Editorial Article
Moshe Behar demonstrates how Jewish intellectualism
masks opportunistic traitors
By Lee Kaplan,
www.isracampus.org.il
Moshe Behar's background states he completed
his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University and is
currently a post-doctoral fellow in Comparative Politics at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His research focuses on Jewish and
Arab nationalisms.
Sounds innocuous enough, no? But Moshe Behar's
work could only be described as pandering to the worst anti-Semites
in the world and his comments, vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, demonstrate he is a sloppy scholar at best relying on his
anti-Israel political clique to validate his poor understanding of
research and international law.
Israel today, as something that grew out of the
ashes of the Holocaust, is one giant concentration camp for Jews in
this world. The only difference is the Jews are armed for
self-protection this time. As with any other concentration camp of
Jews, there have always been those Jews who would curry favor with
the anti-Jewish tormentors either for better privileges, money or
notoriety. This could be said to describe Moshe Behar.
As an Israeli himself, Behar wants to recruit
and organize every Jew who hates Israel and wants to see the Jewish
state's destruction regardless of the myriad reasons why some Jews
are out to encourage another Holocaust-in-the-making. That is, if
some Jews are anti-Semites because they are communists, or because
they are narcissists, or because they are self-hating, or even if
they are mentally ill, Behar wants them all working as a team player
like he does with the Arabs.
Behar's work is prominently displayed by the
Journal for Palestine Studies, a pseudo-intellectual think tank set
up by the late Edward Said and the PLO at Columbia University where
Behar got his PhD in political science (being an Israeli, one only
needs to regurgitate as much anti-Israel diatribes masked as
"scholarship” as possible to get personal acceptance as one of the
boys and a chance to publish and be listened to everywhere and
anywhere in academia that Israel has enemies, even within Israel's
own ivory towers of academia like Hebrew University where Behar is
now a postdoctoral fellow. Columbia University is otherwise known by
competent Middle East academics like Martin Kramer as "Bir-Zeit on
the Hudson" (for those unfamiliar with Bir-Zeit University, it is a
Hamas stronghold in the Palestinian Authority areas of the West
Bank, another gift from an Israeli government that can't do enough
for its enemies), so Columbia was a fitting place for Behar to earn
his chops in academia.
Behar drafted a letter to every Jew in the
world that wants to see Israel ended as a Jewish nation in which he
calls for "a clear call of a halt to all American and other aid to
Israel" and implementation of UN Resolution 242 that he says
"emphasized the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by
force" and "affirmed the principle of withdrawal of Israeli forces
from territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict."
Right away we can see there's some problems
with this
pseudo-intellectual-academic-scholar-Arab-irredentist-asskisser's
logic for arguments in favor of the PLO's tactics:
Boycotting Israel only forces 30% of the
elderly and children to eat in soup kitchens and is just another way
of assaulting Jews by trying to starve them out; one Arab assaults
Jews with an AK-47, whereas another tries to inflict harm by
starving his children in hopes of collapsing the Israeli economy. It
is truly obscene that Moshe Behar should be affiliated with Hebrew
University in Jerusalem not far from poorer Jewish neighborhoods.
But even more insulting is he has been teaching in Sderot, the
Jewish community besieged by Kassem rockets after 8,000 Jews were
deported from their homes in Gaza in the interests of peace, in a
prequel of what he is demanding be implemented in Judea and Samaria
(the West Bank).
Behar says that Jews around the world opposed
to a Jewish state should insist on the implementation of UN
Resolution 242 that calls for Israel to withdraw from some of the
territories taken in 1967, but he chooses to define it in Arab
newspeak as calling for the complete withdrawal of Jews from all the
territory taken by Israel in the Six Days' War.
Middle East historian Bat Y'eor in her book,
Eurabia, has described how the Arabs continually misquote the
intention of Resolution 242 insisting it says Israel must withdraw
from all the territories and give it to the Arabs. But Eugene Rostow,
who wrote the Resolution for the UN, says it says Israel must
withdraw from part of the territory in return for secure borders.
Those two issues never come into play for an Arab League that
insists international law be followed only when they agree with it.
There were 23 Jewish settlements in Gaza and Judea and Samaria (The
West Bank) prior to 1948 that Arab armies destroyed that Israel took
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