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One of the most extremist of Israeli leftist “professors,” and surprisingly someone who teaches at Bar-Ilan University (where she is deputy chair-person of MA Studies), has just emerged in the limelight as a result of a broadcast by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network. The broadcast purported that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers who fought in Operation Cast Lead were now wearing T-Shirts boasting of their killing pregnant women and children.

Orna Sasson-Levy is a sociologist who specializes in “Gender Studies,” one of the trendy new pseudo-academic disciplines that radical leftists have gotten universities to recognize. "Gender Studies" is yet another study of “oppression” within democratic western societies, and never mind about the treatment of women or female genital mutilation in the Third World. Sadly, Sasson-Levy does little more than project her political agenda into her "field," and that agenda is decidedly hateful of Israel’s soldiers.

Sasson-Levy, it turns out, is a devoted acolyte of the late Marxist sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, who long worked assiduously against the Jewish state and who wrote extensively and negatively about “the state of the IDF” when he was not inventing a history of a Palestinian "people." Sasson-Levy builds upon Kimmerling’s ideas about the Israeli army as being militarism-gone-amuck in an otherwise uncivilized society that “oppresses” the Palestinian people. Her curriculum vitae shows she studied personally under Kimmerling, and this apple did not fall far from the tree. Sasson-Levy built her entire career upon denouncing the “gender practices of Israeli women soldiers in ‘masculine roles’” as well as “hegemonic masculinity and Israeli militarism.” That is what passes for neutral academic research these days in Gender Studies.

Sasson-Levy explains in one of her papers that she studies the IDF by conducting “ in-depth interviews with Israeli combat soldiers,”in which she claims that “the warrior's bodily and emotional practicesare constituted through two opposing discursive regimes: self-controland thrill. The nexus of these two themes promotes an individualizedinterpretation frame of militarized practices, which blurs theboundaries between choice and coercion, presents mandatory militaryservice as a fulfilling self-actualization, and enables soldiers to ignore the political and moral meanings of their actions.” We are not making this up! In other words, she dabbles in "scholarly analysis through doubletalk."

In simple English, soldiers in the IDF are not serving to protect their families from Arab irredentists or jihadis who want to murder or terrorize them, nor are they protecting the Jewish people from the endless pogroms conducted against them. Instead, they are serving as blind ignorant automatons with no moral or political sense, too stupid to understand the world as Sasson-Levy and the anti-Zionists see it. Military conscription does not fit her sense of “democracy” either. Never mind that it results in a people's army that can protect the country so middle-aged intellectuals like herself can denounce it from the comfort of Bar-Ilan University. Never mind that the actual elite combat units that do most of the fighting are generally composed of volunteers who asked for combat duty.

Of course, today any good “Gender Studies” professor worth her salt would also have to show oppression of women in the military. Sasson-Levy determines that Israeli women who serve as trainers in the IDF somehow undergo a "gender transformation" by lowering their voices and actually behaving there like men, instead of serving in traditional feminine roles (how sexist of this Gender Studies professor to think such roles exist!). Frankly, we have seen many a female army officer who looks better in a skirt than Sasson-Levy! She arrives at these "scholarly theories" after interviewing a little more than 50 women in the IDF, an army in which about 20% of combat units have women soldiers in them. But, wait! She also produces another paper in which she explains how women serving as secretaries in the IDF are subject to male chauvinists forcing them into the “matrimonial principle of the office wife,” which makes them “status symbols” (i.e. underpaid sex objects).

The truth is that as recently as last month the IDF once again took steps to integrate further the service and open up more careers for women. What a surprise to learn from Sasson-Levy that female drill sergeants are coerced into shouting orders the same as their male counterparts, instead of curtsying, asking their recruits to open doors for them, or showing them traditional “feminine” deference. And frankly, we suspect that if a male recruit were to hold the door open for a female DI or gallantly throw his coat over a puddle for her to walk across, Sasson-Levy would have a tantrum. Women soldiers performing "traditional feminine" roles in the IDF, such as secretaries, are also enough to get Sasson-Levy’s petticoat twisted in rage. In short, whatever the IDF does, and to whomever it does things, it must always be considered oppressive and evil.

Sasson-Levy has also appeared and been quoted on the website of Neo-Nazi pseudo-academic Norman Finklestein, in an article based largely on anonymous “quotes” by IDF soldiers that are impossible to verify as genuine. A PR agent for the Hizballah, Finklestein has built a career on the claim that world Jewry and Israel use the Holocaust as a profitable industry to extort the poor Germans and is opposed to the very existence of any Zionist state.

Al Jazeera routinely refers to suicide bombers and terrorists who murder Israelis as “martyrs,” and was accused of using its correspondents inside Israel for espionage, phoning in rockets positions to the Hizballah during the 2006 summer war. In addition, Al Jazeera gives free press time to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Despite this, their news crews are allowed into Israel, where they churn out propaganda against Israel. In part, they are assisted in this by none other than our Orna Sasson-Levy.

Her latest "scoop" begins with what was a possibly tasteless choice in tee-shirts by some young Israeli soldiers. One shirt showed a pregnant woman in gun sights. It was ordered from a commercial tee-shirt print shop. Since then, soldier "Tee Shirt Insensitivity" has become the new banner of the anti-Zionist Israeli Far Left!

