified them as members of the specific Hamas military units.
Despite unprecedented efforts to avoid civilian casualties --
including hundreds of thousands of leaflets, telephone calls and
non-lethal, noise-making warning bombs -- some civilians were killed,
because Hamas deliberately hid behind civilians, using them as
shields, when they fired rockets at Israeli civilians.
Following the end of the Gaza War, which has essentially stopped Hamas
rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, there was a great debate
about the number of Gaza civilians actually killed, and the ratio of
civilian to combatant deaths during this difficult military operation.
The Israel Defense Force put the total number of known combatants
killed at 709 and the number of known civilian deaths at 295, with 162
(mostly men of fighting age) "unknown." Such a ratio, if true, would
be far better than that achieved by any other nation in a comparable
conflict. Not surprisingly, Israel's enemies initially disputed this
ratio and claimed that the number of combatants killed was far lower
and the number of civilians far higher. The United Nations, the
Goldstone Report, various "human rights" organizations and many in the
media automatically rejected Israel's documented figures, preferring
the distorted numbers offered by Hamas' and other Palestinian sources.
But a statement recently made by a Hamas leader confirms that Israel
was correct in claiming that approximately 700 combatants were killed.
First, a word about the context of the Hamas statement. In the
aftermath of the war, Hamas has come under considerable criticism from
rival terrorist groups for not doing enough to defend Gaza and for
allowing so many civilian casualties. So, in a recent interview with a
London paper, Al-Hayat, Fathi Hamad, Hamas' Interior Minister,
responded to these criticisms as follows:
"It has been said that the people were harmed by the war, but is Hamas
not part of the people? It is a fact that on the first day of the war
Israel struck police headquarters and killed 250 members of Hamas and
the various factions, in addition to the 200-300 operatives from the
[Izz al-Din] al-Qassam Brigades. In addition, 150 security personnel
were killed, and the rest were from people. (The original text of the
interview in Arabic, as reprinted in the Hamas newspaper Felesteen,
can be found on the website of the Meir Amit Intelligence and
Terrorism Information Center. It was also reported by Agence France
Presse)
This statement not only supports the Israeli numbers, but it also
acknowledges what Israel has long said about the 250 policemen who
were killed on the first day of combat: they were "members of Hamas
and the various factions" and were indeed "combatants" by any
realistic definition of that term.
Fathi Hamad's figures are in striking contrast to those originally
issued by Palestinian groups which claimed that only 48 combatants
were killed and that the total amounted to a mere 17 percent of all
fatalities.
Because it uncritically accepted the original Hamas claims of very few
combatant deaths, the Goldstone Report was able to reach its flawed
conclusion that the purpose of the operation must have been to kill
civilians, not combatants. This is what the Goldstone Report said:
The Mission notes that the statistics from non-governmental sources
are generally consistent. Statistics alleging that fewer than one out
of five persons killed in an armed conflict was a combatant...raise
very serious concerns about the way Israel conducted the military
operations in Gaza. The counterclaims published by the Government of
Israel fall short of international law standards.
Now that the truth has been admitted by the Hamas leadership -- that
as many as 700 combatants were, in fact, killed -- the Goldstone
Commission is obliged to reconsider its false conclusion and correct
its deeply flawed report.
Richard Goldstone himself has repeatedly said that he hoped that new
evidence will prove his conclusions wrong. Well, this new evidence --
a classic admission against interest -- does just that!
The original false figures have also been submitted by the Palestinian
Authority to the International Criminal Court. It too has an
obligation to correct the record. It would be an outrageous
miscarriage of justice for the International Criminal Court to open an
investigation of a nation that, in actuality, had the best ratio of
combatant to civilian deaths in any comparable war.
The admission by Fathi Hamad that Israel's figures were correct and
those originally offered by Palestinian groups were false exposes the
rush to judgment against Israel that has stained the so-called "human
rights" community so often in the past. It is essential that this new
evidence be widely circulated, which it has not been to date, and that
those who condemned Israel on the basis of false allegations correct
the record. Don't hold your breath! In today's distorted world of
"human rights," truth takes a back seat to ideology, and false claims
-- especially those that "support" radical ideologies -- persist even
after they have been exposed.
Professor Alan Dershowitz's latest book is a novel, The Trials of Zion.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/finally-a-hamas-leader-ad_b_798429.html?ref=tw
3. More leftist censorship?
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/23/how-the-l-word-became-a-4-letter-word/
See also http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/22/the-left-twists-net-neutrality-into-a-civil-rights-issue/
4. When assimilationist liberals claim to speak for the Jewish
community: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/23/will-jewish-community-leaders-stand-up/
5. How to melt a Leftist:
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/23/melting-leftist-arguments-on-contact/
6. From Middle East Quarterly:
Clash of Identities
Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies
by Baruch Kimmerling.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 429 pp. $55 ($27.50, paper)
Reviewed by Steven Plaut
University of Haifa
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2010
http://www.meforum.org/2799/clash-of-identities
If you are looking for a numbingly unreadable book of anti-Israel
diatribes written by a deceased sociologist with Marxist tendencies,
you can do no better (or worse?) than Clash of Identities. Kimmerling,
who died in 2007, devoted his long career as a sociologist to doing
little sociology while preening as a New Historian. Clash of
Identities is the reprint of twelve previously published articles
venting against Israel and Zionism.
Just about everything that was wrong with Kimmerling's work as an
academic is on display in this new book, which is long on diatribe but
short on evidence. Data and numbers are almost completely missing.
Other than a few tables from a questionable public opinion survey,
nothing is measured quantitatively in this supposed investigation of
identity.
Kimmerling seems to have had little interest in measurement and
analysis and seemed more interested in preaching and advocating. He
saw himself as a historian of the Palestinian people, seeing shades of
Palestinian identity decades, even centuries, before the U.N.
partition vote of 1947. Ironically, when he actually stumbled across
evidence of importance, he tended to ignore what it actually showed.
Thus, in describing the birth of Palestinian national identity, he
mentions petitions sent to British authorities in the 1920s by
thousands of Palestinian intellectuals and professionals, demanding to
be made Syrian citizens.
This book may be eye-opening for people who have never read a book
before about the Middle East. They will learn that both Jewish and
Arab identities have something to do with religion, that both
nationalist movements have flirted with socialism, and that many
Israeli resources go into its military. However, Kimmerling chooses to
ignore or hide the fact that the bulk of Palestinians in 1948 were
recent migrants or temporary workers who came to the area from other
Arab countries attracted by the increase in economic opportunities
brought about by Jewish enterprise and British rule of law. The reader
will also fail to learn that, until 1967, there was little Palestinian
nationalism beyond Arab nationalism or beyond the Arab desire to see
the Jews driven into the sea.
The most interesting part of the book is its long preface. There we
learn that when Kimmerling first approached the dean of Israeli
sociology, Shmuel Eisenstadt, to be his dissertation advisor,
Eisenstadt turned him down cold because Kimmerling was planning on
writing a pro-Arab diatribe as his thesis. Other senior professors at
Hebrew University also showed him the door. Eventually he managed to
twist the arm of a junior faculty member, Moshe Lissak, to serve as
his supervisor. Lissak, who became one of Hebrew University's most
distinguished professors also became one of Kimmerling's harshest
critics.
7. More jihad from the Hebrew University:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HebrewU%20-%20Bashir%20Bashir%20-%20Middle%20East%20with%20no%20Israel.htm
