Israeli Academic Extremism
Israeli Professors of
Hate
These Israeli academics abuse academic freedom by utilizing their
universities as launching pads to delegitimize their own country and
people. The extreme damage to Israel’s reputation and Jewish
identity inflicted by these and other Jewish intellectuals has been
greatly underestimated.
…
Whether it is Professor Shlomo Sand, who achieved celebrity status
in Europe by publishing a book denying the existence of the Jewish
people, or Professor Oren Yiftachel, who called Israel "a white...
pure settlement colonial society", these Israeli celebrities gained
fame and fortune by trashing their own country and people.
The same phenomenon happened in czarist Russia,
when some Jewish social agitators endorsed pogroms against their own
kinsmen, hoping that by venting their frustrations on Jews, the
masses would ultimately turn on the czar.
At the Ben-Gurion University, Neve Gordon
accused the IDF of being "war criminals" and promoted the boycott of
Israel in a Los Angeles Times editorial. Gordon's articles have also
been published on the web site of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and
in Iran's state media.
Ze'ev Sternhell, in the midst of the Second
Intifada, when his own students were being butchered on buses and
restaurants, declared that Palestinians should "concentrate their
struggle against the settlements".
In May 2001, after Arabs sadistically bashed
the skulls of two "settler kids" in Tekoa, Israeli psychiatrist
Ruchama Marton declared that "the settlers raise little monsters".
Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University openly
supported boycotts of her own university. You find professors such
as Moshe Zimmermann and other members of the progressive community
who compared the Israelis to the Nazis. Also professors such as
Idith Zertal, who thinks that the Zionist absorption of Holocaust
refugees was a form of rape.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/10778#.TrMsxHLAZos
Op-Ed: Israeli Professors of Hate
Giulio Meotti
Published: November 02, 2011
From the 1970s, Israel's universities had
become home to a new generation of leftist intellectuals who
demonize Israel and the undermine the struggle for survival of the
Jewish people.
When in 2007 Professor Hillel Weiss of Bar Ilan
University was captured on film
cursing the IDF regional commander during the expulsion of Hebron's
Jewish residents, the well- known scholar, a leading expert on the
works of Nobel Laureate author Shai Agnon, was pulverized in the
Israeli media.
The public opinion later discovered that Weiss' anger was the
reasonable reaction of a father protesting against the (twice)
eviction of his children and grandchildren from their homes.
Weiss didn't call on anyone to act upon his words. He called upon
G-d. But Professor Weiss is a patriarch of the right wing movement.
Somehow, the Israeli media doesn't pay the same attention to the
legion of Israeli professors and lecturers from the Jewish Left who
daily take the side of Israel's existential enemies.
From the 1970s,
Israel's universities
had become home to a new generation of leftist intellectuals who
demonize Israel and the undermine the struggle for survival of the
Jewish people.
A study by Im Tirtzu claimed that more than 90% of the
allegations of "Israeli war crimes" cited in the shameful Goldstone
Report were provided by 16 NGOs who received close to $8 million
from the New Israel Fund between 2006 and 2008, an organization
headed by former Meretz MK Professor Naomi Chazan.
A few days ago, a criminal investigation was opened against Dr.
Ayal Nir, a lecturer at Ben- Gurion University in Be'er Sheva, over
a status on his Facebook page in which he called to "break the necks
of right-wing activists".
It's an open call for murder of those who
reject his far-leftist opinions.
Today there is a predominance of Israeli academics within the
NGOs that discredit Israel, such as Gush Shalom, B'Tselem, Yesh Gvul,
the Committee to Stop Demolition of Houses in Palestine and the
Committee to Stop Torture.
Steve Plaut has just drawn up a thorough list of them for the
Middle East Quarterly.
The phenomenon goes back to Karl Marx, whose anti-Semitic
diatribes were reflected in outbursts like "money is the jealous god
of Israel, by the side of which no other god may exist... The social
emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from
Judaism".
Whether it is Professor Shlomo Sand, who achieved celebrity
status in Europe by publishing a book denying the existence of the
Jewish people, or Professor Oren Yiftachel, who called Israel "a
white... pure settlement colonial society", these Israeli
celebrities gained fame and fortune by trashing their own country
and people.
The same phenomenon happened in czarist Russia, when some Jewish
social agitators endorsed pogroms against their own kinsmen, hoping
that by venting their frustrations on Jews, the masses would
ultimately turn on the czar.
At the Ben-Gurion University, Neve Gordon accused the IDF of
being "war criminals" and promoted the boycott of Israel in a
Los Angeles Times editorial. Gordon's articles have also been
published on the web
site of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and in Iran's state media.
Ze'ev Sternhell, in the midst of the Second Intifada, when his
own students were being butchered on buses and restaurants, declared
that Palestinians should "concentrate their struggle against the
settlements".
In May 2001, after Arabs sadistically bashed the skulls of two
"settler kids" in Tekoa, Israeli psychiatrist Ruchama Marton
declared that "the settlers raise little monsters".
Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University openly supported boycotts of
her own university. You find professors such as Moshe Zimmermann and
other members of the progressive community who compared the Israelis
to the Nazis. Also professors such as Idith Zertal, who thinks that
the Zionist absorption of Holocaust refugees was a form of rape.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose anti-Semithic book "The
Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" has become a bible for
Israel-bashers in the West,, in 2008 were allowed to deliver a
lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
University of Haifa political science professor Ilan Pappe
brackets Israelis with Nazis and urges academics to delegitimize
Israel. Ran Hacohen from Tel Aviv University described "Israel as
fulfilling Hitler's dream" and referred to the assassination of
Hamas leader and inciter to murder, Ahmed Yassin, as "a milestone in
the process of the barbarization of mankind".
Lev Grinberg, director of the Humphries Institute for Social
Research at Ben-Gurion University, accused the Israeli government,
in a Belgian media, of "state terrorism".
These Israeli academics abuse academic freedom by utilizing their
universities as launching pads to delegitimize their own country and
people. The extreme damage to Israel's reputation and Jewish
identity inflicted by these and other Jewish intellectuals has been
greatly underestimated.
Indeed, with their words and actions, they are boosting
pernicious and deadly Judeophobic propaganda.
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il
Foglio, writes a weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of
the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of
Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has
appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage
and Commentary.
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