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Anti Israel US Professors

ZOA Condemns American Studies Association For Approving Discriminatory Boycott Of Israeli Academics

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) today condemned the American Studies Association (ASA), an association of some 5,000 members involved in interdisciplinary study of American culture and history, for voting by a two-thirds majority to boycott fellow Israeli academic institutions.  The executive committee of the ASA's national council has six members, five of whom previously endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Four signed a 2009 letter to President Obama that described Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as "one of the most massive ethnocidal atrocities of modern times" and declared that a one-state solution, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, is "almost certainly" the only road to peace (Jonathan Marks, 'A Vote Against Israel and Academic Freedom,' Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2013). The ZOA has issued the following statement: "The ZOA condemns the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel of which the ASA boycott is a part, because it is a vicious, discriminatory movement seeking the extinction of Jewish national rights and the Jewish state of Israel. We agree with the eight past presidents of the American Studies Association, along with more than 50 other members, who signed a letter calling the resolution 'discrimination pure and simple.' We also agree with the the American Association of University Professors, which has condemned the ASA's resolution. "The ASA Council Statement on the Academic Boycott of Israel does not cite particular Israeli policies it wishes to criticize. It does not seek to foster discussion on  a matter of Israeli policy. It takes issue with Israel's existence; or, as the ASA puts it, Israel's "occupation of Palestine."  "The ASA claims that '[i]t represents a principle of solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and an aspiration to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians.' The ASA is making this statement with respect to Israel, one of the few countries in the region which possesses academic freedom. Jewish and Arab academics, both inside Israel and within the Palestinian Authority (PA)-controlled areas, work together productively in many fields of academic endeavor. Yet the ASA does not want American academics working with any of Israel's world-class institutions of higher learning. Clearly, the ASA's statement is disingenuous and its motives are other than advancing human rights and academic freedom.  "The ASA also claims 'We believe that the ASA's endorsement of a boycott is warranted given U.S. military and other support for Israel.' In other words, the ASA has made a nakedly political decision to boycott Israel, based on U.S. support for Israel's security and existence that is strongly endorsed by the American people, the Congress and successive U.S. Administrations. "We urge all Jewish and pro-Israel organizations and all academics and academic bodies to condemn the ASA's scandalous, dishonorable vote. We also urge ASA members opposed to the ASA's decision to resign from it in protest."   Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).  The Academic Boycott of Israel Is a Travesty BY LEON WIESELTIER Share One has to start somewhere, explained Curtis Marez, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA), which had just announced an academic boycott of Israel. He was responding to a reporter’s sensible query about the justice of singling out Israel for punishment when many countries in this heartless world have human rights records that are significantly worse, and his chillingly casual words are a measure of the moral and intellectual vapidity of what the ASA proudly described as “an ethical stance.” In a supporting document called “Answering Questions About the ASA Boycott from Department Chairs, Deans, Administrators,” the ASA instructs its members that its mission is to “make a positive contribution to human understanding” and “support diversity and equity” and “contribute to solving world problems” (there is no mention of scholarship, of course: these people long ago obliterated the distinction between academia and activism), but in truth only one “world problem,” only one problem of “human understanding,” exercises it, and it is the problem of the Palestinians. They and they alone are the universal touchstone of decency. A few hours away from Palestine six million people are refugees in their own country, where they are being bombed by their government, and starving in the snow, and fighting polio; but never mind them, they are not Israel’s victims, and it is the turpitude of the Jewish state, not the actually existing misery in the region and the world, that offends the ASA. Compared with Aleppo, Ramallah is San Diego. But one has to start somewhere. It is true that one cannot care equally about everything, that an ethical action is always concrete and therefore selective. But the ethical quality of one’s action must be measured by one’s standard for selection; and if that standard is not first and foremost determined by an impartial assessment of suffering and need, so that one selects as the beneficiaries of one’s ethical energies not those who are most wretched but those whose wretchedness confirms one’s prior ideological and political preferences, then the halo is a fake. Reading the ASA materials on its decision, I am immediately struck by the decidedly extra-ethical origins of its boycott. In another helpful document called “ASA Academic Boycott Resolution Frequently Asked Questions”—if the resolution is so clear in its reasons and its virtues, why is the ASA producing these agitprop crib sheets for its members?—I read that “Israeli academic institutions are part of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of the Zionist settler-colonial project.” That is not anti-occupation, it is anti-Zionist; it is the foul diction of delegitimation, the old vocabulary of anti-Israel propaganda. (It also ignores the fact that Israeli universities are where criticism of the occupation flourishes.) In the “Council Statement on the Academic Boycott of Israel,” I read that “in the last several decades, the ASA has welcomed scholarship that critically analyzes the U.S. state, its role domestically and abroad”: so this is not just the usual anti-Zionism, it is also the usual anti-Americanism. Of course Pakistan is also an ally of the United States whose military we support, and the Pakistani army is complicit in savagery beyond anything that any Palestinian is enduring—but terrorism (and certainly Muslim terrorism) does not interest such progressives. They are not empirically minded in their ethical commitments. They answer to higher promptings. I also read, in the National Council’s statement, that “the ASA also has a history of critical engagement with the field of Native American and indigenous studies that has increasingly come to shape and influence the field.” What on earth has this to do with Israel and Palestine? The answer is, everything. There is a comic dimension to this travesty of academic freedom. Lauding the ASA boycott for targeting institutions and not individuals, the saintly Jewish philosopher Judith Butler pointed out in The Nation that “the only request that is being made is that no institutional funding from Israeli institutions be used” for the travel expenses of Israeli scholars. O patria, quanto mi costi! Just how important do these professors think they and their conferences are? But finally there is nothing funny about this. There are first principles at stake in this stunt. Butler instructed that an academic boycott “militates against the spirit of censorship and the practice of calumny that would cut off debate and engage in debased caricatures.” I suggest she put down her Levinas and pick up her Orwell. It is precisely the spirit of censorship, and of conformity of opinion, that animates a boycott of academic institutions. In a sterling letter to the ASA, a group of distinguished American scholars noted this, and protested that “scholars would be punished not because of what they believe—which would be bad enough—but simply because of who they are based on their nationality. ... This is discrimination pure and simple.”  For all the politicization of the ASA, it is indifferent to the politics of what it piously deplores. The occupation of the Palestinian territories is a political problem that requires a political solution. In the attempt to attain such a solution, the Palestinians are not inert victims or bystanders to their fate. They are historical actors; and their refusal to accept any of the plans for Palestinian statehood that have been proposed to them—the imperfection of the solution disturbs them more than the imperfection of the problem—is one of the reasons—one of the reasons—that they find themselves in a condition of such weakness. The Israeli settlement of the West Bank indeed must end; but even if it ends, Israel is a state by right with a perfectly understandable anxiety about its security. “We do not support the boycott of Israel,” Mahmoud Abbas, in South Africa for Mandela’s funeral, declared. He supports only a “boycott [of] the products of the settlements.” “We have relations with Israel,” he added, “we have mutual recognition of Israel.” But who is Abu Mazen to speak for the Palestinians, compared with an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego?  Leon Wieseltier is literary editor of The New Republic.

