Monday, February 20, 2012
Harvard's Academic Pogrom
Harvard's Academic Pogrom
Posted By Steven Plaut On February 21, 2012
Harvard University is a school of rich tradition. And in a few days it
will be restoring a great Harvard tradition dating back to the 1930s:
the tradition of hosting Nazis and violent anti-Semites on campus
seeking the mass murder of Jews.
Harvard is to hold a pseudo-academic conference devoted to calls for
Israel's extermination. This "academic conference" will be little more
than a genteel campus pogrom. Misnamed the "One State Solution
Conference," it will definitely not have any discussion of any "One
State Solution" under which all of Western "Palestine" remains one
single Jewish state, while "Palestinians" unhappy about living there
as a political minority move to one of the 22 Arab states. When the
conference organizers and speakers talk about a "One State Solution,"
what they mean is a Rwanda solution, a final one, to the "Jewish
Problem" of the Middle East. They want Israel annihilated and replaced
by a "bi-national" state with an Islamist Arab majority in control.
And it does not take a great imagination to understand just how Jews
will fare under such a "solution."
Naturally, Harvard is defending this campus atrocity with the usual
protestations about academic freedom and freedom of speech. The
administrators who justify such open and violent bigotry in the guise
of an academic conference are the very same people who never seem to
express any objections when campus hooligans disrupt and harass talks
by Israeli diplomats and rallies by Jewish students. Harvard
administrators would be the first ones in the Ivy League to shut down
as "hate speech" any "conference" devoted to proving that black people
have lower IQs than others, that called for evicting all illegal
Hispanics from the nation, or that promoted the view that
homosexuality is a mental disorder.
In any case, a brief review of pedigrees of the participants in this
"conference" illustrates just how clearly this is to be nothing more
than a Bash-the-Jews campus crusade.
The "star" of the Harvard pogrom will be Ilan Pappe, who is arguably
the most thoroughly discredited pseudo-academic on the planet. Pappe
is a notorious fabricator, someone who claims proudly that facts and
truth are of no importance. "Indeed the struggle is about ideology,
not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many
people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct
one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are
truthseekers," the French newspaper Le Soir, has cited Pappe as
saying.
Pappe is an expatriate Israeli who devoted one of his "books" to his
sons with the wish that they may grow up in a world without Israel.
His own University of Exeter recently chastised him for his infamous
habit of playing fast and loose with facts. Pappe is best known as a
fulltime anti-Israel propagandist who has done more than any other
anti-Israel Israeli to promote the moral equivalence of "Nakba denial"
with Holocaust denial. He is a "new historian" in the sense of
pseudo-historian. His mission in life is to invent an imaginary
Palestinian historic "narrative." Nearly all those beating the "Nakba"
drum today cite Pappe and his "books" about the supposed "ethnic
cleansing" of Arabs by Israel in its war of independence. (For those
who do not know, "Nakba," meaning "catastrophe," is how Arabs refer to
Israel's birth.)
Pappe was a lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa,
but moved to resume the position of a pseudo-academic propagandist
position at the University of Exeter in the UK. Even other
anti-Zionists have repudiated Pappe as a liar and fabricator. He
openly calls for Israel to be exterminated and endorses Hamas
terrorism. He considers Noam Chomsky insufficiently anti-Israel.
Pappe, who ran for the parliament in Israel on the slate of the
Stalinist communist party and played a central role in fomenting
boycotts of Israel in the UK and elsewhere, was also the central
figure in the now infamous "Tantura Affair." In this incident, Pappe
coached a graduate student of his into inventing a non-existent
"massacre" of Arabs by the Hagana Jewish militia (Alexandroni Brigade)
in Tantura, south of Haifa, a "massacre" that Pappe claims took place
in 1948. Not a shred of any evidence for any such "massacre" exists.
Arab and other journalists who were present at the time of the battle
that took place in Tantura reported no massacre. Arabs living in the
town at the time confirmed that a battle did occur, but that after the
battle the Jewish militiamen aided and assisted the townspeople, not
massacring anyone. The graduate student in question was sued for libel
by the veterans of the Hagana militia. He later admitted in court with
his lawyer present that the entire massacre was an invention.