So amidst the attempt by the Palestinians to obliterate southern Israel in a rocket blitz, triggering Operation Cast Lead to stop the Qassams falling on Sderot and Ashkelon, Sasson-Levy and the other "leftists against tee-shirts" decided to paint the IDF as a bunch of bloodthirsty warmongers and cutthroats. The Al Jazeera report about the "tee shirt atrocity" was produced in English so that it has the look of a CNN report. Al Jazeera expressed no shock or remorse when the Arabs were firing thousands of Qassams at children in Sderot and Ashkelon. But a tasteless cartoon on tee-shirts trumps that as a human rights abuse! Or at least it does so according to Orna Sasson-Levy.

Meanwhile, The Committee For Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) reports that Danny Zamir, a leftist opposed to Israel fighting the Hamas in self-defense, submitted a "report" to head of the IDF, Gabi Ashkenazi, based on some hearsay about Israeli soldiers supposedly shooting innocent women and children during Operation Cast Lead. The subsequent investigation proved the accusations false, but, of course, the intended media damage was already done. Israel’s soldiers were smeared. Al Jazeera’s cynical use of Orna Sasson-Levy to further smear the IDF over Shirtgate was similar.

So a handful of IDF soldiers (out of an army of 500,000) were allegedly purchasing with their own money and wearing objectionable tee-shirts, as a joke. Shirts that supposedly glorified the killing of women and children! Gosh, where on earth do teenagers ever don tasteless tee-shirts!?? One T-shirt had a picture of a pregnant woman in the sight of rifle with the caption, “One shot, Two Kills.” Another tee-shirt had an image of a child in the gun sight with a comment about how inconvenient it is to kill such a small target. We are not amused. But we have seen far worse slogans on tee shirts on the campus of Berkeley and in San Francisco. Frankly, we find the tee-shirts less disturbing than Arab chants of "In fire and blood we will redeem thee Oh Palestine."

Gabi Ashkenazi, Chief of Staff of the IDF, rightfully describing the shirts as “tasteless.” He added that the shirts had been made up by a few yahoos, immature young people with no sense of decorum. But for Sasson-Levy the shirts were a gold mine. She exploited the prank to smear Israel and the IDF as a whole, and on Al-Jazeera no less!

Al Jazeera produced a video about the T-shirts that appeared on anti-Israel web sites and blogs all over the planet, next to headline banners such as “UN Accuses Israel of War Crimes” and “Guardian Uncovers Evidence of Israeli War Crimes in Gaza, Parts 1, 2, 3.” Al Jazeera of course does not run stories about Palestinians using Mickey Mouse and other childish images on children’s TV shows to mass murder of Jews.

Interviewed by the Al Jazeera reporter, Sasson-Levy states, “The tee-shirts are an example of culture, they’re symbolic, even if they’re not really used by the Israeli force, right? They’re saying. ‘This is our culture, we’re proud of it,’ and by wearing the T-shirt again and again, you again and again make public this statement: We are proud of killing Palestinian babies or Palestinian pregnant women…” Sasson-Levy then adds, "The tee-shirts represent an increasing trend in Israeli culture that 'dehumanizes' Palestinians as can be shown on the shirts." You can watch the video here. We have yet to hear of anyone ever being blown up by a tee shirt. [In light of her jihad against the tee-shirts, we kind of prefer that ultra-feminist haters of Israel should go back to burning bras.]

Sasson-Levy pretends to be an academic expert on women’s oppression at the hands of a patriarchal male-dominated society, a slogan she intersperses in her "analyses" against the IDF as if it were a punctuation mark. She argues that tee-shirts are an indication of the acceptance of “force” in Israeli society. “It’s frightening for everyone,” she says in the Al-Jazeera video, “and it’s frightening for women in Israeli society and that’s also the orientation the last elections shows, that the state is going more to the right wing…”

It is a shame that the Arabs do not fire nasty T-shirts into Sderot from Gaza instead of Qassams…

Actually our scholar Sasson-Levy did no research or interviews at all with any soldiers on the matter, not even those who allegedly wore the tee-shirts. She has no way of knowing whether they hate Arabs or just have a teenager sense of "humor." She also did no research to show that women in Israel are any more frightened by the patriarchal menfolk of the IDF than by Qassam rockets. She states for Al Jazeera's camera that the Israeli electorate voted for the new conservative government because the country is trending toward violence. It does not occur to her that voters considered the previous Leftist government to have failed to protect the public from Arab missile attacks.

And Israeli taxpayers are picking up the bill for such "scholarship."

The Al Jazeera reporter who interviewed her claims to have visited the tee-shirt shop where the shirts were supposedly printed, but claims he was ordered out by police. Yeah, sure. I suppose one should also not rule out the possibility that they were actually ordered in the first place by Israel’s leftist anti-war and pro-Arab groups as a provocation and ruse. We also do not know if any of the soldiers wearing the tee-shirt had been stationed in Gaza or took place in combat there

The leftist daily Haaretz also ran a "scoop" about Shirtgate, in which it stated that employees responsible for producing the shirts at the printer were in fact Arabs. Could they have created the shirts as a provocation? Or just as a gimmick to make money? These possibilities do not interest social scientist Sasson-Levy, who pontificates with authority that such shirts represent a dangerous trend in Israeli society and the IDF as a whole! On the pro-terror Al Jazeera!

This “expert” on Israeli trends toward violence in society also saw no hypocrisy in signing a petition to free Tali Fahima, the Jewish Israeli who helped smuggle weapons for her Palestinian boyfriend to kill her fellow Israelis.

Even more annoying is that the Israeli taxpayer subsidizes most of the costs of her Bar-Ilan University salary.

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