Hollywood's anti-Semitism

Hollywood’s War on Israel

Radical chic in the entertainment biz

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach 12/16 9:32am

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Saving Mr. Banks, the new film chronicling Walt Disney’s bid to secure movie rights to Mary Poppins, was released on Friday. Although an incredibly talented and innovative animator, director and producer, Disney’s reputation will be forever tarnished by his well-known anti-Semitism and support for racist causes. Disney participated in several racist initiatives, including the pro-Nazi German American Bund and was a close friend of the Nazi propagandist and Hitler confidante Leni Riefenstahl. He was also allied with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, another anti-Semitic organization.

Emma Thompson. (Photo by Getty Images)

But the irony of this unfortunate history is that Emma Thompson, who plays the role of author P. L. Travers in the new film, seems aligned with Disney and his ambivalence toward the Jewish people. Since she signed a libelous protest of an Israeli theater group’s participation in last year’s Shakespeare festival in England, I don’t know if her reputation will ever be the same.

The 2012 letter of protest, published in The Guardian, signed by Ms. Thompson and more than three dozen other artists, states, “We notice with dismay and regret that Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London has invited Israel’s National Theatre, Habima, to perform The Merchant of Venice in its Globe to Globe festival this coming May.” It seems that the irony of an Israeli theater performing The Merchant of Venice was lost on Ms. Thompson, who appears to have taken Shakespeare’s caricature of Jews a little too literally.

The six-week long festival also hosted China’s National Theater, but their participation was met without protest from Ms. Thompson and the other artists. If Ms. Thompson was sincerely concerned about her complicity in supporting a government that she claims violates human rights, then China, which regularly jails dissenters for lengthy sentences and has brutally occupied Tibet since 1950, should have been at the top of her list.

But China was allowed to participate in the Shakespeare festival without Ms. Thompson demanding a pound of flesh.

Here lies the troubling prejudice of Israel’s enemies who hold utterly hypocritical standards when it comes to the Jewish state. For Jews, the standards are superhuman and often impossible to satisfy. Ms. Thompson’s boycott of Habima is only a small part of an unsettling trend in the community of celebrities and Hollywood stars to hold Israel to an unachievably higher standard than other nations.

Sometimes the uneven judgment comes from Jewish celebrities themselves.

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, in his series Parts Unknown, seems never to miss an opportunity to slam Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population when he visits the Jewish state. Although he put tefillin on for the first time in his life, having a perfunctory “bar mitzvah,” he is no more immune than anyone else to being blinded by a superficial evaluation of the conflict. While Mr. Bourdain goes to great lengths to break stereotypes about Palestinians—documenting an all-female Palestinian racing team, for instance—he sadly reinforces an inaccurate impression of the Israeli presence in the West Bank.

