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Editorial Article

UC Berkeley - Lecturer in Hebrew Rutie Adler spends her days on campus urging boycott of and divestment from Israel

Her name is on the first boycott and divestment petition against Israel ever created on a college campus in the US (number 45 there). The idea of creating a divestment-from-Israel program on US campuses to break Israel financially, help Arab terrorism, and curry dislike among Americans was actually the brainchild of a law professor at the University of Illinois named Francis Boyle. But Rutie Adler, who teaches Hebrew as part of the UC Berkeley’s Near Eastern Studies Department, part of the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), was determined to help fire the first salvo against Israel in the campaign. … Rutie Adler’s name even made it to the neo-Nazi Stormfront website because of her adamant support for anything against the Jewish state. She signed a petition that the US should not send foreign aid to Israel when Ariel Sharon went into the West Bank to clean out the terror cells that were routinely sending suicide bombers into Israel and blowing up buses, schools and cafes almost weekly. … Ignoring the spate of suicide bombings in Israel at the time in the petition is very telling. … Of course, one could also speak out about what is going on in Darfur or the denial of human rights in Arab countries, even the Palestinian Authority, but Adler never finds time to address anything except Israel’s alleged abuse of Palestinian Arabs.

 

 

UC Berkeley: Lecturer in Hebrew Rutie Adler spends her days on campus urging boycott of and divestment from Israel

By Lee Kaplan, www.IsraCampus.org.il
6/9/2009

Her name is on the first boycott and divestment petition against Israel ever created on a college campus in the US (number 45 there). The idea of creating a divestment-from-Israel program on US campuses to break Israel financially, help Arab terrorism, and curry dislike among Americans was actually the brainchild of a law professor at the University of Illinois named Francis Boyle. But Rutie Adler, who teaches Hebrew as part of the UC Berkeley’s Near Eastern Studies Department, part of the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), was determined to help fire the first salvo against Israel in the campaign. The campaign was led by the International Solidarity Movement, but advised by Boyle, who was a US legal advisor for the Fat’h Terrorism Organization. It decided to begin the boycott and divestment campaign at Cal first and then in the entire University of California system, the biggest university system in the nation. Rutie Adler leapt to enlist in the new movement, despite her being from Israel, and her anti-Israel activities on her campus to this day.

Considered by herself to be an expert in Hebrew, she is an instructor whose students complain she is disorganized and uses class time to discuss the politics of the Middle East rather than teaching the structure of Hebrew.  Adler’s office is just steps away from another UC Berkeley ex-Israeli obsessive-Israel-hater, Prof. Daniel Boyarin, who was featured earlier here at Isracampus.  Hatred of Israel even by Jewish faculty on the Bay Area campus is a common occurrence in the CMES at Cal, which is itself funded by Saudi Arabia. It is a place where Israelis and Jews are consistently hired based on their having anti-Israel views.

Thanks to Adler’s assistance, the Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley, an ISM-affiliated group that also allies itself with the anti-US International Socialist Organization (ISO) was able to launch almost weekly demonstrations on her campus against Israel, falsely accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “violations of human rights.” As an Israeli and Hebrew language instructor on the campus, Adler was able to lend the SJP an aura of credibility. Back in 2002, the SJP was actually involved in violence against Jewish students on the Cal campus, from pelting Jewish students with eggs to even smashing a concrete block through the window door of the local Hillel. Such actions, however, never daunted Adler, who continued to advise and help the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic SJP movement grow on campus by spearheading the divestment campaign. Lately, she has helped with fundraisers for the Free Gaza Campaign and Norcal ISM, that seek to open the sea lanes to Gaza in order to facilitate the smuggling of weapons from Iran

Rutie Adler’s name even made it to the neo-Nazi Stormfront website because of her adamant support for anything against the Jewish state. She signed a petition that the US should not send foreign aid to Israel when Ariel Sharon went into the West Bank to clean out the terror cells that were routinely sending suicide bombers into Israel and blowing up buses, schools and cafes almost weekly. The incursions were legal per international law and the Oslo Accords, but Adler signed a petition that stated among other things, “We Jews, citizens of the state of Israel and of other countries, are sickened that the Barak government would let the war criminal Ariel Sharon enter a Palestinian area and provoke terrible violence. Unfortunately this just illustrates the determination of the current Israeli government to keep Palestinians permanently separate, unequal, closed up in small territories, and exiled in foreign lands. We protest the ever escalating violence against Palestinians. We urge the US Congress to suspend all foreign aid to Israel."

Ignoring the spate of suicide bombings in Israel at the time in the petition is very telling.