No matter – Pappe roams the world and continues to spread the lie
about the imaginary Tantura "massacre," a lie that has found its way
into nearly every anti-Semitic web site and Neo-Nazi magazine on
Earth, and even a handful of otherwise respectable mainstream
journalists foolishly rely upon him. Pappe has lied about practically
everything else, including about being "persecuted" by his own
university in Israel. In fact, Pappe was never fired for his fraud and
fabrication by the University of Haifa, although he should have been.
(Some wags even suggested the university should be boycotted for not
firing Pappe.) That did not stop Pappe from waving his stigmata as
"victim of Zionism" before the European anti-Semites promoting
"divestment" from Israel. His recruitment by the University of Exeter
proves how indifferent that school is to scholarly standards. His
coming appearance as the star of the Harvard academic pogrom shows
that things are not much better there.
While Pappe may be the most notorious fabricator at Harvard's Destroy
Israel Conference, he is hardly the only one. A close runner-up will
be Stephen M. Walt, who – along with his sidekick John Mearsheimer –
is best known for proliferating medieval "theories" about a grand
Jewish cabal plotting to control the world. Walt and Mearsheimer spin
yarns about the imaginary power of the "Jewish lobby" that resound
very much like German propaganda from the 1930s. It would be an
exaggeration to say that there is no Israel lobby whatsoever in the
United States, but only a small exaggeration. The "Israel lobby" does
not come up to the pinky toes in terms of the power of the farm lobby
and the teachers union lobby. Walt's partner Mearsheimer has been in
the news the past few weeks for endorsing and celebrating a
notoriously deranged British Israel-born Holocaust denier, Gilad
Atzmon. Walt also defends Mearsheimer's choice of Nazi chums on his
own personal blog.
Walt and Mearsheimer are widely seen as open anti-Semites, churning
out conspiratorial tripe no better than what the "9/11 truther" nuts
produce. The Anti-Defamation League dismisses them as anti-Semitic
cranks, adding: "Mearsheimer and Walt start by blaming Israel for
everything in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once establishing
Israel's consistent guilt, from the creation of the state to present
day, they then move to asserting that the 'Israel lobby' (which is
loosely and inconsistently defined) in the United States uses every
device and method of pressure politics to stifle criticism of Israel
and to ensure America's pro-Israel policy, against America's true
interests and to serve the interests of the Jewish state."
The Harvard conference will also feature a number of obscure
pseudo-academics, whose inclusion is evidently entirely due to their
being Jewish anti-Semites. One of these speakers will be Marc H.
Ellis, on the faculty at Baylor University. Ellis is someone
considered by himself to be a Jewish theologian and thinker, and by
himself alone. No one else in the world seems to consider his
"philosophical" salad of Marxism and the quest for the annihilation of
Israel to be Jewish theology. Well, no one besides the racist Reverend
Jeremiah Wright, at least (Wright just adores Ellis). Ellis is
basically a clone of Norman Finkelstein, but – unlike Finkelstein –
was never dismissed by his own university for being a fraud (yet).
Come to think of it, since Finkelstein has lately been renouncing the
"Boycott and Divest from Israel" movement, Finkelstein these days
might better be considered to be the Ellis Lite. Ellis pretends to be
something of a "Holocaust theologian," but the only lesson he has
managed to extract from the Holocaust is that it is necessary now to
conduct a second Holocaust to rid the world of Israel.
Ellis thinks that the legacy of the Holocaust ought to instill in Jews
the duty to denounce Israel unambiguously and to support the demands
and agenda of the Palestinian terrorists. He denounces all Jewish
denominations and all rabbinic institutions for their failures to
endorse Palestinian violence unreservedly. He is as hostile to the
Jews of America as he is to those of Israel: "We as Jews come after
the Holocaust, but we also come after the illusory promises of Israel
and America. And we cannot find our way alone, only with others who
realize that the promises they have been handed are also illusory."