He does not reveal that Israel conquered the West Bank in a war of annihilation against the Jewish State provoked by Nasser of Egypt and joined by King Hussein of Jordan. He does not reveal that the West Bank consists of Judea and Samaria, the two oldest Biblical settlements of the ancient Jewish nation. He does not reveal that Israel has returned 97% of the West Bank to Palestinian control, amid incessant terror attacks launched against Israelis and Jews from those areas.

When Mr. Bourdain visits Gaza, he speaks with a young Palestinian woman who tells him about the challenges of fishing—that Palestinians are shot at by Israelis if they travel too far from the coast and risk having their boats, and livelihoods, destroyed. He does not reveal that Gaza is ruled by Hamas, with its genocidal charter against Israel, its honor killings against young Palestinian women, and its murder of homosexuals who are falsely accused of collaborating with Israel. He also fails to reveal that bombs and bullets are regularly smuggled into Gaza and are employed to terrorize the Israeli population.

In narrating a visit to Israeli settlement Eli, Mr. Bourdain remarks that “half a million [Jewish] settlers have moved here, all in contravention of international law … Though, in effect, it seems to make little difference.” Mr. Bourdain also states that “Eighty-five percent of [the separation wall] is in Palestinian territory.” One of his guests on the special tells Mr. Bourdain that “No, [it’s not a fence,] it’s a big wall. It’s ugly. It’s really ugly. You can see it, it’s not far away from here.”

But Mr. Bourdain does not reveal that 95 percent of the security barrier’s length is fence, not wall. Not to mention that the barrier was erected only after more than 1,000 Israelis were blown to smithereens on buses and in coffee houses. Mr. Bourdain also does not reveal that the wall portions of the barrier are located primarily in residential areas to block snipers from firing on Israelis from the upper floors of buildings. More importantly, since the construction of the security barrier, suicide bombings have virtually ended.

Anti-Semitism and anti-Israel hatred has reached the music industry as well. In 2010, singer-songwriter Elvis Costello cancelled two summer performances in Israel because, as he said, it was “a matter of instinct and conscience” to protest Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population.

Stevie Wonder, too, decided not to perform in Los Angeles at the gala benefit for Friends of the Israel Defense in December 2012. ”I am and have always been against war, any war, anywhere,” he said.

But worst of all among the anti-Israel mouthpieces celebrities is Roger Waters, former front man of Pink Floyd, who branded Israel a “racist apartheid” regime in an interview with CounterPunch two weeks ago. He went on to accuse Israel of practicing “ethnic cleansing,” even going so far as to compare Israel to the Nazi regime, claiming the “…parallels with what went on in the ’30s in Germany are so crushingly obvious,” only “this time it’s the Palestinian People being murdered.”

Last week I responded to Waters’s incendiary statements here in The New York Observer.  Waters’s response to me was that the onus was actually on me to refute such statements, stating in The Guardian that, “If Rabbi Boteach can make a case for the Israel government’s policies, I look forward to hearing it.”

I would welcome the opportunity to debate not only Waters, but all of the anti-Israel celebrities who hold Israel to an impossible standard, who believe it has no right to self-defense, and use their prominence as an opportunity to denigrate the sole democracy in the Middle East.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” will shortly publish Kosher Lust: Love is Not the Answer. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley. Like Rabbi Shmuley’s Facebook page.

Read more at http://observer.com/2013/12/hollywoods-war-on-israel/#ixzz2nq50t344 
Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook

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Wouldn't Iran using nuks be suicide?

Anyone who thinks that Iran will not use nuks against Israel once they get them (infinitely easier now with the Obama/Kerry appeasement deal,) you must read what one of the world's greatest Islamic scholar and the Ayatollahs themselves say about it. "Strike Iran now to avert disaster later.” Podhoretz recalls:
As Bernard Lewis, the leading contemporary authority on Islam, put it , to these fanatics “mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already [from the Iran-Iraq war] that they do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. . . . They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights.”
Nor were the rulers of Iran deterred by the fear that their country would be destroyed in a nuclear war. In the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who brought the Islamist revolution to Iran in 1979: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. . . . I say let this land [Iran] go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.” (The quote appeared in a 1981 Iranian collection of the ayatollah’s speeches. In later editions, that line and others were deleted as Iran tried to stir up nationalistic fervor amid the war with Iraq.)
And here, speaking in particular of a nuclear exchange with Israel—that “cancer” which the mullahs were and are solemnly pledged to wipe off the map—is the famous “moderate” Hashemi Rafsanjani, in an Al-Quds Day sermon at Tehran University on Dec. 14, 2001: “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” Mr. Rafsanjani, an earlier president of Iran, is the sponsor and mentor of its current president, that other celebrated “moderate,” Hasan Rouhani.