Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Academic fraud

Showing posts with label Academic fraud. Show all posts

Sunday, May 10, 2020

New academic paper justifies teaching terrorism to Palestinian kids

Palestinian textbooks have always encouraged terror and extolled martyrdom. For example here is a poem from a third grade textbook about dying for the cause of annihilating the Jews in Israel:

The Land of the GenerousI vow I shall sacrifice my blood, to saturate the land of the generous
And will eliminate the usurper from my country, and will annihilate the remnants of the foreigners.
Oh the land of Al-Aqsa and the Haram, oh cradle of chivalry and generosity
Patient, be patient as victory is ours, dawn is emerging from the oppression.
(Our Beautiful Language, Grade 3, Vol. 2, 2016–17, p 64. )

A new academic paper in Settler Colonial Studies by Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter justifies such lessons taught to children - and condemns any attempt by Europe or Israel to eliminate the incitement to terror in such textbooks as a colonialist attack on Palestinian society.

The paper, "Palestinian education and the ‘logic of elimination’", includes doubletalk like this to condone teaching terrorism (which she whitewashes as "resistance"):

I seek to make it quite clear that what is at stake is not the upholding of values of objectivity and neutrality but rather the desire – which is barely concealed – to disallow or delegitimise Palestinian resistance....

I place Israel’s attempts to control Palestinian education in historical, political and, perhaps most crucially of all, colonial, context. I argue that these interventions are part of a conscious and deliberate attempt to deny the legitimacy of resistance to occupation....

I instead propose to focus upon the question of incitement, with the intention of demonstrating how this links into Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. I suggest that the proposition that Palestinian education should be detached from the material realities of occupation is in many respects a denial of Palestinian narratives of resistance and struggle and, by extension, a denial of the Palestinian right to exist.

Palestinians are required to distort and even disown their history and narrative in the name of ‘peace’....Under these circumstances, ‘peace’ takes on an Orwellian significance and works in the service of an unsustainable status quo.

According to Nasser-Najjab, asking that Palestinians stop teaching kids that their ultimate goal is to die trying to kill Jews is an unacceptable colonialist demand to change pure and holy Palestinian culture.

Which means, of course, that Palestinian culture is to encourage violence and death.

In the disgusting moral universe of today's Middle East studies, asking people to stop teaching kids to glorify terrorism is a worse crime than the suicide bombings themselves.

This might all sound outrageous and sickening, but the justifications for terror presented as academic research today becomes accepted narrative by politicians and journalists tomorrow.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Insane academic paper of the day

Published in Mediterranean Politics in April:

Rethinking justice beyond human rights. Anti-colonialism and intersectionality in the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement

This article discusses the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) – a contemporary social movement operating across a number of Arab and western countries. Unlike analysis on the Arab Uprisings which focused on the national dimension of youth activism, we explore how the PYM politics fosters and upholds an explicitly transnational anti-colonial and intersectional solidarity framework, which foregrounds a radical critique of conventional notions of self-determination based on state-framed human rights discourses and international law paradigms. The struggle becomes instead framed as an issue of justice, freedom and liberation from interlocking forms and hierarchies of oppression.

This movement sounds very intellectual and woke!

Here's one of the photos on PYM's Facebook page:

Wow, VERY woke.

Number of times the paper mentions Palestinian violence: Zero
Number of times the paper mentions Palestinian terror: Zero
Number of times the paper mentions "struggle:" 24

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Insane academic paper of the week: "Palestine and the Will to Theorise Decolonial Queering"

If you can make heads or tails out of this abstract, my hat's off to you:

Palestine and the Will to Theorise Decolonial QueeringWalaa Alqaisiya

AbstractThis article posits a theorisation of decolonisation in relation to queer as it emerges from the settler-colonial context of Palestine, what I call decolonial queering. The first part provides a new reading of Zionist settler-colonialism, which I define as hetero-conquest. Its novelty lies in refocusing the question of colonialism in native grounded knowledge of queering, while showing the limitations of those existing studies whose frames emanate mainly from American and/or global north contexts of racism and homo-nationalism. By tracing the contemporary continuity of hetero-conquest in Palestine, the second part unpacks the need for a radical theory of liberation that weaves decolonization into queer. Bringing Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon into dialogue, such a theory emanates from the amalgam of histories, geographies and bodies, whose restoration beyond the strictures of hetero-conquest opens the way for a radical multi-scalar politics of liberation.

The paper itself isn't much more understandable, but one part that was almost in English was interesting.

In May 2016, Israel held its first ever beauty pageant for transgender people and the winner was Talleen Abu Hanna, an ‘Arab citizen of Israel,’ who became Israel’s transgender beauty queen. Abu Hanna’s victory marked a significant historic moment, signalling the undeniable progressiveness of Israel as an LGBT haven. The circulating facts about Israel as a beacon of LGBT emancipation, however, are part of a very carefully engineered array of narratives that aim to frame and sponsor the country as a liberal democracy via its record on gender and sexuality rights. In so doing, those narratives also are engrained into a chrono-geographical scheme that is reminiscent of what has been presented so far. Israel’s record of LGBT tolerance, in fact, is measured in relation to its Arab neighbours, who happen to lack such values....

The success story of Israel’s Arab transgender queen is not simply a historic moment showcasing Israel’s progress on transgender rights, but it sits within the discursive economies of Zionist rightful [settler-colonial] presence over Palestine by virtue of emancipating the ‘oriental’ ‘woman-land.’ Being a woman and Arab, in fact, are constituting elements in this victory, as they permit readers to zoom on the necessity of her ‘triumph’ over her Arab closed-minded background, which rejected her and did not accept her transitioning....

Abu Hannah’s case and the narratives mobilised around her allows us to map the historical continuity of Zionist hetero-conquest. Similar to the oriental woman-land, whose emancipation awaited halutz desiring project -fusing Zionist spatio-temporal constitutive (modern ploughing techniques birthing a Zionist geography)- Abu Hanna’s ability to transition successfully as a woman owes to Israel’s presence as a place of modern sexual values. Read within the sphere of Halutz desiring logic, Abu Hanna is the perfect embodiment of a sexed and gendered other, whose racialised [oriental] essence makes it possible to demarcate the necessity of Zionist conquest, with its moral modern and civilizational attributes. Through Abu Hanna, Israel’s unprecedented celebration of transgender rights can be fathomed only in relation to its antithesis: a Palestine to which Abu Hanna is grateful not to belong to. The latter lacks in cultural and moral values that Israel has – [Palestine] would have killed Abu Hanna- while Israel is the one that nurtures and permits the unfolding of her True sexed/gendered self. With this triumph, Abu Hanna is not only said to reveal and fulfil her true gendered self, but is also caught within the discursive promotion of Israel: As a place of peace and a culture of sexual tolerance as opposed to Palestine and rest of the Arab region. The birthing of an Arab transgender queen of Israel, therefore, corresponds to a Zionist settler colonial teleology, generating - once again - the legitimizing grounds for de-legitimising Arabness/Palestine.

Alqaisiya cannot deny that Israel is a liberal state. She cannot deny that transgender rights exist in Israel and are non-existent in the Palestinian areas. She cannot deny that Talleen Abu Hanna is a proud Israeli who would be killed if she lived under Palestinian rule.

But pointing out those facts is immoral, because it helps legitimate Israel and it delegitimizes Palestine.

In other words, pointing out that Israel is a more moral and a more liberal society than any in the Arab world is worse than the gay-bashing, misogynist Arab culture itself. There is no greater crime than legitimizing Israel, and its liberalism and morality do exactly that, so they must not be discussed. And when Israel shows pride in its own accomplishments and its humanity, that is all a means to legitimize itself, and therefore immoral.

The next paragraph of gibberish mostly confirms what I wrote, but it ends with an astonishing statement for a supposed liberal to make:

Conceptual frames approaching queerness as a liberal critique would interpret the case of Israel’s first Arab beauty queen as the emergence of (queer) homo-normative/ nationalist subjectivity, thus serving a liberal/nationalist status quo that is nevertheless racist. Drawing on decolonial queering, however, I capture the historical continuity of hetero-conquest and the embedded violence on a native self from without and from within. This lens invites the reader to reflect on the case of Abu Hannah - and the narratives around her – as part and parcel of the history of Zionist conquest, whose constitutive gendering and racializing elements cohere with a structural settler-colonial politics of Time, Space and Desire. More importantly, decolonial queering situates queerness in relation to hetero-conquest generated from within Arab-native self-struggle and adopted taxonomies for emancipation. In other words, the story of the first Arab transgender queen in Israel is not simply a moment of queer liberal time, where the racialized Arab emerges as ‘the most salient and dangerous other at the moment the homosexual, once the nation’s sexual other, gains increasing acceptability.’ This would be a reductive analysis that divorces the event from a wider historical continuity of settler-colonial conquest and its generative production of the conquerable other. This triumph explains how those same dynamics of hetero-conquest – mapped above – perpetuate, whereby the colonising saviour self-legitimises its presence over the woman/land by virtue of extending those progressive values and tools the native is presumed to lack. What is important in Abu Hannah’s case is that she as an Arab who is said to reify this narrative of Israel’s legitimate presence by virtue of promoting herself as Israeli and mobilising international support for Israel. She, therefore, confirms the Zionist colonial fantasy of having to endow conquest, as Neumann would perceive it in its moral liberating terms vis-a-vis the woman-native who is yearning for her conqueror.

The Arab winner of a beauty contest is a person to be loathed because she said nice things about Israel. According to Alqaisiya, this cannot possibly be because she actually likes her country. No, she is "yearning for her conqueror" and is therefore worthy of contempt.

The only possible way that a leftist can insult a trans woman without the risk of being labeled "transphobic," is if that trans woman praises Israel, the ultimate evil.

This is academia in the social sciences today - pseudo-academic texts with multi-syllabic (and invented) words all meant to justify the basest of hatreds.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Academic journal accuses Israel of 'vegan-washing"

In the latest Journal of Intercultural Studies, there is an article by Esther Alloun called "Veganwashing Israel’s Dirty Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel."

Predictably, the article accuses Israel is using vegan-friendly policies to distract from, yes, its "occupation."

The abstract:

In popular media and public discourse, Israel has been referred to as ‘the first vegan nation’ and the ‘global centre for veganism’ because of the mainstreaming of veganism in the country in the 2010s. The article examines this triumphalist rhetoric and argues that animal welfare and veganism have been enrolled as a device to narrate the Israeli nation within terms of Jewish Israeli sovereignty. The contemporary cultural politics of veganism in Israel circulate and reinforce national myths of exceptionalism tethered to a Zionist exclusionary ideology, including claims to unique victimhood, pioneering achievements and moral rectitude, which further entrench Jewish Israeli belonging and Palestinian unbelonging. Indeed, Israeli institutions have co-opted an image of ‘vegan/animal-friendliness’ as makers of the nation’s modernity and morality. Yet, drawing on fieldwork with Jewish Israeli activists, the paper argues that both the deliberate practices of veganwashing and its well-intentioned critiques overlook the nuances and ambivalences of Israeli animal politics. The paper also highlights that critiques of veganwashing do not go far enough to show how it is negotiated by Palestinian animal advocates. It suggests that focus on veganwashing as the primary debate of settler-colonial injustice and animal politics has paradoxically rendered them inaudible, and calls instead for a politics of listening.

Parts of the paper are unintentionally funny.

Activists have rightly pointed out that Israeli veganwashing generates much violence through its deflection and obscuring of settler colonial oppression.

Talking about Israeli leadership in veganism generates much violence?

The paper laments that any discussion of veganwashing has the same practical effect as veganwashing itself:

Debating veganwashing can (unwittingly) serve as a politics of deflection itself by drawing attention away from the actual settler colonial politics of the Israeli State and Palestinians’ resistance to it.

Perhaps an entirely new field can be founded, of X-washing-washing, where debate about how Israel tries to deflect from its awful crimes is actually a deflection from discussing Israel's awful crimes. Maybe even Alloun herself is a Zionist shill for increasing the debate about X-washing and deflecting from writing yet another article about how Israel is more directly evil.

The absurdities continue. The author interviewed some new Israeli Jewish vegans who stupidly compared animal cruelty to the Holocaust. Based on these anecdotes, Alloun concludes:

Mainstream Israeli culture tends to not only essentialise Jewish victimhood and innocence, crystallised through events like the Holocaust and as a core part of Israeli Jewish identity, but also to deny that other humans can be victim (Pappé 2010). This is crucial to understand the broader implications of activists folding animals into national (Jewish) victimhood and political innocence.

Using Ilan Pappe's fictional thesis that Zionist deny any other human suffering besides Jews, Alloun makes up a further theory that Jews will include animals as fellow victims, based on interviewing two idiots. Somehow, I doubt that Yad Vashem would agree.

There is a telling anecdote as Alloun talks with members of the Palestinian Animal League, the only Palestinian animal rights group in the West Bank.

Sudfeh, PAL’s vegan cafeteria (and main vegan initiative) in Abu Dhis (West Bank) which had got a lot of press and sent a clear signal that Israel did not have a monopoly over veganism, had closed because of a lack of business. Speaking to PAL volunteers and its core team at the conference, it also became apparent that veganism was neither the centrepiece nor a top priority of PAL’s animal advocacy. Conference tours of Bethlehem, Ramallah and Jalazon prompted an international attendee to remark that she had not yet seen the Palestinian vegan movement she had expected and come to the West Bank to witness (fieldnotes). There is no beating Israel at the game of the vegan nation.

The paper goes on to note that PAL is really an anti-Israel initiative where the welfare of animals is only secondary, and decries that white Westerners think of it as a normal Western-style animal rights group.

PAL rejects patronising and neocolonial interventions by well-intentioned international animal NGOs (see Safi 2017b) and proposes a unique form of animal politics with Palestinian national liberation as its guiding principle. In the context of a literal war zone, PAL’s platform envisages a decolonial and decolonised politics of animal liberation as an integral part of Palestinian self-determination. It therefore puts the Palestinian struggle for justice, and boycott of the Israeli State at the centre of its activist engagement.

In short, there is really no Palestinian animal rights group and there is not a single vegan restaurant in the territories. The one and only animal rights NGO uses animal rights as another tool to generate hatred against Israel - much like this academic paper does.

In the end, these sorts of papers which are increasingly being published without any fact checks or objective editing are part of a huge anti-Israel push in academia. Cutting out the pseudo-academic language, the "laundry" literature all has in common a thesis that Israelis do not have the right to have any pride in their people or their state. Israeli pride is simply a subterfuge for covering crimes against Palestinians, which is the only valid discourse about Israel that is allowed. Any other discussion must be silenced by accusing it of being a means to divert attention from what they believe is the real topic. It is psychological projection: it is not Israel that is so obsessed with Palestinians that they embrace liberal causes to distract the world from them, but these pseudo-academics are the ones who cannot look at Israel with anything but their occupation goggles.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

No, Trump didn't stop aid to Palestinians. Palestinians did. (update)

Joyce Karam, an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University, tweeted:

Does Jared Kushner not know that cutting aid to UNRWA affects 1.3 million Palestinian? Cutting aid to Jerusalem hospitals affects Palestinian patients? This is not punishing PA leadership...

Sharp interview by @jonathanvswan pic.twitter.com/leHdJesg4K
— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) June 3, 2019

While the US did cut all aid to UNRWA, which should not exist, did it also cut aid to "Jerusalem hospitals?"

Karam is apparently referring to USAID, which stopped all its services to the West Bank and Gaza at the end of January. USAID wouldn't have given money to fund hospital; it would give funds to projects including medical, infrastructure, governance and education.

Headlines blamed the US for stopping all aid:

Apparently, Karam is the kind of academic who doesn't bother reading the actual article. Because unlike the headline, the article says:

The Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (ATCA), passed by Congress and then signed into law by President Donald Trump last year, has just come into force.

This allows Americans to sue those receiving foreign aid from their country in US courts over alleged complicity in "acts of war".

At a news conference on Thursday, senior official Saeb Erekat said the Palestinian Authority (PA) had sent a letter to the US state department asking them to end funding because of a fear of lawsuits.

"We do not want to receive any money if it will cause us to appear before the courts," he said.

The US didn't end the USAID program - the Palestinians did.

Just like Israel didn't stop sending tax revenues to the PA - the Palestinians did.

Palestinians want lots of money, but they don't want any responsibility or strings attached. They want to be able to spend the money on salaries for terrorists without interference. They want to be able to receive billions from the US but not to be sued for the Americans killed by the terrorists they support.

The BBC headline, and others, were completely the opposite of the truth. The Trump administration has reduced aid to Palestinians in line with the philosophy that money given should provide some benefits to the US - something every other country does as well, implicitly or explicitly. But the decision to end all cooperation with the US came from the Palestinian leadership, not the US.

It is just one more example of how Palestinian leaders do not give a damn about their own people.

And this is another example of how an academic shows her ignorance - or her willingness to lie.

UPDATE: In fact, the US did cut aid to Arab hospitals last year, before USAID was refused by the PA.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Another fishy claim: "Holocaust refugees were sheltered in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria"

Haaretz surveyed some historians to see if any of them agree with Rashida Tlaib's assertion that Palestinians provided Jews with "safe refuge" from the Holocaust.

Not surprisingly, most of them say that the idea has no basis in reality, but the comments from notoriously anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi are interesting:

Prof. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, charged that many of Tlaib’s detractors were also historically off base.

Tlaib, he said, “is facing an ‘idiot wind’ that makes the Arabs into accomplices of the Nazis, when hundreds of thousands of Arab troops fought with the Allies in World War II, while Jews who escaped the Holocaust were sheltered in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, as well as Palestine."

This is the first I have heard of European Jews being sheltered in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

I've been looking for examples of this online and coming up empty. I do have a counter-example I recently discussed of a ship of Jews who attempted suicide after Egypt rejected them, and they were treated in Egyptian hospitals until they were presumably well enough to be sent to their doom.

I cannot even find an anecdote of Jews who somehow managed to sneak into Egypt, Syria or Lebanon, which is not proof it didn't happen...but if it did, it doesn't sound like it was anything close to these Arab countries sheltering European Jews.

I put out this question on Twitter, and Robert Satloff, the world's biggest expert in Muslims saving Jews during the Holocaust, said "To the best of my knowledge, there’s no evidence of 'Syria, Egypt and Lebanon sheltering Jews' during the Holocaust. "

Khalidi is not usually stupid enough to make things up from scratch. Maybe he is referring to an extraordinarily low number of Jews who somehow managed to sneak into those countries due to family connections or luck.

I would love to know what he is talking about. If true, then the world should know about it. If false, then it is more evidence that a Columbia University professor is willing to put his reputation on the line to lie to defend a false narrative.

(h/t David G)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Pure antisemitism in academia - Shiraz Dossa

In December 2006, Iran held the "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust." Attendees included Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, white nationalist David Duke, and a professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, named Shiraz Dossa, who presented a paper there.

Dossa defended his attendance, and the conference, by stating that only 6 of the 33 papers given at the conference explicitly denied the Holocaust. Otherwise, he says, it was a very serious conference.

While Dossa is not a Holocaust denier, his views are just as toxic and antisemitic as those of any Holocaust denier.

In 2012, he wrote a paper he named "Auschwitz's Finale: racism and holocausts" where his abstract is filled with straw man arguments: "This article dissects the Auschwitz discourse and its denial of other holocausts. It critiques the claim that it was the only ‘real’ genocide. It advances a contrary thesis on colonialism, racism and holocausts in history. I clarify the affinity between colonialism and fascism and Israeli tactics in Occupied Palestine. It is undeniable that Auschwitz fuels anti-Arab anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism. "

The paper includes this almost unbelievably antisemitic paragraph:

The ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust flows from Ashkenazi pride in their racial superiority. Its corollary is not denied but defended: non-Jews count for very little, which can be traced back to the Old Testament thesis on the acceptability of the Canaanite genocide because Yahweh willed it. Israel’s killing of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims since its founding has been similarly justified. Suffice it to mention the 1200 civilians killed in Lebanon in July 2006 and the 1400 civilians (including 400 children) killed in Gaza in January 2009. It is evident that the chosen Jew–unchosen non-Jew divide has been globalised. It is even accepted by many ‘Third world’elites, including Saudi, Jordanian and UAE Arab leaders who endorse the US–Israeli agenda without demurral. Its legitimacy, its ‘truth’ has long been settled. The dissenters among Jews are aberrations.

Dossa has a bit of an obsession with Ashkenazic Jews, whom he usually defines as "white Jews." In a footnote he blames a researcher's racism on his being an Ashkenazic Jew. "Lemkin held a racist view of Africans; he labelled them ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ and even blamed them for killing fellow Africans on the orders of their Belgian masters. It testifies to the resilience of chauvinism in Ashkenazi culture that a man like Lemkin could succumb to its vile charms."

This is an academic, today.

It is curious that when Professor Jason Hill writes an article that is pro-Israel, his faculty coworkers censure him, but no one at St. Francis Xavier University says a word condemning Shiraz Dossa for his naked Jew-hatred masquerading as scholarship.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

The academic fraud, and obnoxious editor who defends her lies, in the NY Review of Books

Professor Katherine Franke of Columbia University - whom we have mentioned before - wrote last month about the completely fictional "Pro-Israel Push to Purge US Campus Critics."

The article is riddled with half truths and errors, but one is particularly easy to show.

She writes:

Especially chilling, the US Department of Education recently adopted a new definition of anti-Semitism, one that equates any criticism of Israel with a hatred of Jews.

Is that what the policy says? No, it says the exact opposite. It says, explicitly, "[C]riticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."

Franke is 100% wrong.

When this was pointed out to the editor of the New York Review of Books, he responded in an astonishing way:

A perfectly reasonable and accurate criticism was leveled at Seaton - and his response was dismissive and derisive.

Is this how editors are supposed to deal with fact checking? By making fun of the number of followers the fact checkers have?

I couldn't resist responding to Seaton:

I just was made aware of this exchange and I am astonished at the lack of ethics of an editor at @nybooks. The tweet is absolutely correct, Franke is 100% wrong in her assertion. Weeks later and there is no correction.

And Matt -I have a LOT more followers than you do, "loser."
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 3, 2019

I usually don't use ad hominems in my tweets, but by Seaton's yardstick for how important one is, he indeed is a loser compared to me. Not to mention if one compares how either of us deal with honest fact checkers.

Of course, as of this writing, Seaton hasn't responded. He can't because whatever he says (outside of an abject apology to the original fact checker) would make him look like even more of a "loser."

I don't know if Seaton is the person who edited Franke's inaccurate article and allowed her lies to be published under its name.

But one wonders why the New York Review of Books, which often has the word "prestigious" attached to its name when it is mentioned in the media, would employ someone who is so utterly dismissive of both readers - and of the truth.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Anti-Zionists justify Alice Walker's antisemitism, saying she's "wrong" - but her heart is in the right place

Mondoweiss publishes Sarah Schulman, the academic fraud who popularized the term "pinkwashing," to explain to their audience how Alice Walker's blatant antisemitism is sort of okay once you contextualize it.

Like many of us, Walker has tried to understand the source of Israeli cruelty, violence, self-righteous racism, and supremacy ideology. She has risked her life for Palestinian liberation on the Flotilla, and has been in deep confrontation with the Israeli state for years. Being in that place is shocking, it reveals behaviors and beliefs of the Israeli state that are almost impossible to comprehend.

According to Schulman, Walker claiming that rabbis have taught generations of Jews to enslave "goyim" and to kill the best of them isn't antisemitic - it is a reflection of her deep pain at the plight of the Palestinians and her honest attempt to understand how Jews can be so cruel.

At no point does Schulman admit that Walker's hate for Jews is antisemitic.

Schulman admits that Walker is wrong. Not offensive, mind you - just mistaken. Not because Walker is trading in Nazi-style Jew-hatred, but because she falls for conspiracy theories and doesn't understand that Judaism isn't the issue, but religion altogether.

By looking to the Jewish religion as the source of Israeli cruelty, Walker is making two significant errors. 1. Pathologizing Judaism itself, instead of the larger problem of religions in general and how they are used to justify supremacy ideology. and 2. Ascribing religion as the central motive for apartheid when many Jews who support the Zionist state are not religious, and many Jews who stand with Palestine are religious.

Notice that purported scholar Schulman does not say that Walker's description of the Talmud and Judaism is completely wrong. No, Schulman sort of agrees that Walker is correct in saying that the Talmud teaches Jewish dominance over "goyim," but by singling out Judaism and not generalizing it to all religions, Walker fell into the trap of allowing people being able to call her antisemitic - which detracts from the wonderful work she does.

That Alice Walker has chosen conspiracy theory tools to address important questions discredits some of her thinking. But it does not discredit all of her thinking. Sometimes people who do good things also do bad things. And that can be disappointing, or devastating, but that is life and here we are.

When a supposed scholar like Walker freely admits and even brags that her method of researching the Talmud is by watching YouTube videos made by neo-Nazis, and when she then takes that information and publishes poetry that could have been published in Der Sturmer, and when she refuses to apologize but doubles down on her hate for Jews, it doesn't discredit her at all, according to Schulman.

She's just misunderstood and human.

Really.

This is very funny coming from someone whose bogus "pinkwashing" charge is meant to tell the world that Israel does only bad things, and never does good things. When Israel treats women, minorities, LGBTQ, the disabled in ways that are more liberal than many other Western democracies, Schulman doesn't say that "sometimes people who do good things also do bad things" - she says that when Israel does good things it is by definition a bad thing.

The hypocrisy of Schulman is astounding. But not surprising.

(h/t Andrew)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Academic fraud of the day defends Alice Walker: "Some of her best friends are Jewish" @myHNN

At History News Network, professor of social studies and history at NYU Robert Cohen states flatly that Alice Walker is not an antisemite:

Whatever the merits of Walker’s reading of Icke, her life history has been one in which she has consistently and eloquently battled bigotry since her teenage college years at Spelman College where she was active in the Atlanta movement against racial discrimination and the Jim Crow system. As one who has studied Walker’s history of political activism, I find no trace of anti-Semitism, but instead find a humane identification with the oppressed, including Palestinians, and a dedication to battling war, poverty, and hatred.

... I know this because this year I published a book on Howard Zinn, Spelman, and the Atlanta student movement, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism, and Walker wrote a foreword to it that described in moving terms how her and her family’s love of education and reverence for teachers, along with her passion for freedom, and justice, motivated her to stand up for her beloved [Jewish] teacher.

Wow. Just wow.

A supposed scholar who has spent a great deal of time studying Walker not only brushes off her defense of David Icke, chooses not to mention Walker's antisemitic poem, on her website today, about Jews and the Talmud, based on her meticulous research of watching YouTube videos.

Walker says that for centuries Jews have been taught by their rabbis that they should enslave "goyim." Walker says that Jewish rabbis have taught generations of students that Jesus is burning in hell because he stood up for the poor. Walker claims that Jews are taught from birth to kill "goyim" (which she helpfully defines as "us," since Jews are clearly The Other.)

This isn't "support for Palestinian rights." This is Nazi-level Jew-hatred, Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level filth, far worse than what I see in the worst of Arabic media.

To excuse this hate and these lies is to be complicit in them.

Walker's poem should exclude her from any respectable circles. Full stop. Anyone who disagrees because of the good work she has done is enabling antisemitism in academia and intellectual circles. It is beyond immoral - it is dangerous.

The most charitable thing one can say about Cohen is that he is unaware of Walker's antisemitism in her poem and her earlier books (where she says that Israeli Jews have used the dictum, that "might even be enshrined in the Torah," that possession is nine tenths of the law.) If that is so, he is not a scholar - he is a hack and a fraud.

The least charitable thing you can say is that Cohen is aware of Walker's antisemitism (as he is clearly aware of her full throated support for Icke's Jew-hatred) and that he consciously decided to defend her anyway.

Either way, if he doesn't pull this article, he has been proven to have no intellectual honesty.

This is twice in one week that History News Network has published ridiculous defenses of antisemites. In the previous article, Jews who felt that someone who accuses Jews of poisoning Palestinian wells of antisemitism are the real racists.

HNN needs to employ some fact checkers, because what used to be a good and useful site is in danger of being subverted by "academics" whose goals are anything but the truth.

(h/t Phil)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Academic calls Jews racist for getting Marc Lamont Hill fired @myHNN

At History News Network and the Stanford University Press blog, Michael R. Fischbach - professor of history at Randolph-Macon College, and author of Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color - says that CNN's firing of Marc Lamont Hill is part of a "long history" of Jews targeting uppity blacks:

When noted black intellectual Marc Lamont Hill spoke at the UN last month about justice for the Palestinian people, critics like those in the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were quick to condemn him.

....Yet some of the most insightful criticisms of the way Hill was treated pointed out the controversy’s racial context: Hill’s was just the most recent case in a long history of blacks being publicly excoriated for “daring” to speak out on the great issues of the day in ways that defy white conventions. This was particularly true when discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict in a manner that challenges the carefully circumscribed discourse enforced by strongly pro-Israeli groups like the ADL.

This has happened before. Indeed, next year, 2019, marks the fortieth anniversary of a similar brouhaha that erupted when another black man very much in the public eye dared to challenge the rigidly pro-Israeli understanding of Americans’ approach to the Middle East: the Andrew Young Affair.
In August 1979, President Jimmy Carter forced the American ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, to resign following revelations that Young had secretly met once with an official from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in violation of an American pledge to Israel not to deal with the PLO in any way. Young, the highest-ranking black official in the Carter administration, had met the official to advance American policy aims but nonetheless was fired after facing a barrage of hostile public criticism, notably by American Jewish organizations.

When it was soon revealed that the American ambassador to Austria, a Jewish industrialist from Cleveland named Milton Wolf, also had met several times with PLO officials earlier that year but without similar repercussions, African-Americans exploded in fury and rallied behind Young.

So since Jewish groups have managed to get two blacks fired in 40 years, clearly there is a pattern of racism here.

Obviously.

Oh, Fischbach didn't directly call Jews racist. No, of course not. The headline just says that he's "raising this question."

So I'm not going to directly call him an antisemite. No, of course not. He just likes to single out Jewish organizations for using their inordinate power to destroy the careers of uppity black personalities that they don't like.

Just since I started this blog, we Elders have also managed to get rid of Octavia Nasr, Jim Clancy and Diana Magnay over their bias - all from CNN.

Well, none of them are black, but who cares? Fischbach is a history professor, and if he sees a pattern of two incidents over four decades, then he clearly sees things that no one else can.

Hold on - one other black CNN commentator, Roland Martin, was suspended and ultimately let go - for encouraging people to bash gays. Obviously GLAAD, which demanded his suspension, is racist, right?

No. In today's universe, saying that gays are racist is obviously wrong. But saying that Jews are racist on little more proof is perfectly acceptable.

Why History News Network allowed this bigotry to be published is another story. The story doesn't come anywhere close to proving Fischbach's theory that Jews are racist, but it sure indicates that Michael R. Fischbach is a different type of bigot.

Fischbach, by complete coincidence, has spoken at a pro-BDS conference and features a poster in his office that shares Marc Lamont Hill's desire for the destruction of the Jewish state, and no other state on the planet.

(h/t phil d.)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

British professor an unabashed fan of Hamas and its "poetry"

Check out this abstract of a paper published at the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication by Atef Alshaer, who lectures at the University of Westminster and who wrote this while at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London:

This article sheds light on poetry written by two of the most prominent leaders of Hamas, assassinated by Israel in 2003 and 2004, respectively: Ibrahim al-Maqadmah and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Both leaders took part in the creation of Hamas and propagated its ideology in political, cultural and other fields. Poetry, being the premier form of artistic expression in the Arab world, is used by the leaders of Hamas to present their experiences in Israeli prisons, and their vision and involvement in the Palestinian struggle. The sentiments that their poetry expresses, reveal deep and nuanced cultural, political and philosophical dimensions. The poetry of Hamas can be characterized as one of commitment, suffering, pain, longing, defiance, and certainty.

The paper is even worse, as Alshaer refers to the murderous leaders of Hamas as "intellectuals" who suffered a "cruel fate":

Al-Rantisi became the movement’s leader following the assassination of founder Ahmad Yasin by Israel in 2004, and was himself assassinated by Israel later that year. Ibrahim al-Maqadmah was also assassinated by Israel in 2003. Both had similar life experiences, and ultimately shared the same cruel fate, like many other Palestinian intellectuals.

See? Israel doesn't target Hamas terrorists who blow up buses and pizza shops with women and children - it targets Palestinian intellectuals!

The entire paper is filled with love of Hamas and denial of its violent nature. In this section, Alshaer claims that Rantisi only wants peace, a desire frustrated by Israel:

In these lines, al-Rantisi shows an existential paradox, wherein Palestinian lives have been disrupted and deprived of normality: on the one hand, there is the desire to live in peace and to see fulfillment of one’s needs and desires, and on the other, there are the forces which have rendered impossible the fulfillment of these needs and desires. Confronted by this dilemma, al-Rantisi chooses to resist injustice.

"Justice," of course, is the destruction of Israel.

Rantisi's poem urging his son to take up violence is interpreted romantically by Alshaer:

Better to die than to live as a coward… here you are rotting in a prison with no price/ tomorrow you die, and you will be buried/ O, pity on me, to whom you would leave your sons/ and the wife you will leave behind to wolves…I fear that you would be exiled tomorrow/ you would leave your house derelict; complain over the ruins/ you search for a trusted friend/ to cry for you or share the suffering with you…I forewarn you my son not to bow to an idol, not to return the sword to the sheath/ go in life as you like; I would not be satisfied with such a life without struggle.

This is a moving poem, clouded by paradoxes and occasional mysteries, such as when he fears that his wife would be left to wolves if he dies. Wolves are depicted as representing the ultimate danger; he understandably is racked with worry over the state of his wife and his sons if he is not to be with them. Here, the poet depicts himself as ‘the man, guardian, of the house’ who ensures the safety and security of his family. But finally, Al-Rantisi beckons his son not to give up: what is at stake deserves sacrifices; not doing so would be tantamount to surrendering to the forces that deny Palestinians a life of dignity and peace.

The keywords that Alshaer uses to describe this paper shows his romanticizing of the terror group:

poetry , Hamas , Arabic literature, Islamic poetry, prison, commitment, pain, defiance, hope and optimism

Alshaer, who clearly shares Hamas' philosophy, does admit that Hamas' poetry proves that Hamas is not interested in peace with Israel but in creating an Islamic state:

[W]ithin the grand scheme of Hamas’ ideology, an independent Palestinian state is only a stepping stone towards the realization of a larger Islamic polity that would encapsulate territories larger than Palestine, and ultimately culminates in an Islamic caliphate.

This guy is teaching swooning college students how wonderful Hamas is.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

When religious Israeli Jews demand human rights, they are just acting as immoral settler colonialists, argues another brain-dead academic paper

Here's an abstract for "Temple Mount pilgrimage in the name of human rights: the use of piety practice and liberal discourse to carry out proxy-state conquest," by Rachel Z. Feldman, published in Settler Colonial Studies last year:

Since 2010, Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif compound has become an increasingly popular practice within Israeli society. On the Temple Mount, pilgrimage guides and their Jewish participants subjectively perform Israeli state sovereignty, carrying out a proxy-state attempt at land annexation through the format of a piety ritual. During pilgrimages, Temple Mount tour guides filter down a new discursive regime to participants, helping them to frame their act of conquest in the language of the liberal state, claiming that Jewish access to the Temple Mount is matter of ‘human rights’ and ‘religious freedom’. Today, Temple Mount pilgrimage is becoming a public ritual of liberal-settler colonial comportment, where Jewish pilgrims act on behalf of the state, laying claim to the Temple Mount by constituting themselves as human rights victims, and strategically inverting the relationship between settler and native. On the Temple Mount, religious piety and liberal ideologies conjoin, supporting forms of settler colonial domination in Israel/Palestine.

The paper itself is interesting in a few aspects. One is that the author is herself a religious Jewish woman, showing how the religion of anti-Israel studies has infected even some who understand that Jews are the indigenous people of Israel:

While I recognize the holiness of the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif compound for both Jews and Muslims, I do not condone the forced entry of Jewish pilgrims accompanied by armed guards inside the context of Israeli occupation. On a personal level, as an observant Jewish woman, this research represents my desire to address the cooptation of Jewish practice and spirituality, which I hold dear, for the use of land annexation and domination in Israel/Palestine. I wish to shift the conversation on the Temple Mount away from blaming religion and religious actors per say [sic], and instead, to reveal the particularly pernicious junctures of piety practice and liberal ideologies that embolden settler colonial regimes.

Nowhere in the paper does Feldman actually argue that the Jewish claim of equal rights to peacefully worship on the Temple Mount is not valid. The idea that religious Jews have human rights on par with Palestinians is derisively dismissed as mere politics. It cannot even be entertained. Instead. Feldman concentrates on how these Jews that she interviewed really want to build the Third Temple and to extend their "colonialism."

The most telling aspect of the paper is this part that she uses to describe Zionist Jews, but that applies to her and her Palestinian heroes far more:

The Temple Movement’s use of human rights discourse can be situated within a larger phenomenon exhibited by right wing pro-settlement organizations in Israel, who have learned how to mobilize human rights discourses to their advantage in recent years.58 Similar to the way humanitarian discourses were used by the United States to justify intervention in Afghanistan, human rights discourses, mobilized across the political spectrum in Israel, have become resources to legitimize violence and provide the moral justification for forms of settler colonialism.59 Human rights discourses are powerful tools in political projects of domination precisely because human rights appear as neutral, transcendent, and apolitical values.60 Yet, their mobilization at the local level is always political because human rights effectively ‘demarcate the borders of human’, establishing a hierarchy of civilians who fall under their purview.61

Wow. When Jews talk about their human rights, it is political and cynical. But, the implication is, when people talk about human rights of Palestinians, it is "neutral, transcendent, and apolitical."

Yet this entire paper trashes the human rights of Israeli Jews who want to worship on their holiest place, a right that is indeed enshrined in human rights laws.

Feldman's paper assumes that everything the Zionists do is oppressive, without describing why. That, my friends, is political.

(By the way every footnote in that paragraph refers to the same article. Which should be sort of embarrassing.)

It is more than disappointing to see a religious Jewish woman willing to throw her coreligionists under the bus, with a paper that has built-in biases that are obvious to anyone who is not already infected by the sickness that permeates these sorts of pseudo-scholarship. But perhaps more grating is that she uses interviews of Jews who would no doubt have trusted her not to use them as ammunition against their own human rights.

Finally, this is perhaps the most disturbing part of the paper:

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2014–2017).

The National Science Foundation funded a woman to fly to Israel to trash her own people in a paper that has nothing at all to do with the objectivity one expects from science or academia.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Sick "scholarly" paper of the day says that Israel must be destroyed - and academics must do their part

This academic journal article, in Settler Colonial Studies, was just published last week.

Here's the abstract in academic gobbledygook:

Seeing Israel through Palestine: knowledge production as anti-colonial praxis
Yara Hawari, Sharri Plonski & Elian Weizman
Published online: 31 Oct 2018
ABSTRACT
Knowledge production in, for and by settler colonial states hinges on both productive and repressive practices that work together to render their history and present ‘normal’ by controlling how, where, to and through whom they tell their story. This makes the production and dissemination of knowledge an important battleground for anti-colonial struggles. The State of Israel, in its ongoing search for patrons and partners, is focused on how to produce and appropriate ‘knowledge’, and the arenas in which it is developed and shared. In so doing, it works to reshape critique of its political, social and economic relations and redefine the moral parameters that inform its legitimacy and entrench its irrefutability. Inspired by existing literature on and examples of anti-colonial struggles, this paper challenges the modalities through which Israel produces and normalises the colonial narrative. By critiquing existing representations of the Israeli state – and the spaces and structures in which these take hold – our article contributes to the range of scholarship working to radically recalibrate knowledge of ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’. As part of this work, the article purposefully centres indigenous anti-colonial frameworks that reconnect intellectual analysis of settler colonial relations, with political engagements in the praxis of liberation and decolonisation.

The paper takes it as a given that Israel must be destroyed ("liberation and decolonisation") and wants to ensure that no one looks at it as anything other than an evil, artificial colonialist entry.

The paper starts off with a quote from Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN that it regards as the perfect example of how Israel is trying to fool the world into thinking that it is a liberal, normal state:

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a world steeped in tyranny and terror where gays are hanged from cranes in Tehran, political prisoners are executed in Gaza, young girls are abducted en masse in Nigeria, and hundreds of thousands are butchered in Syria, Libya and Iraq, yet nearly half – nearly half of the UN Human Rights Council’s resolutions focusing on a single country have been directed against Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East; Israel, where issues are openly debated in a boisterous parliament, where human rights are protected – by independent courts, and where women, gays and minorities live in a genuinely free society.

The paper doesn't even attempt to refute Netanyahu's words. In the circles that these academics travel, facts aren't important. It is so axiomatic that Israel is inherently, uniquely evil that Netanyahu's words do not evoke the desire to argue with it as much as the desire to show that they prove that Israel is so bad that its prime minister is forced to divert the world's attention from its evil.

As with "pinkwashing" - the absurd concept that is roundly rejected everywhere outside the anti-Israel and academic worlds - anything that Israel does that is consistent with liberal values is really immoral, they just have to figure out how.

The article is also concerned that the field of "Israel Studies" helps to make Israel sound like a normal state. The authors are very concerned that academia itself cannot be objective in describing how evil Israel's colonialism is:

Given our discussion above of counter-hegemony – and the fact that hegemony is a field of struggle – can we then consider all spaces as potential sites for contestation? What tools do we have to turn the study of Israel into a platform for transforming settler colonial relations, when we are working from within one of the key centres of colonial hegemony, the academic arena? Again, this involves challenging how we work, whose voices are centred, and the connection we make between scholarship and praxis, between understanding settler colonialism and resisting it.

The point of these academics isn't to understand Israel - but to resist it.

The strategy of fomenting Indigenous studies as a starting point for studying the Israeli state and society (as part of critical Palestine Studies), is also a political endeavour.

Throughout this article, we have been working towards a re-reading of Israeli state and society as part of critical Palestine studies; an epistemological starting point that would make visible and disrupt the hegemony increasingly held by Israel Studies in its reproduction of Israel as a ‘normal – if complex – modern state’, as posited in the quote that introduced this article. We have drawn on Indigenous studies and anti-colonial scholarship to make the point that the only way to do this, is to ensure that when we investigate the Israeli state and society, it is with the goal of its transformation. This is informed by a political commitment, requiring not simply that Israel is understood, but that scholars are in solidarity with its decolonisation.

If you are a scholar of Israel and not actively working to dismantle it, then you have no legitimacy in today's academic environment.

This paper freely admits that when the topic is Israel, academia is part of the "resistance" - meaning exactly what Hamas means when they use the term. There isn't even the pretext of objectivity or scholarship where Israel is concerned.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Crazy academic paper of the day: "Ancient Israel and settler colonialism"

If you worry that people might look at history and see that Jews are indigenous to Israel, flipping the script of who is a colonialist and who is native, we have "scholars" who are ready to say that the ancient Israelites were also settler colonialists:

This essay looks at ancient Israel as a settler colonial society. After an introductory paragraph that describes the significance of the study of ancient Israel for the study of settler colonialism, it summarises various approaches to the study of the history of ancient Israel. It then presents evidence for seeing the Israelite documents and early history in settler colonial terms. Finally, it looks at some aspects of decolonisation of the biblical narrative based on acknowledging at least the very possibility of a settler colonial nature of early Israel.

The same author seems a little obsessed with looking at Jews, and only Jews, in settler colonialist terms. He has also written

Ancient Israelite population economy: ger, toshav, nakhri and karat as settler colonial categories

A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual, and Colonialism

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2016) The ecological-evolutionary theory, migration, settler colonialism, sociology of violence and the origins of ancient Israel. Cogent Social Sciences, 2 (1). pp. 1-23. ISSN 2331-1886

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2015) Ancient Israel and Philistia: Settler Colonialism and Ethnocultural Interaction. Ugarit Forschungen, 45. pp. 233-263. ISSN 978-3-86835-137-8

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2015) Reading Genesis–Joshua as a Unified Document from an Early Date: A Settler Colonial Perspective. Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture, 45 (1). pp. 3-31. ISSN 0146-1079

Pitkänen, Pekka M A (2014) Pentateuch–Joshua: a settler-colonial document of a supplanting society. Settler Colonial Studies, 4 (3). pp. 245-276. ISSN 2201-473X

A quick look at indexes of scholarly literature does not find any articles on Arab colonialism in the Middle East.

Think about that.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Crazy academic paper of the day: "Palestinian women in Israel: embodied citizen strangers"

Check out this abstract for the paper "Palestinian women in Israel: embodied citizen strangers" written by Kim Jezabel Zinngrebe and published in Settler Colonial Studies:

Palestinian women’s bodies constitute a central site of the struggle between the Zionist state and Palestinian ‘citizens’ in Israel.

Note the scare quotes around 'citizens' as if Arabs are not truly citizens of Israel.

At the intersection of critical feminist and settler colonial studies scholarship and drawing on empirical data collected in 2013–2014, it will be argued here that Israel’s continuous drive to control Palestinian women’s bodies plays a pivotal role in the completion of the Zionist project.

I wish I could read the paper to understand exactly how Israel is trying to control the bodies of its Arab female citizens, but I'm more interested in how the author defines "the completion of the Zionist project." It sure sounds like she defines Zionism as ethnically cleansing all non-Jews from Israel.

In line with classic settler colonial logic, this project has always closely linked native women’s bodies and native land in its discourses and practices.

I read a fair amount of Zionist literature and I don't recall seeing anything that linked Arab women's bodies with the "native land" - since Zionism defines Israel as the Jewish native land and Jews as the natives of the land!

Therefore, Zionist settler colonialism must be considered a not only racialised but also gendered process.

If one could find these fictional proofs that Zionists care so much about Arab women and treat them differently than Arab men, sure.

Palestinian women’s stories are complex and contradictory and cast the body as the key medium through which they experience citizenship in Israel as a continuation of settler colonialism by other means.

So they are citizens. They can vote and create Internet startups. They can drive, become Knesset members and news anchors and reality TV stars. But somehow their citizenship is a continuation of the equally nonexistent settler colonialism.

This paper claims that it is, in fact, via citizenship that the Palestinian women’s forced exclusion from the Israeli body politic is realised, thereby debunking prevailing Zionist myths of citizenship in Israel and the Nakba as a one-off event.

So by giving them full rights of citizenship, Israel is really taking away their rights! How insidious these Jews are!

Please, please, someone send me the full text so we can see how the author debunks obviously verifiable facts about Arab women citizens of Israel.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Nutty academic paper of the day refers to Palestinian women stabbers as "martyrs"

From Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, published in August:

Yes, Palestinian women killed while trying to stab Jews are referred to as martyrs, without scare quotes, in an academic journal.

The abstract:

During the 2015 Palestinian ‘al-Quds’ uprising, more than 80 Palestinians were killed and their corpses were held by Israel in freezers. Fifteen of these corpses belonged to women and girls. This article draws on ethnographic data and traces the rites of passage of three Palestinian women’s corpses, examining the intersectionality between colonial, social-patriarchal, and resistance performances during their (in)secure life and death. Based on interviews with the women’s families, it examines the necropolitical and biopolitical powers inscribed over women’s frozen dead bodies. Necropolitics in this case is not only the decision about who deserves to live and who deserves death but also the decision about the structure of the dead body’s time-space, about its social-political and biological death. It is about allowing or disallowing burial, grief, and bereavement. Muting, erasing, and managing the death rites of the Palestinian women martyrs, calls for stepping beyond existing Western theory on the linearity, ‘liminality’, ‘anomaly’, and ‘abjection’ of death.

Of course the Israeli authorities were trying to ensure that funerals of these "martyrs" would not become a launching pad for more terror. But such details are probably not mentioned in this paper, because the readership is more interested in "linearity, ‘liminality’, ‘anomaly’, and ‘abjection’ of death."

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Academic papers falsely claim early Zionists wanted Israel to be "goyim-rein"

As I have been looking at the lies published in academic journals about Israel, I saw a heavily referenced paper published in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2006 by Patrick Wolfe, titled "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native."

It has been referenced over 1500 times in other academic papers, so it is considered a seminal source on the topic of settler colonialism. Universities have this paper in their syllabuses.

The paper assumes, without proof, that Israel is guilty of the crime of settler colonialism, not mentioning that Zionism is actually an indigenous rights movement and is anti-colonialist, as it was not driven by a large nation state as every other example of colonialism in history.

One of the sentences in this paper struck me:

[T]he conquest of labour was central both to the institutional imagining of a goyim-rein (gentile-free) zone and to the continued stigmatization of Jews who remained unredeemed in the galut (diaspora). The positive force that animated the Jewish nation and its individual new-Jewish subjects issued from the negative process of excluding Palestine's Indigenous owners.

Wolfe's use of the term "goyim-rein" as if it is a well-known phrase of Zionists struck me, as it seemed extremely unlikely that Jews would have ever used the term, an obvious pun on the Nazi phrase "Judenrein," or "free of Jews."

I found that the phrase was first mentioned by Moshe Menuhin (1893–1983) , the father of famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin and a rabid anti-Zionist (and apparently Jewish antisemite.) Menuhin was raised in Palestine and attended the Gymnasia Herzlia in Jaffa - Tel Aviv.

In his 1965 book "The decadence of Judaism in our time," later posthumously reprinted under a different title, he claimed:

All through the years of our studies at the Gymnasia, we daily imbibed an endless harangue about our sacred obligations toward Amaynooh, Artzaynooh, Moladtaynooh (our nation, our country, our fatherland). It was drummed into our young hearts that the fatherland must become ours, "goyim rein" (clear of Gentiles—Arabs); that we must dedicate our lives to serving the fatherland and to fighting for it.

Menuhin finished high school around 1910, decades before the Nazis introduced the phrase "judenrein." There is simply no way that Zionist Jews in Palestine would have used that term, even if they had advocated ethnic cleansing of Arabs (which they certainly did not.)

Proof of Menuhin's lies come from his translation of "Moladtaynooh" as "Fatherland." It means "our homeland" or more literally "our birthplace," but Menuhin's anti-Zionism forces him to compare Israel to Nazi Germany and pretend that Jews used the Nazi term "Vaderland" for their land. It is no coincidence that he claims Zionists evoked Nazi terminology twice in one paragraph. It shows that Menuhin is not telling the truth.

There are obviously no corroborating stories from any of the thousands of Jews who attended the Gymnasia that students were given an "endless harangue" on building an Arab-free Jewish state or that the term "goyim-rein" was ever used.

It is a lie.

The "goyim-rein" slander has been published in numerous books and other academic papers, with hundreds of references in Google. It will be mentioned in academic papers and books in ways such as this:

Once one sees a reference, it appears authentic. The fact that the author might have made this up is not even considered; the quote that proves that Zionists are just like Nazis is too deliciously good to doubt. And the lie then gets propagated to the next paper, and the next one, as absolute fact.

This type of sloppy research, and the unquestioning use of previous poor research as a basis for the next paper, is emblematic of the basic problems of the social sciences today.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Crazy anti-Israel academic paper of the day: "Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine"

This paper by Shiri Eisner published in the Journal of Bisexuality in 2012 is truly insane. The abstract is only the beginning:

This text narrates the writer's story as a bisexual activist and, through it, also the story of the bisexual movement in Israel so far. In addition, the text endeavors to highlight the strands of militarism, violence and racism in Israeli culture, with a focus on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. This is meant to achieve two things: first, to deconstruct the false separation between the two fields of ‘LGBT rights’ and antiwar activism; and second, to promote the principles of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, encouraging solidarity with the Palestinian people and nonviolent struggle against the Israeli occupation.

The author admits in the abstract that this is a piece of propaganda. She is using her bisexuality to push BDS, even though "Palestine" has absolutely nothing to do with her bisexuality. But she insists there is a linkage - even though she agrees that this isn't a scholarly paper but a personal account.

Why on Earth did the journal publish this? Is everyone's personal opinions worthy of being published, or only if they fit some sort of trendy opinion?

The beginning of the paper is published in Eisner's blog, and her justification for her personal story being published in a presumably academic journal is bizarre:

This article will consist of a sequence of stories from my personal history as an activist.4 The reason why I chose to tell this story from my own perspective rather than take the more ‘dignified’ stance of an academic researcher is threefold. Firstly, by telling the story from my personal point of view, I denounce a single, unified, master-narrative. ...

Secondly, living in a patriarchal, masculinist world, we all learn to appreciate certain values over others: objectivity over subjectivity, universal over personal, rational over emotional. The values associated with masculinity are socially rewarded with respect, dignity and status, and are attributed more importance (both within and without the academia). On the other hand, the values associated with femininity are perceived as flawed, undignified and often even inappropriate. Indeed, in polite “Western” society, speaking of one’s feelings or personal life is often frowned upon. Of course, these values are also racially charged: the former, masculine ones often linked to whiteness and “Western-ness”, and the latter, feminine ones, to “race” and “third-world-ness”. Thus, it is my intent to undermine and subvert these values through use of a personal narrative and emotional writing. By this I mean to suggest that emotions, subjectivity and personal perspectives are central to our experiences as people and should be respected as crucial to our understandings of the world. I feel that to claim a space, and to incorporate these values in my writing is a political act of feminist and anti-racist subversion.

You see, objectivity is part of the evil patriarchy! Emotions and feelings are just as important to be published in an academic journal.

Some seven billion people are now entitled to be published, without any regard to whether their opinions have any validity, because objectivity is male and therefore racist.

The funny part is that the only people associating women with being emotional and unable to be objective are those who are biased against women. It is a negative stereotype - and one that Eisner celebrates.

Eisner embraces the stereotype of women who cannot think clearly and objectively and denigrates those who do as acting "male."

In an academic journal.

The considers this idiocy to be worthy of publication.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Crazy anti-Israel academic paper of the day: "The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought"

Since the "Sokal Squared" hoax of nonsensical academic papers being published in respected journals in the social sciences, I've been looking up papers about Israel and Palestinians in similar journals to see how the subject matter is treated. I wrote about one last week, but there are so, so many more.

If you think media bias is bad, academia is a hundred times worse.

Here is the abstract for a paper entitled "The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought," by Stephen Sheehi, the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William and Mary, in the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

This discussion considers Palestinian subjectivity in a perpetual state of doubleness, commuting between a number of transnational political and cultural contexts and positions. Engaging Lama Khouri’s “Through Trump’s Looking Glass into Alice’s Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian,” this paper reveals how, on one hand, Zionism is intricately and inextricably linked with and haunted by a Palestinian identity, which it fundamentally works to negate; on the other hand, it also engages the ideological aspects of Palestinian Arab identity when it is transplanted to the United States, interpolating all identities through its racialized social and class hierarchy. In examining the structures of these binary identity systems, I gesture toward a decolonializing psychoanalysis that adopts psychoanalytic tools to understand how alienating two-ness can become a productive mode of confronting and dismantling Zionist objectification and radicalized othering.

No, Stephen, Zionism isn't linked to Palestinian identity. It is utterly indifferent to Palestinian identity, which didn't exist in any serious way until Zionism was at least 70 years old. It is Palestinianism that is deeply engaged in negating Jewish nationalism and to deny the right to Jewish self-determination.

But Sheehi has come up with a way to use "decolonializing psychoanalysis" to dismantle "Zionist objectification and radicalized othering," which really sounds evil - and to the readers of these journals. it clearly is.

The paper he refers to, "Through Trump’s Looking Glass into Alice’s Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian," by Lama Z. Khouri, was published in the same issue, and doesn't even pretend to be scholarly:

In this article, I explore—as a woman of color, a theorist, and a clinician—what it means to be a subject with conscious and unconscious relations to power and domination. To do so, I limn a psychic space I encountered through the Trump looking glass, where my understanding of the world around me was turned on its head and where newly found sociopolitical realities and discourse feel bizarre and nonsensical. There, like Alice in Wonderland, I realized that I did not know who I was and felt my identity morphing into different shapes and sizes: Through Trump’s rhetoric I became viscerally aware of multiple interpellated selves (interpellation is described in the paper), within which a hidden traumatic narrative led me to enact such interpellations. I use earlier clinical and personal experiences to demarcate these selves and identities, which I did not know I knew, by revisiting a talk I gave at a conference on immigration 3 years prior to Trump’s inauguration. I also attempt to uncover how my identities came to be by studying those sociopolitical and cultural factors, I believe led to such interpellations. I propose that such experiences are probably universal.

I don't understand what traumatic experiences she had in the wake of Trump's election "as a woman of color, a theorist, and a clinician" but why bother doing research to see if her experiences are universal - just propose it! It saves a great deal of time to make up theories than it does to test them. Science and the scientific method is all part of the patriarchy, after all.

(Khouri also wrote a paper about how her own psychoanalysis with a therapist who is the child of Holocaust survivors didn't work out because, apparently, she was trying to equate the "Nakba" with the Holocaust and the shrink couldn't deal with someone with such a tenuous grip on reality.)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.