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The Olmert Government has decided to give the Israel Prize this year to Israel's worst academic leftist McCarthyist, Zeev Sternhell. That spelling of his name is not a joke, he really spell sit like that. Sternhell is a far-leftist political scientist at the Hebrew University. He has devoted much of his career at painting Israeli non-leftists as violent fascists who should be suppressed and denied freedom of speech. Sternhell was one of the promoters of the leftist McCarthyism against anti-Oslo dissidents, especially after the Rabin assassination by Yigal Amir. Sternhell considers all non-leftist Israelis to be fascists. The fact that a leftist extremist is to be awarded the Israel Prize by the Olmert government states volumes. The committee that nominated Strenhell was headed by Shlomo Avineri, a one-time (??) hard-core Marxist from the same department as Sternhell who had been thought to have moved towards the Zionist center.

Aside from his McCarthyism, Sternhell is also known for some other things. Wikipedia reports: 'Sternhell was taken to court by Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French philosopher and political economist, in 1983, after Sternhell published his work Ni Droite, ni gauche (Neither Right nor Left). Jouvenel sued Sternhell on nine counts, and Sternhell was subsequently convicted in France for defamation.' In his book, Sternhell accused Jouvenel of having had Fascist sympathies. Convicted on two counts, Sternhell did not need to retract his remarks from the book however. Strenhell is also the leading academic proponent in Israel of 1930s style Bolshevik central planning.

Edward Said, Columbia University's professor of terror, praised Sternhell in Al-Ahram, May 21, 1998. In Said's immortal words, Sternhell "author of a very important recent book on the myths of Israeli society (the main ones of which -- that it is a liberal, socialist, democratic state -- he demolished completely in an extraordinarily detailed analysis of its illiberal, quasi-fascist, and profoundly anti-socialist character as evidenced by the Labour Party generally, and the Histadrut in particular)."

Sternhell wrote in the Davar newspaper in 1988: "In the end we will have to use force against the settlers in Ofra or Elon Moreh. Only he who is willing to storm Ofra with tanks will be able to block the fascist danger threatening to drown Israeli democracy."

In the Haaretz newspaper, in 2001, Sternhell said: "There is no doubt about the legitimacy of [Palestinian] armed resistance in the territories themselves. If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements, and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line." (see http://www.leibler.com/article/61)