UC Santa Barbara clears lying, anti-semitic professor

From YNet/AP:

A committee at a California university has cleared a professor who sent an e-mail comparing Israel's policies in Gaza to the Holocaust.

Officials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent a letter Wednesday to sociology professor William I. Robinson saying the committee had closed the matter.

In January, Robinson offended some students and others with an e-mail to his "Sociology of Globalization" class that juxtaposed grisly photos from the Nazi era with a recent Gaza offensive.

Robinson has said his justified criticism of Israel's policies should not be confused as anti-Semitism.

As I reported then, the media screwed up this story big time.

First of all, Robinson sent out an email with 42 pictures juxtaposing Nazi-era pictures with pictures of Israelis and Arabs. While it was characterized as if it was source material for a class, it was nothing of the sort.

Secondly, while the university seems to have been fixated on whether this was anti-semitic or not (and it clearly is,) it ignored that his "facts" were provably wrong. Robinson didn't just tell his students his opinions; he told them lies as if they were factual.

When a university has such a disregard for the truth, it loses all credibility. This episode does not just damn Robinson - it damns the entire University fo California Santa Barbara as a serious institution of higher education.

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Today's Syrian drought - and the Hauranites

YNet reports:

Some 700,000 households in Syria – about 3.5 million people - have no income. In other words, an average of one family of five in Syria leans on monthly governmental aid in order to survive, according to a comprehensive study conducted by the Social Affairs and Labor Ministry in Syria, whose main findings were published by the local al-Watan newspaper.

These reports join a recent international report, which states that some 160 villages in northeastern Syria have been abandoned by their residents due to the food shortage. These villagers immigrate to the country's big cities, putting a great amount of pressure on the already shaky infrastructures in Syrian cities.

This reminds me of what happened in the Hauran district of Syria in the early 1930s. A severe drought there also prompted tens of thousands of Hauranites to leave - and the emigrated to the most logical place to make money, Palestine:

The Hauranite "invasion" was so massive that both Arabs and Jews protested the illegal immigration: (all articles from the Palestine Post)

Nonetheless, the Hauranites did find jobs and sent back money to their families:

Palestine in the 1930s was a logical place for Arab immigration, for precisely the same reasons - its economy was the envy of the Middle East. More importantly, Arabs didn't feel a strong attachment to the areas they lived in (outside their villages) - the nascent Arab nationalism that the intelligentsia adapted from the West did not permeate the villages and the peasants, who were itinerant and moved where ever they wanted whenever it made economic sense, corssing "national" boundaries.


Many (although not most) of todays' "Palestinian" Arabs are actually descended from these immigrants from Syria, Iraq and Transjordan. They didn't consider themselves parts of these nations - they simply considered themselves Arab.

When the fighting began after the 1947 partition agreement many of them crossed borders again, thinking that their Arab brethren would allow them to settle in new homes as they had for centuries before when circumstances prompted Arabs to relocate elsewhere in the Middle East. They didn't anticipate that they would become pawns in a power game against Israel for the next six decades and beyond, and that their Arab brothers - and leaders - would do everything possible to keep them stateless.

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More intrigue from Jabalya UNRWA school

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which earlier this week told The Jerusalem Post that 12 Palestinians were killed in the shelling near a UN school in Jabalya, north of Gaza City - and not 42 as claimed by Palestinian officials at the time - has now given the Post the names of seven of those fatalities.

The incident at the UN school was a key case in point, said the CLA's head, Col. Moshe Levi, since initial reports erroneously stating that the IDF had fired at the school, and putting the death toll at 42, were widely adopted at first by the UN and various NGOs. Earlier this month, the UN corrected its position and confirmed that the shelling and all of the fatalities had taken place outside the school compound.

Within hours of the incident on January 6, the IDF named two Hamas operatives, Immad Abu Askar and Hassan Abu Askar, as being among the dead.

Levi said nine Hamas operatives and three noncombatants died in the incident near the school. The seven names newly released by the CLA were: Ranin Abdullah Sameh, 12, Hadifa Jihad Kahloud, 17, Faris Mahmoud Faraj Allah, 21, Nafed Abu Abid, 22, Abed Muhammad Kadas, 25, Ayman Ahmad el-Khourd, 35, and Basem Abdel Gabin, 40.

The CLA would not specify how it had obtained the names. Officials said these names were being checked and categorized as combatants or noncombatants.

This sentence doesn't make much sense - if they already announced that 9 of them were combatants and three civilian, why don't they know which of the names are in each category?

But the next sentence is more intriguing:

On the day of the incident, officials further said, officers from the CLA contacted the Palestinian Health Ministry and were told that three Palestinian civilians had been killed and that Hamas was hiding the identities of the remaining casualties.

If the Palestinian Health Ministry never claimed the initial count of 42 deaths, then who did? The UN said 30, and PCHR said 27 civilians, so it wasn't either of them. Was this just another case of some reporter or bystander making up a number and having the world believe them without question? And if so, how many other times has this sort of thing happened?

And if the IDF turns out to be correct - and so far, they are the only ones to release names of the victims - then we have solid proof that the UN and PCHR are not reliable. All the other groups need to do to prove the IDF wrong would be to give us their own list of more than 12 victims.

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