When Israel sent in the IDF to stop Hamas from firing missiles into Israeli communities over the last eight years since the Disengagement, Adler immediately signed a petition calling for a ceasefire. She never drafted or signed any petitions for Hamas to stop firing those missiles during those eight years but worked with the SJP on her campus that encouraged it and tried to justify it. At the same time, Adler signed a petition in support of Tali Fahima, who helped her Palestinian terrorist boyfriend plan attacks against her fellow Israelis.

Adler’s hatred of Israel seems based on her hatred for the United States and its influence in the Middle East, as well as her selective concern for the Palestinian Arabs. She feels it is a duty as a professor to campaign against the Jewish state, while at the same time she opposes America going to war against Saddam Hussein, the guy who financed suicide bombings in Israel. In 2002, Adler stated, “Anybody who says a professor is supposed to be neutral is supporting whatever the common (sic) ideology is. If you don't voice an opinion about what is happening in Israel and Palestine now, you are supporting what is happening."  We guess that anyone who has never expressed an opinion over whether Adler is a twit must decidedly hold the opinion that she is one.

Of course, one could also speak out about what is going on in Darfur or the denial of human rights in Arab countries, even the Palestinian Authority, but Adler never finds time to address anything except Israel’s alleged abuse of Palestinian Arabs. She ignores attacks on Jews in Israel, then insists that she herself is not anti-Semitic because she was born in Israel. Talk about non sequiturs. That is like insisting that no one born in the US is anti-American.

Adler co-authored a petition attacking Harvard University President Larry Summers for his statement equating the US college boycott and divestment campaign with anti-Semitism. According to Adler, “Mr. Summers thinks, as many good Jews do, that we are anti-Semites, and I'm also getting e-mails telling me I'm a Nazi. The Jewish community and the world in general doesn't know the color gray. Either you're Nazis or you do what Sharon wants you to do.”

After Sharon was gone, the same rhetoric just changed to include Israel’s new leadership. She proclaimed in a joint statement, "We reject the allegation that our opposition to state violence by the state of Israel in any way constitutes anti-Semitism, which, like all forms of racism, we unequivocally reject."  She continued speaking with her peers about such Jewish faculty who, like her, “They feel an added responsibility to speak out against Mr. Summers' brand of slander,” while pointing to her “Jewish culture” as evidence that her position is not anti-Semitic. “I grew up in Israel and I know the truth,” she continued. “The idiocy of calling people like me anti-Semitic doesn't even merit an answer. It's ridiculous. This has nothing to do with Judaism. It has to do with politics.”

Adler’s being a Hebrew teacher does not excuse her from her working to aid those who seek to harm her fellow Jews. If she really understood Jewish culture she would understand the idea of Ahavat Yisrael.  The boycott and divestment campaign she promotes contributes to poverty in Israel. The campus divestment campaign is an extension of the Arab League Boycott begun after 1948 that seeks the destruction of Israel’s Jews, not just a political end to Israeli sovereignty.

Disingenuously, Adler professes to be pro-Israel. In one interview she stated, “If one more person calls me anti-Israel, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm more pro-Israel than your newspaper and many Jews who think they are. I'm pro-Israel and I'm pro-Palestine; there is no contradiction...You don't have to agree with me; just don't call me an anti-Semite." She also has acknowledged in that article that anti-Semites are taking advantage of the Israeli divestment petition to further their own causes, but said she believed people who hate Muslims are jumping on the pro-Israel bandwagon.

"We don't want to be called anti-Semites just because we critique the policies of Israel. If the American government treated Israel as they treat Iraq with all their misbehavior, maybe we would have peace in Palestine by now," said Adler. "We are not anti-Semites and we don't like to be called anti-Semites."

History is replete with anti-Semitic Jews who worked to harm others.  Rutie Adler’s “politics” are as anti-Semitic as those of Arafat or Hamas, only hidden under a banner of leftist radicalism. She hates America where she lives as much as she hates Israel where she came from, and is an ardent supporter of the International Solidarity Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area that is closely allied with the International Socialist Organization (ISO) that hates America.

Meanwhile, note also how she talks above about “peace in Palestine” – not peace in Israel and Palestine or simply peace in the Middle East. If actions speak louder than words, Adler has shown her true colors by supporting and allying with groups that seek for Israel to cease being a Jewish state and to become “Palestine.” As one commentator on her has noted: “What would you call someone who selectively ignores the unspeakable cruelty of certain nations and goes out of her way to concoct lies about the world's only Jewish State?”

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Op-Ed articles appearing on IsraCampus.Org.il are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the opinion of IsraCampus.Org.il