Zionist Conspiracy

 

1.   There is no joy in tenured Mudville

   

 

    In November of 2012 in the middle of the Pillar of Clouds anti-terror incursion by the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza, a group of Arab and radical-leftist Jewish students at the University of Haifa sought permission to hold a pro-Hamas rally on the campus.  The protesters demanded the right to hold events showing solidarity with the terrorists and the enemies of their own country, all this smack in the middle of the battle.   To do so would be equivalent to the holding of pro-Nazi rallies in London and New York in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.

 

     The University of Haifa authorities, led by the president (who was in power only for a few weeks at that time), issued a temporary order prohibiting holding political demonstrations on campus.  The idea was to prevent the inevitable violent clashes between the pro-Hamas demonstrators and the rest of the student body.

 

    The prohibition on holding campus protests enraged some members of the Ultra-Left.  Three radical faculty members at the University of Haifa joined  six students (five of them Arabs) and the far-leftist Association on Civil Rights in Israel, and together submitted a petition to the Haifa District Court against the University.  They demanded that the court proclaim the University regulations that allow the President and Administration to regulate and even prohibit campus political rallies to be unreasonably disproportional, unconstitutional, and a violation of freedom of speech. 

 

   The three members of the faculty were led by Dr. Ilan Saban, an ultra-Leftist instructor in the University's School of Law.  This is the same school of law that is so often in the news for things like coercing its students into providing free legal counsel to convicted terrorists, and for prohibiting the singing of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva.   Saban is one of the people who led the campaign to DEFEND the decision to proclaim Prof. Robert Aumann unworthy of getting an honorary degree because Aumann holds non-leftist views.  To illustrate Saban's devotion to freedom of speech and pluralism, a couple of years back Saban was serving as editor of a law journal published by the University of Haifa and he ran a biased article there on the Plaut-Gordon court case.  I had previously contributed an academic article to the same journal and so, as a contributor,  asked Saban, as the editor, for half a page in the next issue of the journal to correct some factual errors in the article it had published about my case.  Saban refused.

 

     In the law suit against the University, this same Saban was joined by Asad Ghanem, a radical anti-Israel Arab nationalist instructor in political scientist, and by Yuval Yonay, a Marxist anti-Israel sociologist with expertise on "Queer Studies," which is what he himself calls it.

 

   On January 19, 2014, the Haifa District Court issued its verdict in the case (verdict 51057-11-12, available only in Hebrew).  The judge tossed out the entire petition with obvious disdain.  She argued that there was nothing anti-democratic in the University's regulations about campus protests and there was no violation of freedom of speech.  There was no infringement of student rights.  There was nothing unreasonable or disproportionate.    In other words, the petitioners are full of baloney.

 

     The court also rejected the claims by the petitioners that the prohibition had been improperly approved under campus governance rules.  The court pointed out that the three faculty members in the petition had themselves sat in the University Senate when the guidelines for protests had originally been passed and had never raised any objections to it at that time.   Finally, the court hit the petitioners with about $2000 in legal costs payable to the University, which in Israel is pretty high for such petitions.

 

 

2.  You probably heard that the ultra-leftist foul-mouthed anti-Orthodox bigot Shulamit Aloni met her Maker on Friday and I certainly hope that her Maker is dressed up in a robe like Ovadia Yosef when she meets him.  I did not catch exactly what was the cause of death but I suspect it had something to do with Dorothy's house landing  on her during the cyclone….

 

 

3.  Enjoy:

http://www.preoccupiedterritory.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/oy-vey.jpg

 

 

 

4.  These are making the rounds and are quite funny: