Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Academic fraud

Showing posts with label Academic fraud. Show all posts

Monday, August 28, 2017

Today's academic fraud: Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. He wrote an op-ed in Al Jazeera that starts off admirably being against racism and then devolves into a large aside filled with absurd hate against Israel.

The full rant is not worth the electrons it would use to post it here, but here is his conclusion for that section:

Today, Israelis have absoletely no moral authority, not an iota, to denounce the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, for the neo-Nazis intend to do in the United States what the Zionists have already done in Israel: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a model for the white supremacists in the United States. Mass expulsion of Palestinians, the massacre of Palestinians in Deir Yasin and elsewhere: those are the Zionist trademarks the Neo-Nazis hope and wish and strive to replicate in the United States.

It's funny, because anyone who has ever spent thirty seconds walking around in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv can see far more Muslims walking around than can be seen in the US or most of Europe. After all, Arabs are some 20% of Israel's population.

They don't walk around with the fear that American Muslims do. They aren't worried about attacks on their homes or mosques. Their muezzin can be heard louder and more frequently than in any city in Europe. They have government funded schools. They have absolutely no worries about being ethnically cleansed. They have less fear of terror attacks than Jews do - in the Jewish state. The few anti-Arab incidents are statistically minuscule compared to the racist incidents in the US - and even compared to antisemitic incidents in the West. Arabs are safer in Israel than they are in the rest of the Western world. Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the territories are considerably more secure that they will remain in their own houses in ten years than Palestinians in Lebanon or Egypt.

In other words, Dabashi - a professor at Columbia - is a fraud and a liar. But he knows that his readers won't call him on it because they live in the hate-Israel bubble where no anti-Zionist statement is too outrageous to be confidently said, and truth is a joke.

There is a lot of outrage over lies by the far-Right. The Atlantic has a cover story about how the truth is no longer of interest to the right in the US. But it ignores the lies of the Left. And the number of academics who are willing to openly lie to advance their own political agenda is arguably more dangerous that the liars and fantasists of the Right - because the Leftist liars claim the mantle of truth and the right to judge the others.

There is no difference between those who believe in conspiracy theories from the Right and those who believe these sorts of lies from the Left. (What is describing Israel as being interested in a long term plan of ethnic cleansing for 70 years - something it could have done in months if it wanted to - if not a conspiracy theory?)

Dabashi is just another academic fraud.

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Academic Fraud of the Day: Eve Spangler

Eve Spangler is an associate professor of sociology at Boston University. Her "scholarly interests" include "Inequality and Intersectionality; Classical Sociological Theory; Health, Human Rights and Social Justice in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Work Organization: Health and Safety in the Global Economy."

Spangler wrote a book called "Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict" that purports to make the Palestinian issue easy to understand. She writes that the book "will be useful for classes in Middle East studies, peace and conflict studies, Middle East history, sociology of race, and political science. It can be helpful for church groups, labor groups, or other grass roots organizations committed to social justice, and for all readers who wish to be informed about this important topic."

This supposed academic claims that Israeli settlers raise and release wild pigs just to irritate Palestinians.

But she has a footnote! Where is her scholarly source?

It's Mondoweiss. But Mondoweiss didn't even write the article, it was excerpted from the absurd anti-Israel propaganda site IMEMC.

Palestinian farmers in the Salfit district appealed all to Palestinian and international bodies to stop the continued destruction of their crops, caused by the Israeli pigs in the district.Farmers said, ‘We have encountered heavy losses in our wheat and barley crops, where the pigs destroyed them completely.’

They added, ‘We tried to get rid of the pigs with all available ways but we have failed’, pointing out that the only way is to shoot them; which is difficult due to the miltary’s monitoring towers and checkpoints in the area.

Furthermore, according to Al Ray, Palestinian researcher Khaled Maali explained that the settlers found launching wild pigs toward the Palestinian farmlands was the best effective way to fight the Palestinian farmers without significant cost.

Maali pointed out that the occupation prevents the Palestinians from shooting the pigs, whereas it permits settlers to kill the pigs when they reach their colonial settlements.

Even this story is internally inconsistent, claiming that settlers raise pigs (against Jewish law)for no other reason but to release them in Palestinian farms, yet they also shoot the pigs that somehow make their way back to where they were raised.

And even if the story was true, Spangler should have sourced it correctly instead of referring to a secondary source, showing that even as a lying academic, she fails as an academic.

The idea that Jews raise and release wild boars (which have lived in the region since Biblical times) is laughable to anyone with the ability to think - but not to a Boston University PhD who specializes in "Inequality and Intersectionality".

Oh, Spangler also writes in her book as fact that Israel engages in "pink-washing" - that any human rights it gives to LGBT community is really an attempt to divert attention from its crimes, an equally laughable slander.

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SOAS Snowflakes cannot stomach the idea of an Israeli ambassador on campus

This entire article at The Guardian is amazing, not least because it is written as if the opinions expressed are perfectly normal for a university that specializes in teaching about the Middle East.

Students and academics at Soas University of London have said a visit by the Israeli ambassador Mark Regev this week could lead to serious tension and substantial distress on the campus.

Regev has been invited by two student societies to speak about the Middle East and prospects for peace on Thursday, but his visit has been criticised as provocative by other staff and students who are planning a protest.

More than 150 academics from Soas and other UK universities, plus 40 student societies at the university, have written to the Soas director Valerie Amos urging her to intervene to stop the meeting on Thursday at which Regev is due to speak.

A letter signed by more than 100 Soas staff says: “We fear that if this provocative event proceeds as planned, it will cause substantial distress and harm to many of our students and staff who are, have been or will be affected by the actions of what a recent UN report refers to as the Israeli ‘apartheid regime’.

“The event could further cause serious tension on campus and result in a charged atmosphere that will be detrimental to the wellbeing of all faculty, staff and students.”

This is not a spoof. This is not satire. This is seriously what supposed academics are claiming will be the outcome of an Israeli representative speaking on campus, a single Zionist speech among the hundreds of anti-Zionist talks, activities, lectures and boycotts that infest SOAS every year.

The students’ union challenged the university authorities over the staging of the event, raising concerns about possible safety and security risks posed by the ambassador’s visit and “the inability of students and staff – in particular Palestinian students – to participate openly in the debate, because of possible repercussions on their ability to enter Israel/Palestine”.

Apparently Israel is completely unaware of the anti-Israel activities they do the other 364 days of the year, but they will have Mossad operatives taking names on the day of the Regev speech just looking for excuses to ban Palestinians from coming home.

Prof Jonathan Rosenhead, one of the organisers of the academics’ protest letter to Lady Amos, said: “Holding this meeting at Soas, where staff and students have voted overwhelmingly in support of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and in support of Palestinian rights, seems like a deliberate provocation.”

Calling for the destruction of Israel isn't a provocation. Holding a speech defending it is.

A statement posted on Facebook by the Soas students’ union said: “We stand with the Soas community in expressing our concern at Mark Regev’s presence on campus, and in rejecting the idea that our spaces of learning should serve as avenues for officials to put forward state propaganda.”

But perhaps the most outrageous comment about this speech came from Yair Wallach, the chair of the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS, who said “We see little value in the talk itself. This is the view of myself and other colleagues at the Centre for Jewish Studies. Therefore we suggest that the JSoc and the SOAS UN society reconsider the event.”

That is how thoroughly anti-Israel SOAS is. Even its "Jewish studies" leaders are against the idea of even hearing an Israeli representative speak.

Snowflakes.

Here is a list of speeches, available on podcast, hosted by the SOAS Student Union over the past couple of years that are considered to have more value than a speech by a representative of Israel. "Twerking as an act of resistance" sounds like it is hugely valuable.

The last time a representative from Israel visited SOAS in 2005, someone pulled a fire alarm at the outset of the speech, delaying it for an hour.

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Antisemite Joy Karega dismissed from Oberlin College, she threatens to sue. A roundup.

From the Cleveland Jewish News:

The Oberlin College board of trustees voted to dismiss professor Joy D. Karega, effective Nov. 15.

After extensive consideration and a comprehensive review of recommendations from multiple faculty committees and Oberlin President Marvin Krislov, the college voted to let go the assistant professor of rhetoric and composition for failing to meet the academic standards that Oberlin requires of its faculty and failing to demonstrate intellectual honesty, according to a news release from the college.

The release said: “As a board, we agree with President Krislov and every faculty committee reviewing this matter that the central issues are Dr. Karega’s professional integrity and fitness. We affirm Oberlin’s historic and ongoing commitment to academic freedom.

“During this process, which began with Dr. Karega’s posting of anti-Semitic writings on social media, Dr. Karega received numerous procedural protections: she was represented by counsel; she presented witness testimony, documents, and statements to support her position; and she had the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses testifying against her.

“The faculty review process examined whether Dr. Karega had violated the fundamental responsibilities of Oberlin faculty members – namely, adherence to the “Statement of Professional Ethics” of the American Association of University Professors, which requires faculty members to “accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending and transmitting knowledge” and to “practice intellectual honesty."

“Contrary to this obligation, Karega attacked her colleagues when they challenged inconsistencies in her description of the connection between her postings and her scholarship and she disclaimed all responsibility for her misconduct, according to the release.

She also continues to blame Oberlin and its faculty committees for undertaking a shared governance review process, the release said.

“For these reasons, the faculty review committees and President Krislov agreed on the seriousness of Dr. Karega’s misconduct. Indeed, the majority of the General Faculty Council, the executive body of Oberlin’s faculty, concluded that Dr. Karega’s postings could not be justified as part of her scholarship and had “irreparably impaired (her) ability to perform her duties as a scholar, a teacher, and a member of the community.

“In the face of Dr. Karega’s repeated refusal to acknowledge and remedy her misconduct, her continued presence undermines the mission and values of Oberlin’s academic community. Thus, any sanction short of dismissal is insufficient and the Board of Trustees is compelled to take this most serious action,” according to the statement.

her dismissal is not only because of her antisemitic posts on Facebook, but from her activities since they were revealed.

Karega is threatening a lawsuit:

I know the news is coming in. Trust me, this is not a surprise. I've been dealing with the persecution, incompetent leadership, and discrimination from Oberlin College since March. No surprise here.

I will be issuing an official statement soon. I could easily release a "Kiss My Ass" statement. I would be MORE than justified in doing so. But that is not my style. I choose my weapons CAREFULLY and STRATEGICALLY. And trust, I have done that. There will be a challenge and defense of my rights, using ALL the avenues I have available to me -- litigation, public, etc. The pathway for that has already been laid.

...For my Africana faculty, I'm sorry that it had to come to this. I'm sorry that now you all will be placed at the center of the litigation that is coming. I never wanted that. But the College has left me no choice.

She also claims in her post that she was targeted because she is black. ("To my faculty colleagues who had a hand in this decision and to my faculty colleagues who have sat back and done NOTHING: When this precedent that is being set extends beyond mere harm to faculty of color, you will have NO right to complain or say anything.")

The news articles that have been about her, by their nature, minimize her antisemitism and her willingness to embrace absurd anti-Israel conspiracy theories - in other words, her complete inability to distinguish truth from fiction and her willingness to espouse hate.

Thanks to David Gerstman at The Tower, who broke the story about this professor, we have screenshots of what she has actually said in context:

This article has more, and so does this, where Karega "liked" a post that bragged about "exposing the Jew."

There have been academics that defend her right to publish hate on Facebook. The argument mostly goes like this:

Stanley Fish, the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University and author of Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution, said Karega can say whatever she wants on social media or even in her scholarship, even if it’s patently false and relates directly to her subject area—as long as she doesn’t attempt to present it in class as a fundamental truth (and there’s a sound pedagogical reason for presenting it at all)

This is probably why Oberlin is couching her dismissal not in terms of her posts, but in terms of her antagonism towards her employer in the wake of their asking questions about her posts. It was her refusal to “accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending and transmitting knowledge” and to “practice intellectual honesty."

These academic standards quoted by the AAUP and professors who comment on the case are written by people who have an interest in protecting their own jobs. It seems to me that the bar for teachers, and journalists, must be higher, because their entire jobs are dedicated to conveying truthful information. If a professor or journalist cannot distinguish between truth or fiction - even on Facebook posts that have little to do with their professional work - then one must be concerned about their ability to perform their jobs professionally, too. If they prove that they are bigots on Facebook, then they disqualify themselves from pretending to be honorable members of their profession in the office or classroom.

Free speech is important, but for professions that depend on truth and a modicum of fairness, free speech isn't a defense against lies and hate. These opinions aren't merely "controversial." They are wrong and disgusting, and that should disqualify people from jobs that rely on the ability of the professional to know the difference between truth and fiction and between reasoned opinion and hate disguised as truth.

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Academic fraud whines that I started a "Twitter campaign" against her

A new subchapter in the Simona Sharoni saga:From Plattsburgh State's student newspaper Cardinal Points:

Plattsburgh State gender and women’s studies Professor Simona Sharoni has received a slew of online threats after making comments about feminism and the conflict between Israel and Palestine, particularly in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, BDS, movement.

The threats were received by Sharoni through both her PSUC and personal email accounts, as well as tweets directed to her Twitter handle.

“The vast majority of of the messages were sexist in tone and incoherent in substance. They consisted of attacks on my character and academic reputation with several messages that included threats to my career and job security and two messages, which included direct threats to my safety,” Sharoni said in a letter addressed to PSUC colleagues. “One threatened me with rape and the other with both rape and physical violence.”

The initial twitter campaign against Sharoni was initiated April 19 by user @ElderofZiyon, whose bio on the social media site states he is a “International man of mystery, who just happens to run the world. Zionism, Israel, the Arab world, Palestinians, all from a different viewpoint.”

Twitter user @Mrvigilante tweeted to Sharoni, “may be [sic] you should try rape and terrorism to see the difference. Can be arranged.”

I tweeted to her exactly once in April, which is not exactly starting an entire Twitter campaign, and certainly I have nothing to do with any alleged threats of rape against her:

Idiot professor @simonasharoni pretends to link campus rape to Israel https://t.co/ohpUH8xnBo #AcademicFraud pic.twitter.com/tJXdeUf8SN
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) April 20, 2016

I wrote to the newspaper and asked why they mischaracterized my role.

The answer I received is that Sharoni herself is the one who accused me of starting this campaign in the letter to her colleagues!

(The editor says that she will correct the article, although that hasn't happened yet. Her characterization of two alleged threats as a "slew" is more sloppy reporting.)

After the initial threats were received in April, Sharoni said she contacted University Police.

She said she “was fairly satisfied with the response of campus police and IT specialists,” though she still felt vulnerable on campus.

The example from @MrVigilante of a "rape threat" does not strike me as that at all, either. While I don't condone it, he is saying that Sharoni's linking of Israel to rape is less credible than linking Palestinian terror to rape, and crudely offering to help her research the topic. Again, I don't support that statement nor did I have anything to do with it, besides publicizing her own words.

If Sharoni felt threatened by him or any other tweet, she should have gone to the actual police or the FBI, not the campus police. This was not even remotely a credible threat to her.

But Sharoni decided to make an issue of her being "threatened" and "harassed" by Freedom of Information Law requests because she simply cannot defend her absurd positions linking Israel to campus rape via "intersectionality." She claims that she is being persecuted because of her support for BDS, but in fact she is being criticized for this tendentious linkage which she admits is an anti-Israel strategy she made up to inflame passions.

Essentially, Sharoni does not have the ability to defend her slanderous and false accusations against Israel, and to divert attention from her own failings in logic and truth, she is claiming victimhood because people are now asking questions about how an academic can so easily make such false statements.

It is not unreasonable to ask whether someone entrusted to teach students is trustworthy herself.

What is sad is that her colleagues, her college newspaper and some media are accepting her version of events without even bothering to check her accusations. Even this incident shows that Sharoni has no academic rigor as she lashes out at her ideological opponents armed with nothing but false accusations and lies.

I invite her colleagues at Plattsburgh State to read my critique of her words and to agree - or argue -with me. It is something that Sharoni clearly doesn't welcome herself.

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Academic fraud who equates Israel with campus rape claims "harassment" when critics ask questions

Simona Sharoni is an academic fraud who wrote an article earlier this year that pretends that there is a relationship between Israeli policies and men raping women on college campuses.

"Intersectionality," you know.

After she exposed herself as an idiot, it is natural that people would start to look at her background a little bit. This is the person who helped send Rachel Corrie to Israel to protest IDF actions for college credit, and she may be one of Corries' mentors who told her that her "whiteness" would protect her, something that may have directly caused her death as the poor, stupid girl felt she was invincible in front of the slow-moving bulldozer that couldn't see her.

Someone, apparently from Stand With Us, filed a Freedom of Information request to SUNY Plattsburgh, where she now teaches, to find out about Sharoni's hiring, employment history and participation in academic conferences.

It is a legal request. It is a moral request to find out whether state-funded employees who teach New York students are really qualified to do so. There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to find out this information.

But Sharoni suddenly went from being the principled, strong voice speaking truth to power that she pretends to be into a whining, quivering weakling who is complaining, "Look! I'm being persecuted by the evil, all powerful Lobby!"

I'll let Electronic Intifada explain:

[O]n 6 September, Sharoni says she was informed by a school administrator that an individual had made five requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Law asking for records on her hiring, employment history and participation in academic conferences.

According to Sharoni, Sean Brian Dermody, assistant to the vice president for administration and director of management services at SUNY Plattsburgh, asked Sharoni to help with the request by locating the records and turning them over.

The next day, Sharoni says, Dermody sent a follow-up email asking her to give him all correspondence in her possession related to her hiring. Sharoni began working at SUNY Plattsburgh in 2007. She became a professor in 2010.

In the latest update, Sharoni says she was informed that a request was made to disclose all of her travel authorizations and records of what she did and who paid for it.

Ken Knelly, a spokesperson for the university, stressed to The Electronic Intifada that the administration must follow the law. “We are subject to the New York State Freedom of Information Law,” which he says was created to ensure that the government and its institutions are responsive to the public. “The law is based on a presumption of access.”

In response to concerns that the requests may be part of a campaign of intimidation and harassment, as Sharoni and MESA argue, Knelly said the school will review the requests. “Based on the content of individual records requested, we can restrict access if exemptions apply in accordance with state law.”

“We need to follow the law,” he said.

Bob Freeman, executive director of New York’s Committee on Open Government, told The Electronic Intifada that according to precedent dating back to the beginning of the Freedom of Information Law, public records are accessible to anyone without regard to the nature of their interest.

Freeman noted that a request can only be denied if it meets the standard of an “unwarranted invasion of privacy.” He remarked that if every government employee could protest that a Freedom of Information request was intended to intimidate them, then not many requests would be granted.

But Sharoni wants to pretend to be the victim:

“My administration’s utter silence on the matter until today,” she added in reference to Ettling’s email, “underscores an alarming trend in higher education of appeasing external political entities by curtailing the free speech and academic freedom of faculty and students who according to administrators work on ‘controversial issues.’”

“It is an attempt to undermine and discredit scholarly work on Israel/Palestine that includes calls to hold Israel accountable for its systemic human rights violations and repression.”

But Sharoni has no intention to retreat from her work. “I am going to deal with my sense of insecurity and vulnerability by speaking up even louder on these issues, by refusing to let administrators define support for justice in Palestine as controversial and by letting colleagues who don’t work on these issues know what are the broad implications of the loss of academic freedom.”

Sharoni here admits that the FOI requests are not affecting her academic freedom at all.

If she is so brave, and has nothing to hide, and if these requests aren't chilling her speech one iota, and if they are legal requests, then...why is she whining about it?

The reason is because victimhood is sine qua non for anti-Israel activists. They must claim that the Israel Lobby is all powerful and that they are the victims, while at the same time saying that they are brave and they fight despite the crushing weight of pressure from the Zionists.

This case shows that this narrative is utterly false. The truth is that there is no quashing of academic freedom by asking questions, and a true academic would welcome people seeking out information.

Sharoni doesn't base her research on facts. She comes up with her assertion of Israeli evil first, and then tries to shoe-horn any wisps of evidence she can find from any other field to support her foregone conclusion.

No wonder she is against anyone trying to find actual facts.

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Today's academic fraud: Dr. Akan Malici, Furman University (update)

Dr. Akan Malici, who teaches political science at Furman University. His syllabus for "Politics of the Middle East" includes Muslim apologetics like Dalia Mogahed's "Who Speaks for Islam", Karen Armstrong's "Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time" and also anti-Israel materials like Walt/Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby" which was widely criticized as being essentially antisemitic.

Writing in Greenville Online, Malici says that the only reason that the US recognized Israel was because of the Jewish lobby:

Warnings were plentiful. Yet, the United States did get involved ever further and it started arguably for electoral reasons. Political Zionism had come to play a significant role in American politics as the big war had concluded. Convinced he had to cater to it, President Harry S. Truman went against his advisers stating: “I’m sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” Defense Secretary James Forrestal countered: “U.S. policy should be based on U.S. national interest and not on domestic political considerations.” Alas, it was to no avail.

This is not true.

Clark Clifford, who was an adviser to Truman, writes:

As for domestic politics, neither the President nor I believed that Palestine was the key to the Jewish vote. As I had written the President in 1947, in a lengthy memorandum proposing a strategy for the 1948 election campaign, the key to the Jewish vote in 1948 would not be the Palestine issue, but a continued commitment to liberal political and economic policies. Noting the sharp divisions over Zionism within the Jewish community, I concluded, “In the long run, there is likely to be greater gain if the Palestine problem is approached on the basis of reaching a decision founded upon intrinsic merit.”

Holbrooke also says that the opposition to Israel was not based on ethics or morality, but:

Beneath the surface lay unspoken but real anti-Semitism on the part of some (but not all) policymakers. The position of those opposing recognition was simple -- oil, numbers and history. "There are thirty million Arabs on one side and about 600,000 Jews on the other," Defense Secretary Forrestal told Clifford. "Why don't you face up to the realities?"

And Truman himself says that he burned thousands of letters written to him to boost the Zionist cause, and he made his decision to recognize Israel based on his conversation with Chaim Weizmann, whom he resisted meeting:

Truman's decision had nothing to do with the "Jewish lobby," but Malici - who uses that idea as a key part of his teaching - is not willing to look at any evidence that contradicts his thesis that the Jews are controlling America to its detriment.

UPDATE: This fascinating quote from Forrestal that shows the immorality of Malici's pretense of realpolitik: (h/t L King)

I also corrected the author of the quote above to be Clark Clifford. (h/t Joshua)

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Haaretz anti-Zionist historian seems surprisingly ignorant of history - but has lots of hate

Haaretz keeps digging to new lows.

It published an essay by two anti-Zionist historians why they decided to become anti-Zionist.

The first few paragraphs from Hasia Diner, professor of American Jewish history at NYU, is nothing short of astonishing.

When I was asked to run as a delegate on the progressive Hatikva platform to the 2010 World Zionist Congress, I encountered my personal rubicon, the line I could not cross. I was required to sign the "Jerusalem Program." This statement of principles asked me to affirm that I believed in “the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem as capital” for the Jewish people. It encouraged “Aliyah to Israel,” that is, the classic negation of the diaspora and as such the ending of Jewish life outside a homeland in Israel.

Maybe I'm not as smart as an NYU professor, but I don't read "encouraging Aliyah" as "ending Jewish life everywhere outside Israel." I don't think Israel is placing a gun to the head of Jews in Long Island to move to Tel Aviv, or else.

So the entire argument is a straw-man. But that's the least of the problems with Professor Diner's essay.

The death of vast numbers of Jewish communities as a result of Zionist activity has impoverished the Jewish people, robbing us of these many cultures that have fallen into the maw of Israeli homogenization. The ideal of a religiously neutral state worked amazingly well for the millions of Jews who came to America.

I wonder what vibrant Jewish communities Israel is responsible for destroying.

Could it be the Jewish communities of Egypt? Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Morocco? Maybe Sweden? Or perhaps she is blaming Zionism for the destruction of Polish and Hungarian Jewry? What happened to them, anyway?

The answers, which every schoolchild knows, call into question the credentials of a history professor who has seemingly no clue why all those Jewish communities don't exist or are nearly extinct, and who blames Israel for their disappearance. In fact, practically the only place that they are preserved is in Israel. (And if she blames Israel for the antisemitism that drove the Jews out of Arab countries, then she is truly hateful - and shallow.)

Diner doesn't give a crap about the survival of the Jewish people or about the "homogenization" of Jews into an Israeli melting pot. These remnants of these communities are here today largely because of Israel. Those Jews no longer have to suffer with massacres, with dhimmitude, with being humiliated daily. What a terrible loss.

On the other hand, gefilte fish may have never existed if there was no Diaspora. Yay, pogroms!

In fact, Diner herself, in one of her books, exploded the myth of the Lower East Side as a romantic incubator of the American Jewish experience. "Though largely populated by Jews from Eastern Europe, it was not ethnically or even religiously homogenous. The tenements, grinding poverty, sweatshops, and packs of roaming children were considered the stuff of social work, not nostalgia and romance," say a blurb from her book "Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America." Yet she apparently holds on to her own personal myths of a flourishing, romantic Diaspora in Europe and the Arab world - but only when she can blame Israel for its disappearance.

I was struck in Israel last month by synagogues that now mix customs of Ashkenazic Jews and those from Arab countries. On Shabbat, I went to a shul that prayed according to the Eastern European custom but used a Torah from Edot Hamizrach which affected how that part of the service was done. Another one I went to took on the custom of whoever happened to be the prayer leader for that particular service - Ashkenaz for mincha, Nusach Sefard for maariv, and some people saying kaddish in the Mizrahi Jewish manner. All at the same minyan.

This "homogenization" is not something to be scorned but to be celebrated - unless you are a clueless NYU professor for whom the Diaspora is the ultimate symbolism of what it means to be Jewish.

The entire reason Jews have different customs is because they were in an unnatural disapora state for so long. While some customs are quaint and beautiful, the diaspora itself was not. The good customs will remain, others will start, some will disappear. That's what happens in a dynamic, living society. But Professor Diner does not want a dynamic Judaism that has returned to its historic homeland. She wants the museum, fictional Judaism of Fiddler on the Roof.

To Diner, Zionism must be fought because it wants to create a world where Jews are united again and Jews have a nation again.

When one looks at it with a real historical perspective, one sees that Diner's whining has nothing to do with reality. She simply hates Israel and proud Jews. Diner is so bigoted, in fact, that she rails against Haredi Jews, whom she despises so much that she literally "abhors" visiting Israel because she doesn't want to see those damned Jews in their black hats and coats.

If Diner was honest, which of course she isn't, she would admit that her hate for Israel is irrational, and she is justifying it after the fact. There is no real difference between Diner and classic antisemites who also justify their hate with pseudo-moral arguments.

She is a bigot pretending to embrace liberal principals. But hate is what animates her, not a true liberal love for all peoples. What little mask she still has falls off when she reveals:

I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, “We Stand With Israel.”

Irish flags don't bother her on St. Patrick's day. Italians don't bother her when they march down Fifth Avenue on Columbus Day. West Indians and their costumes don't bother her when they dance down Brooklyn streets on their annual festival.

Only the Israeli flag repulses her.

This is not a rational person, This is a bigoted, despicable person who uses her academic standing as a mask to hide her true, ugly face of hatred.

Of course, she is perfect to write for Haaretz.

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Noura Erakat tries to label Israel and the West as "terrorist" in the NYT

The New York Times has a "Room for Debate" section where different people give brief arguments on a topic. The topic earlier this week was "Can we just 'live with' terrorism?"

Academic fraud Noura Erakat, whom I have proven has no problem with lying and then justifying her lies for the sake of her "narrative," spends a few paragraphs pretending that there is no difference between Western armies and terrorists killing civilians, and makes sure (as a person of Palestinian ancestry) that Israel is exhibit A:

To eradicate terrorism, we need a much more honest discussion about what terrorism actually is. If it means the use of force against civilians to achieve a political goal, than that should include all such attacks on civilians, and not merely the ones launched by nonstate actors. In practice, we limit the term to include only nonstate actors.

The victims of state-led attacks are considered collateral damage, or unfortunate but necessary killings. This framework effectively diminishes the value of their lives making it much easier for the world to tolerate excruciatingly high death tolls and absolve the states that caused them.

This paradox is not lost on most of the thinking world, especially where those losses are highest, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in southern Yemen and in the Gaza Strip.

Erakat is saying that Western armies and Israel attack civilians to achieve political goals - meaning that they purposefully attack civilians. Then after stating her slander as fact, she implies that the idea that the civilian deaths are collateral damage is simply a cover-up for the real desire to murder civilians.

There is a glaring omission in her "highest losses" list is what proves that her polemic is meant to deceive, not enlighten.

Syria.

Everyone sees quite clearly that Syria has been using its state armed forces to directly attack civilians. No one is justifying it. And the loss of life from the Syrian civil war dwarfs that of Yemen or Gaza.

Erakat's definition of terrorism is absolutely correct. Her assertion that the word "terrorism" does not apply to state actors such as Syria is a straw man, because it is obvious that Syria is targeting civilians and is therefore guilty of state terrorism. Practically every Arab state has been equally guilty of directly attacking civilians in recent decades.

Yet Erakat wants to make the reader think that there is no difference between how Western armies act - with clear and specific rules of engagement that are compliant with the Geneva Conventions - and how her fellow Arabs act, state and non-state actors alike.

There is a huge difference. The difference is the target. Terrorists target civilians, moral armies target military targets and sometimes civilians unfortunately die, often because the targets purposefully hide among the civilians themselves.

And while Erakat and Amnesty and HRW and other "human rights" frauds like to claim that Israel and the US and European armies target Arabs, the simplest counterproof to that is the fact that the casualties are not in the tens of millions. In fact, if Erakat knew the least amount about modern Western militaries, she would know that more money and time is spent on avoiding killing civilians than on targeting valid military targets.

That is certainly not the case with her own Palestinian brethren, nor with her fellow Arabs.

Erakat knows very well that international law depends on intent, specifically how a reasonable military expert would react given available information, before labeling an action to be a war crime. She wants to hide that basic fact.

That is why Noura Erakat is an academic fraud, preferring advocacy to the truth.

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Academic antisemite of the day: Frank Leon Roberts

Frank Leon Roberts teaches courses such as "Black Lives Matter" and "The Life and Times of James Baldwin & Malcolm X." at NYU and Yale.

He was glancingly mentioned in a nice Tablet article criticizing the current "intersectionality" by John Paul Pagano. Pagano makes some very astute points about antisemitism and why the current Black Lives Matter movement is opposed to acknowledging that it exists:

White privilege is real. Yet when discussing racism I often challenge people who blithely saddle Jews with privilege, because it’s clear to me that they don’t understand anti-Semitism. For one, color bias is an insignificant factor in the history of Jewish persecution, so foisting “white privilege” on Jews is parochial—it shoehorns centuries of Jewish suffering into the particular American experience of racism, which centers on anti-black bias. But more important, anti-Semitism doesn’t work like most forms of racism, which denigrate their victims as inferior. Anti-Semitism is special in that it often perceives its target—Jews—as having too much privilege and assails them for it.

Unlike racism, whose modern versions stem from 19th-century pseudo-science, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory and at root all conspiracy theories envision a demonic elite oppressing and exploiting the common people. They may alight on eclectic topics—war, UFOs, weather and climate, food, medicine, the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, to name just a few—but if you delve deeper, you will find that every conspiracy theory is a narrative in which a secret society of the rich and powerful controls the banks, the media, schools, and governments in order to enslave and exploit the rest of humanity. Anti-Semitism is a name for the conspiracy theory which holds that “the Jews” are this evil elite. To the anti-Semite, Jews are the ultimate bearers of privilege.

It is clear from the first three words quoted above that Pagano is not a racist by any means. But he attacked an antisemitic statement by Frank Leon Roberts:

With much rhetorical pomp and little practical relevance to issues faced by African-Americans, last year a group of over 1,100 black activists, including BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors and Talib Kweli, launched Black Solidarity with Palestine, releasing a statement in which they decried Israeli “slaughter” of Palestinians, repeated lies about Israel sterilizing Ethiopians, endorsed the unmaking of Israel as a Jewish state, and demanded “unified action” against the related evils of “anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Zionism.” The BLM activist Frank Leon Roberts, who took to Twitter after the Gaza Flotilla raid to complain about “Jewish elites” and their “monopoly” of influence, now teaches the nation’s first “Black Lives Matter” course at his alma mater, NYU.

Here are Roberts' tweets from 2010:

Its crucial for the public to realize that NBC/MSNBC,The NYTimes,US News & World Report, & the NY Daily News are all owned by Jewish elites
— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 1, 2010

Speaking out against Israel's massacre & Jewish elites' monopoly of the American free press is not anti-Semitic. #Gaza, #Flotilla, #OilSpill
— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 1, 2010

Um, yes it is, since there is no "Jewish elites monopoly of the American free press." And the Jews who happen to head major media companies are hardly monolithic in their political opinions. So, yes, accusing Jews of monopolizing the media is antisemitic, because it implies a sinister Jewish cabal that means to do nefarious things to others.

Roberts is now defending his antisemitic tweets:

@johnpaulpagano I stand by the statement. And all other statements of fact. Will not be shamed into your racist agenda.
— Frank Leon Roberts (@FRANKLEONROBERT) June 25, 2016

There was a whole thread between the two where Roberts came out quite the loser:

I don't attack intersectionality b/c I'm a racist, @FRANKLEONROBERT. I attack it b/c it leads to racism. Like this. pic.twitter.com/vnHsqW73x2
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) June 25, 2016

The very idea of someone attacking the utterly insane concept of "intersectionality" makes one ipso facto a racist shows these academic frauds are quite aware of how poorly their theories do when faced with facts, and when the emperor is shown to have no clothes, their only defense is name calling.

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Academic fraud of the day: Benjamin Balthaser

Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of English at Indiana University - and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace/Chicago.

He wrote an op-ed for Crain's Chicago Business:

Of all the strange, self-defeating crusades undertaken by Gov. Bruce Rauner in recent months, banning 11 businesses from operating in a state already hemorrhaging jobs and people has to be one of the strangest.

The Illinois legislature, at Rauner's insistence, passed a 2015 bill that forbids the state's pension fund from investing in foreign companies that boycott Israel over its human-rights record. This ban passed by the state legislature also includes companies that boycott "territories controlled by the state of Israel”—a euphemism for illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Until now, the legislation was vaguely understood. What does it mean for a company to comply with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement? Do the shareholders have to take a vote to support international law, back the right of return or demand an end to illegal settlements? What if they decide a company doing business in the occupied West Bank is a poor trading partner?

It's clear now that if a company breaks relations with Israel, it'll end up on the state's blacklist. In the twilight zone that is our state government, our very laissez-faire governor will force companies to continue business with Israel—even in West Bank settlements—whether profitable or not.

No, the bill says no such thing. Only companies that submit to BDS pressure or that admit to following BDS would be ineligible from being invested in by the pension fund.

The governor is not "banning 11 businesses from operating" in Illinois. The bill says nothing like that.

One would think that a professor of English would understand English.

The Middle East may be complex, but the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and international law, are not: Ethnically cleansing territory under military occupation is illegal, and boycotts are protected speech.

Correct. But this academic fraud thinks that a state divesting from companies whose positions it doesn't agree with violates the First Amendment. It doesn't.

He thinks that Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the territories. It isn't, unless you employ a definition of "ethnic cleansing" that ensures that the population grows unhindered.

The D of BDS stands for "divest." Yet Balthaser is now claiming that divesting from companies for their political positions is a violation of the First Amendment!

Oh, I forgot. The rules that apply to Israel don't apply to anyone else.

I shudder to think of what the future will hold for the Holy Land should all routes for peaceful protest be banned.

Well, perhaps Dr. Balthaser can think about what happens in the territories when real peaceful protests - you know, the type where people go into the street with signs - are violently broken up by both Fatah and Hamas. He is more bothered by his fake concern of the First Amendment than the real oppression being faced by the people he pretends to care about.

Which is just more evidence that Balthaser has no academic integrity whatsoever.

What can explain an English teacher who doesn't understand English and who resorts to half-truths and lies to demonize Israel?

Perhaps because he also teaches creative writing.

(h/t YMedad)

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Academic fraud/antisemite of the day James Petras says Clinton is a Zionist spy

The People's Voice conspiracy theory site (still catalogued as a news source by Google) has an article by James Petras where he alleges that Hilary Clinton is a Zionist spy:

But it is Clinton’s long-term, large-scale commitment to Israel that goes far beyond her public speeches of loyalty and fealty to the Jewish state. Hillary Clinton’s entire political career has been intimately dependent on Zionist money, Zionist mass media propaganda and Zionist Democratic Party operations.

In exchange for Clinton’s dependence on political support from the Zionist power configuration in the US, she would have become the major conduit of confidential information from the US to Israel and the transmission belt promoting Israel-centric policies within the US government.

The entire complex of Clinton-Israel linkages and correspondences has compromised the US intelligence services, the State Department and Pentagon.

Secretary Clinton went to extraordinary lengths to serve Israel, even undermining the interests of the United States. It is bizarre that she would resort to such a crude measure, setting up a private e-mail server to conduct state business. She blithely ignored official State Department policy and oversight and forwarded over 1,300 confidential documents and 22 highly sensitive top-secret documents related to the ‘Special Access Program’. She detailed US military and intelligence documents on US strategic policies on Syria, Iraq, Palestine and other vital regimes. The Inspector General’s report indicates that ‘she was warned’ about her practice. It is only because of the unusual stranglehold Tel Aviv and Israel’s US Fifth Column have over the US government and judiciary that her actions have not been prosecuted as high treason.

Petras is a retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

And when Petras says "Zionist power configuration in the US," he means Jews, as he said explicitly in this interview with a Uruguay radio station in 2008 that is on his website:

It’s never explained to a Uruguayan audience how all the [U.S.] presidents are on their knees before Jewish power in the United States.... And it’s one of the great tragedies that we have a minority that represents less than 2% of North American’s population but has such power in the communications media....There’s one thing that one should ask and that is why the North American public doesn’t react against the manipulations of this minority. It’s because the Jews control the communications media.

Last year he doubled down:

What turns comfortable, prosperous American Jews into vindictive bullies, willing and able to blackmail, threaten and punish any dissident voices among their Gentile and Jewish compatriots who have dared to criticize Israel?

What prevents many intelligent, liberal and progressive Jews from openly questioning Israel’s agenda, and especially confronting the role of Zionist zealots who serve as Tel Aviv’s fifth column against the interest of the United States?

There are numerous historical and personal factors that can and should be taken into account to understand this phenomenon.

In this essay I am going to focus on one – the ideology that ‘Jews are a superior people’. The notion that Jews, either through some genetic, biologic, cultural, historical, familial and/or upbringing, have special qualities allowing them to achieve at a uniquely higher level than the ‘inferior’ non-Jews.

That article goes on to become indistinguishable from Stormfront as Petras lists rich and powerful Jews for proof that Jews are driving the nation and the world into the ground.

In fact, David Duke is a fan of Petras.

And this guy is still employed as a professor!

The irony is that if any academic would say racist statements against blacks or Hispanics or women or LGBTs they would be fired and blacklisted by their employers without any question. Publicly complaining about supposed Jewish power, however, doesn't affect a career as an academic one bit.

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What Madagascar can teach us about the Khazar "theory"

In 2013, a geneticist named Eran Elhaik published a study that claimed that, based on his interpretation of existing genetic studies, Ashkenazic Jews were descended from Khazars.

The media ran with this story without doing a modicum of fact checking, and I showed at the time that Elhaik had set out to prove this theory before he even did the research - the exact opposite of what a real scientist should do. His paper was sloppy and the actual researchers who created the data that he misused wrote a later paper debunking his theory.

Elhaik wasn't finished yet. He suddenly changed from a genetics expert into a linguistics expert and in April put out a paper and video claiming that Yiddish is actually derived from Slavic languages and not from German. This was a new attempt to buttress his debunked theory, and to gain maximum publicity he invoked Yoda from Star Wars.

Again, the media jumped on this, and it took a couple of weeks before this cockamamie theory was also shown to also be junk science. (By the way, "cockamamie" is not a Yiddish word.)

This weekend an interesting story came out about a community of over a hundred people in Madagascar who converted to Judaism.

A nascent Jewish community was officially born in Madagascar last month when 121 men, women and children underwent Orthodox conversions on the remote Indian Ocean island nation better known for lemurs, chameleons, dense rain forests and vanilla.

The conversions, which took place over a 10-day period, were the climax of a process that arose organically five to six years ago when followers of various messianic Christian sects became disillusioned with their churches and began to study Torah.

Through self-study and with guidance from Jewish internet sources and correspondence with rabbis in Israel, they now pray in Sephardic-accented Hebrew and strictly observe the Sabbath and holidays.

The conversions were facilitated by Kulanu, a New York-based nonprofit that specializes in supporting isolated and emerging Jewish communities, but were initiated by the residents.

“Now that we’ve re-established the State of Israel, it is time to re-establish the Jewish people, especially in the Diaspora,” said Bonita Nathan Sussman, vice president of Kulanu.

Her husband, Rabbi Gerald Sussman of Temple Emanuel on Staten Island in New York, added: “We are in the process of reconstituting the Jewish people, which would have been more numerous had it not been decimated by the Holocaust and had we not lost millions of Jews in Arab lands.”

Beginning on May 9, members of the community came before a beit din, or rabbinical court, convened for the occasion at the Le Pave Hotel here, the Madagascar capital. The court comprised three rabbis with Orthodox ordinations: Rabbi Oizer Neumann of Brooklyn, Rabbi Achiya Delouya of Montreal and Rabbi Pinchas Klein of Philadelphia. All three belong to a group of rabbis who serve far-flung Jewish communities and support converting emergent Jewish groups.

Delouya, whose background is Moroccan, spoke with the converts in their second official language, French, and also provided Sephardic influences for which the Madagascar community feel an affinity.

The conversion process included periods of intensive Torah study, interviews by the beit din and full body immersions in a river located a 90-minute drive from Antananarivo. A privacy tent was hastily erected beside the river for the occasion, and a festive atmosphere ensued as men, women and children, ranging in age from 3 to 85, lined up to take the ritual plunge.

What this story highlights is that it takes years of intense effort, education and desire to become a Jew according to Jewish law. The Khazar story of the king who forced his people to "convert" en masse may or may not be true (most evidence is that only some leaders and aristocrats converted), but large numbers of converts would not have been accepted as Jews by the existing Jewish communities in Europe without a lot of controversy - controversy that has not been recorded anywhere in rabbinic or responsa literature.

The old Yiddish expression is "es iz shver tsu zayn a Yid," it is hard to be a Jew. Well, it is even harder to become a Jew. That simple fact is simply never addressed by the academic frauds with an agenda like Eran Elhaik.

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...And here's the final proof that Prashad is an academic fraud.

There are two ways of proving that someone is an academic fraud.

One is to prove that he or she knowingly lies.

Yesterday I proved with a high degree of probability that popular Trinity College professor Vijay Prashad lied, by claiming that Hamas does not deny the right of Israel to exist. He quoted selectively from a 2009 New York Times article and used Khaled Meshal's words to pretend that he accepted Israel's existence, but he didn't bother to mention that the article itself said explicitly that Meshal refused to accept Israel's existence.

I then brought a much stronger proof using Meshal's own words, on video, that leave absolutely no doubt about his opinion.

But perhaps Prashad was just being sloppy, and he didn't notice the part of the NYT article where Meshal was shown to hold the opposite view. Or maybe he read about it secondhand. And perhaps this Middle East scholar was unaware of the many other statements in Arabic by Hamas that explicitly denies Israel's right to exist.

That possibility, that Prashad is just a sloppy professor and not a malicious liar, was put to rest when he sarcastically responded to my tweet about his article:

This means that he read my post and decided that proof that pushing anti-Israel propaganda is more important than truth. The Alternet article he wrote remains unaltered; he did not issue a correction or change the words.

Any person who claims to be a scholar, who works in academia, and yet who consciously decides to lie is simply a propagandist and should not be allowed to work at any self-respecting institution of higher education.

Unfortunately, today's colleges think that free speech includes the right to teach lies.

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Academic fraud of the day: Vijay Prashad, Trinity College

Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, and a member of the advisory board of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

He is also a provable liar.

He writes in Alternet:

Hamas does not “deny” Israel’s right to exist. Its Charter, written during the First Intifada in 1987, bears the marks of the moment. But it does not define Hamas’ politics, for which a reading of its 2006 election manifesto gives a much clearer picture. In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal “urged outsiders to ignore the Hamas charter,” for, in Meshal’s words, “We are shaped by our experiences.” What is the Hamas position, the Times’ reporters asked Meshal? “We are with a state on the 1967 borders, based on a long-term truce. This includes East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.” Nothing here is outside the international consensus. Israel is not denied by Meshal, the leader of Hamas.

If one reads the rest of the same New York Times article, which the scholar doesn't bother linking to, it says

Apart from the time restriction and the refusal to accept Israel’s existence, Mr. Meshal’s terms approximate the Arab League peace plan and what the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas says it is seeking.

Let's forget about the dozens of examples that I have gathered since then showing that Hamas considers all of Israel "occupied" and that it's goal is Israel's destruction.

Let's look at Khaled Meshal's own words since the deceptive 2009 NYT interview.

First of all, Palestine – from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, from its north to its south – is our land, our right, and our homeland. There will be no relinquishing or forsaking even an inch or small part of it.

Second, Palestine was, continues to be, and will remain Arab and Islamic. It belongs to the Arab and the Islamic world. Palestine belongs to us and to nobody else. This is the Palestine which we know and in which we believe.

Third, since Palestine belongs to us, and is the land of Arabism and Islam, we must never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of it. The occupation is illegitimate, and therefore, Israel is illegitimate, and will remain so throughout the passage of time. Palestine belongs to us, not to the Zionists.
[...]
The liberation of Palestine – all of Palestine – is a duty, a right, a goal, and a purpose. It is the responsibility of the Palestinian people, as well as of the Arab and Islamic nation.

Fifth, Jihad and armed resistance are the proper and true path to liberation and to the restoration of our rights, along with all other forms of struggle – through politics, through diplomacy, through the masses, and through legal channels. All these forms of struggle, however, are worthless without resistance.
[...]
Politics are born from the womb of resistance. The true statesman is born from the womb of the rifle and the missile.

That's as explicit a rejection of Israel's right to exist as words can convey. The whole speech is here:

No doubt Professor Prashad knows this, and he knows he is lying. So he is yet another academic fraud.

(The rest of his article could be fisked just as thoroughly, but once Prashad is exposed as a liar, really, what's the point?)

(h/t YMedad)

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Jasbir Puar is another Israel-hating academic fraud

There have been some articles lately about charges of antisemitism against Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar. I don't like to toss around phrases like that lightly, so I was very interested in reading a transcript of Puar's recent talk at Dartmouth University.

Is she a classic antisemite? No. But her rhetoric shows why the argument that anti-Zionism is a modern form of antisemitism has a lot of merit.

First of all, Puar was participating in a panel discussion of gender and ecological issues - yet she spoke only about Israel and supposed Palestinian oppression. She barely even tried to relate her talk to the topic. Such obsession, and indeed rudeness to the organizers of an event on a completely different topic, betrays a hatred that goes way beyond sober academic reflection.

Secondly, her comments itself were the usual pseudo-academic rhetoric that one often hears from obsessed Israel haters. It starts from the premise that Israel is uniquely evil in the world, and all of her "research" is based on that flawed assumption.

The paper is in three parts, so the first part is about the new project. The second part is a kind of piecing of an article that’s already been published in order to set the stage for the third piece, which is part of the second half of the book. And I apologize to those of you who have probably already heard one part or another in some other context but this is how I wanted to lay it out to you today.

So the first part is called Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters. How Palestine Matters apprehends the science fiction of the everyday, of every day life. It stretches the speculative into the now, to revise the temporal frames of past, present and future. The West Bank is the past of Jim Crow and the future of controlled societies together. While many decry the settler colonial project of Israel as an archaic remnant of the past, bemoaning, how can this still be happening in the 21st century, I would argue that it is only in the 21st century that such a concentration of power, economy, and technology is possible.

In this project I attempt to articulate what I am calling the computational sovereignty of Israeli settler colonialism: occupation and apartheid. This twerking of sovereignties stands as a challenge to the literatures of biopolitics, deploying a notion of population beyond the human, non-human, animal frame. How do objects compose a population? How do toxicities populate and become populations?

In centering in human entities and temporalities how Palestine matters resituates the geopolitical that has been oddly alighted in the resurrection of the ecological and the geographical and emergent fields of new materialisms and Anthropocene studies. Many scholars have rapidly noted that much of the Anthropocene talk has been enabled through a rather bald-faced appropriation of long-standing native and indigenous cosmologies. So the book attempts to offer a counter genealogy to the surge of theories of object-oriented ontology and theories of post-humanism by putting them into direct relation to the fields of post-colonial theory, questions of imperial occupation and settler colonialism and disability studies.

Did you get that? Neither did anyone else. It is nonsense, although this may be the first time I've seen the word "twerking" in a so-called academic setting. But it goes beyond nonsense - it is an attempt to build an edifice of quasi-academic lingo on a foundation that is a lie to begin with. Israel's unrivaled and malicious evil is a given, and it is up to academic frauds like Puar to find new and innovative ways to express their hate in socially acceptable ways, which includes gobbledygook.

Much of her talk is based on the premise that Israel has an intentional policy to maim Palestinians. In other words, when an Israeli soldier shoots a rock-throwing protester - who is endangering his life - in the legs, that is an evil Zionist policy to create as many disabled Palestinians as possible. (The idea that this also saves numerous lives compared to other methods of self-defense is completely besides the point, apparently.)

But Puar goes beyond. She came up with a novel theory that every Palestinian is disabled, because they have a lack of mobility, because of Israeli restrictions on allowing Jews to be murdered.

So I want to close with a short comment on recent fieldwork in the West Bank and occupied east Jerusalem that I completed in January 2016. During this visit I met with rehabilitation and disability service providers. I met also with Palestinians with disabilities and spoke with people with varying bodily capacities at numerous checkpoints. Health is big business in the West Bank, and it is among the most dominant form of NGO, humanitarian work conducted by European and North American agencies. It is not news, again, that these otherwise valiant efforts wind up reproducing the dependency of colonized populations while legitimizing the structure of settler-colonial occupation. There’s a tension between the liberal U.N. rights-based frames that these organizations carry forward, one that foregrounds disability as an individual affliction to be accommodated and empowered and understanding Palestinian populations as debilitated, as enduring forms of collective punishment that restrict mobility for everyone albeit unevenly.

If the occupation is reducing able-bodied capacity across manifold Palestinian populations, by literalizing mobility impairment through both targeting the knees and creating infrastructural impediments to deliberately inhibit and prohibit movement, then this disabling is happening on both individual and structural population levels. Neither the medical nor the social models of disability are able to address the complexities of debilitation in Palestine. The medical model understands disability as a defect to be repaired, this repair is usually not possible in Palestine. The social model understands disability, the environment to be disabling, curbs, stairs, elevators, chemicals, but does not address the disabling infrastructure of the occupation, checkpoints, divided highways, settlements that divide Palestinian landscapes and so on. One could say that the disabled are thus twice disabled and yet disability is not held
up as a specific identity formation, but rather understood as one that is evolving. So we wouldn’t say it’s twice disabled, rather that everyone is debilitated to some degree or another way to put it is no one is actually able-bodied. Disability activists are less interested in nor committed to the distinction between the disabled and the non disabled, no one is constituted as necessarily able-bodied, preferring instead to see the inhabitants of the West Bank suffering and resisting together, the collective punishment of the occupation. Does this disabling structure of collective punishment create more acceptance and solidarity between those disabled and those able bodies made disabled by the infrastructure of the occupation? This is one of my pending research questions.

Puar makes up a bizarre relationship between disabled people and Palestinians, and wants to see if Palestinians feel solidarity with the disabled because they supposedly share the same challenges. They don't, of course, but when they see Westerners asking leading questions that can end up demonizing Israel, they know quite well how they are supposed to answer.

The idea that fully abled people are "disabled" because they are under "occupation" is almost certainly highly insulting to people with real disabilities. I think most of them would gladly trade places with the people in the West Bank who have both legs and arms and eyes. In Puar's zeal to foment hatred towards Israelis, she is throwing disabled people under the bus, watering down their very real challenges.

Her last part is the coup de grâce:

Toward the end of our visit with a disabilities support group just north of Hebron, we asked the twenty odd people there what their hopes and dreams were for the future. One after another, the respondents articulated desires for rehabilitation, “I hope to walk again someday,” “I hope to go to Germany so I can get the treatment to fix me.” “I want to be able to know what it’s like to walk.” These statements of desire for mobility are profound in the context of the mobility impairment and in fixing of space that is one of the prime logics of settler-colonial occupation. While the long-standing formulation of disability as deficit drives the right to maim, and the production of widespread debilitation is key to maintaining colonial rule, these desires on the part of Palestinians with disabilities points to something more entrenched, there can be little reclaiming of disability as an empowered identity until and unless the main source of producing debilitation, that is the occupation, is ended. One cannot happen without the other.

She asked a question from rehab patients. They answered the exact same way that rehab patients anywhere in the world would answer the question. But since Puar sees the world through Israel-hating glasses, she sees their answers as damning for Israel for supposedly limiting their ability to heal. (Which is, from everything I can tell, a lie. There are rehab centers in the West Bank.)

The overarching message from Puar, from her choice of topic to her highly selective facts to her outright lies, is that hating Israel is the animating theme of every sociological discipline. Feminism, disability studies, ecology, racism - all of those studies must be anchored in a solid belief of unwavering Israeli evil. Hate is the driver for her entire research discipline.

Since Puar's pretense of research and writings are just a smokescreen to spread hate against Israel and Zionists, it has far more in common with antisemitism than with academics. It might not be antisemitism in the classic sense, but the underlying motivation is just as ugly - and just as devoid of scientific or fact-based evidence.

This was not as noxious as some of her other appearances. Yet they all have one thing in common - hate.

My guess is that social scientists are far more reluctant to openly attack the work of their fellows, because they don't want their own work to be subject to the type of scrutiny that is expected from hard sciences. It would be a much better respected field if sociologists and the like would rip apart academic frauds like Jasbir Puar instead of silently allowing her and those like her to be nothing more than vehicles of hate.

It would be nice to see what a truly disabled person has to say about her theories, though.

(h/t Judith)

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