An even more obscure "academic" to be featured at the Harvard pogrom
is one Dalit Baum, a mouth-foaming hater of Israel who teaches "gender
studies" as an adjunct at my own school, the University of Haifa. She
holds a degree in math, and spends her days in quest of being the
planet's leading lesbian for jihad. When she is not leading "dyke
marches" (her term), Baum lectures to college students against the
state of Israel and its right to defend itself. She pretends to be a
victim of societal oppression against homosexuals and women, although
the fact that she holds a job in a sociology department without having
any degree in sociology better illustrates the nature of her
persecution. Baum created an organization of anti-Semitic lesbians
calling itself Black Laundry, which meets in gay bars in Israel. Black
Laundry members, of course, never convene in the areas controlled by
the Hamas or Palestinian Authority to protest "oppression" of
homosexuals. We can only wonder why.
Timothy McCarthy, an adjunct lecturer at Harvard and a self-proclaimed
expert on "gender studies" and "human rights," will be joining Baum.
He will be explaining why the best way to achieve gender equality and
human rights in the Middle East is to annihilate the only country in
which they exist.
Other speakers at the Nuremberg Rally off Harvard Square will include
anti-Semitic journalists, a gaggle of anti-Israel sociologists, law
professors who define human rights in such a way that Arabs have a
human right to murder Jews, but Jews have no human right to defend
themselves, and even one liberation-theology pseudo-rabbi. What they
all have in common is their desire to see Israel exterminated. In what
passes for academic pluralism and diversity these days, the Harvard
conference will not have even a single speaker who thinks that Israel
has the right to exist and the right to defend itself.
Harvard University has a bit of a history when it comes to coddling
Nazis. In the 1930s, it was one of the American universities reluctant
to hire Jewish and other refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. According to
"The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower," by Stephen H. Norwood (Cambridge
University Press, 2009), Harvard University stood out above the rest
in its moral failure and in its collaboration with Nazism. Many of the
faculty members at Harvard were openly anti-Semitic, including
Harvard's president James Bryant Conant. Later, after the war, Conant
served as US Ambassador to Germany and worked feverishly to get Nazi
war criminals paroled and hired. He lobbied for appointments of Nazis
to various public posts in Europe and at the United Nations.
Harvard's law school dean, Roscoe Pound, was openly sympathetic to
Hitler, vacationed in Germany and attended anti-Semitic events there.
Harvard history professor William L. Langer strongly defended Hitler's
reoccupation and remilitarization of the Rhineland, which was the
first step in launching World War II. More generally he served as a
sort of academic apologist for the Nazis. The Nazi Professor Friedrich
Schoenemann had taught at Harvard during and after World War I. During
the 1930s, when he was at the University of Berlin, he went on a
speaking tour of American campuses in 1933 to great acclaim, where his
talks were titled "Why I Believe in the Hitler Government."
Harvard went out of its way to host and celebrate Nazi leaders during
the 1930s. The high Nazi official Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaungl was
invited as the Harvard commencement speaker in 1934. The wealthy
Hanfstaungel had been one of Hitler's earliest and most important
backers. He was on record insisting "the Jews must be crushed," and
describing Jews as "the vampire sucking German blood." Hanfstaungel
was invited by a Harvard medical professor to serve as the honored
speaker in the Harvard commencement ceremony and class reunion of 1934
and used the occasion for anti-Semitic incitement. He openly advocated
the mass arrest or worse of German Jews. The student paper, the
Harvard Crimson, defended Hanfstaungel. Harvard called in the Boston
police to arrest Jews and others protesting the visit, and they were
charged with "illegally displaying signs." When Hanfstaungel returned
to Germany from Harvard, he was personally welcomed by Hitler.
So the Destroy Israel "Conference," AKA the Nuremberg Rally near the
Charles River, is simply upholding a proud Cambridge Ivy heritage.
The "One State Solution" as promoted by the Harvard pseudo-academic
pogromchiki should really be called the Final Solution.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article:
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/21/harvard%e2%80%99s-academic-pogrom/