Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Judith Butler

Showing posts with label Judith Butler. Show all posts

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Rashida Tlaib, the Lion's Den, and the ubiquity of Jew-hate across political boundaries (plus comic)

Last week, member of Congress Rashida Tlaib said at a Palestine Advocacy Day event, “I want you all to know that among progressives, it becomes clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel‘s apartheid government.”

The formulation asserts both the lie that Israel is an apartheid state and that people cannot be both progressive and support Israel.

One does not see similar litmus tests for progressives. Indeed, the virtually unanimous support that the anti-Israel crowd has for the emphatically Islamist, regressive groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad shows the absurdity of the idea that these supposed progressives support only progressive causes.

This was already evident back in 2006 when gender theorist Judith Butler said, "Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important."

If Hamas is part of the global Left, and an Israel where there are equal rights for Arabs and women and gays is cast as part of the bigoted far-Right, then the terms have lost all meaning.

But there is another political theory that is far more powerful than the arbitrary Left/Right divide.

Jew-hatred explains the obvious contradictions between what "progressives" claim to believe and what they actually believe.

And it works both ways. Far right Jew haters, who are far more willing to take pride in their bigotry, regularly pretend to be pro-Palestinian - happily quoting the most far-Left personalities. The racist shooters at Overland Park and Pittsburgh were partly fueled by the antisemitism of the Left.

The far-Right pretense of caring about Palestinian human rights is as transparently false as the far-Left pretense of caring about women's and gay rights while supporting Hamas.

Another proof that antisemitism trumps Left/Right politics comes from the new West Bank terror group, called The Lion's Den. As Khaled Abu Toameh reports:

This is the first organized armed group that consists of gunmen belonging to a number of Palestinian factions – including Fatah, Hamas, IJ and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The PFLP is a Communist group. Islamic Jihad and Hamas are Islamist groups. How can they work together?

Because for antisemites, there is no Right and Left. Those political affiliations are excuses for their hate of Jews, not the reasons for it. Arab antisemites are far less wedded to their supposed Leftist or Islamist Rightist causes than they are to hating Jews - but it is the exact same logic that allows Western "progressives" to be as hypocritical as Western white supremacists who pretend to love Palestinian Arabs.

The only consistency is Jew-hate.

Perhaps it is time to resurrect the political parties like the late 19th century Deutschsoziale Antisemitische Partei whose primary ideological basis was antisemitism, so these people on the Right and Left can join together and enjoy consistent political positions.

The Lion's Den is a model for how today's antisemites can put aside their differences for the greater good of ethnically cleansing Jews from the planet.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Arabs love Haaretz article saying Jews should go back into exile

Earlier this week, Haaretz published an op-ed by B. Michael which I still cannot tell if it is parody or not. Excerpts:

I’m a proud exilic Jew. I’m an internationalist and a cosmopolitan. I’m also devoid of any relationship to my geographic birthplace, and “land” to me is just the dirt in which food grows and people are buried. It doesn’t have a single milligram of sanctity, and it isn’t worth even a single drop of blood.
...
In our own day, we’ve learned that we owe our survival to being geographically dispersed rather than geographically concentrated. To diversity rather than unity. To communities rather than a state.

We’re really terrible at being a “nation.” We very quickly become as stupid, violent and greedy as most of the other nations of the world, and within a short time we brought destruction and exile on ourselves. Only there, in exile, do we regain the sense we lost and resume being a people that survives.

Apparently, being a majority doesn’t suit us – ruling, running an army and a state. We’re good at being a minority. Even a little persecution suits us. It brings out the best in us.

And now, we’re once again playing at being a “nation.” Ostensibly, that’s our eternal answer to the Holocaust that befell us. But in reality, it’s the continuation of the Holocaust. Not, heaven forbid, the burning of our bodies, only the crushing of our souls.

It’s the growth of another shoot from the Jewish tree that does harm to everyone around it. A rotten, poisonous brother of the Zealots, the Sicarii, Rabbi Akiva’s blind students and Simon bar Kochba’s foolish disciples. They ought to be called Jew-oids. They’re like Jews who took the trivial and wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.

... Consequently, there’s no choice but to admit that Zionism was a naïve mistake and to go into exile again to regain our strength and refresh our values.

B. Michael is the pen name of Michael Bryzon, a screenwriter and satirist. At first glance this seems like satire, but there is no punchline - and people with no sense of humor like Judith Butler also believe that the Diaspora is where Jews properly belong.

But satire or not, Arab media is reporting heavily about this article without the slightest doubt it is meant seriously. Many Haaretz articles excite Palestinians, but this one is being reproduced all over.

It reminds me of the interview last month where Ehud Barak expressed his worries about Israel making it successfully past its eighth decade. Arabic articles are still being published about the "curse of the eighth decade."

There is nothing wrong with self criticism, but the Arab world always misinterprets anyone asserting Israel has made mistakes as an indication of the demise of the Jewish state, rather than an indication of a thriving, open society.

The anti-Israel Arab world, humiliated at their inability to destroy Israel in 1948., pathetically grab onto any Jews who says that Jews will destroy the state themselves.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

JVP's "Judaism Beyond Zionism" doesn't have much Judaism (plus cartoon)

Jewish Voice for Peace sent out a fundraising email from Judith Butler, where she says:

As the largest Jewish organization that has declared itself anti-Zionist, JVP has taken on an indispensable role in public life that is singular, timely, and critical. JVP offers a way for Jews to re-imagine what Jewishness can look like without nationalism and state violence, for Jews and other Palestinian allies to enact true safety and solidarity in our communities, while showing up and speaking out in the hard moments — the moments that really count.

JVP is at the forefront showing what a powerful and meaningful Jewish life can look like now, and helps all of us imagine the future. Help me make sure that future comes to fruition.

What kind of Judaism can JVP offer?

Given that the entire point of the organization is to oppose Israel, that makes its public activities all political. The only vestiges of religion are the ones that they can twist into politics.

JVP is trying to create a "Judaism" beyond just anti-Israel activities. They set up something called the JVP Havurah Network:

We are an emergent network that gathers, supports and resources diasporist, anti-zionist and non-zionist Jews and Jewish spiritual communities. We yearn for a vibrant Jewish life beyond nationalism that condemns and challenges white supremacy within and outside Jewish communities. The JVP Havurah Network supports collaboration and leadership development in service of the movement for Palestinian freedom and all liberatory movements.

Unlike their events, their ritual sheets are not centered exclusively on anti-Israel activities. They try to take whatever they can from Judaism and remove anything that has anything to do with Israel.

Which leaves them with very little.

Their Kabbalat Shabbat worksheet includes parts of the service. But it has to remove the middle paragraph of Sh'ma, which talks about the ties between Jews and the Land of Israel.

If they would create a prayer book, they would need to excise much of the Amidah and much of the Grace After Meals. Their Passovers must not include where Pharaoh should let the Israelites go. Their Pentateuch would not include much at all, since it is filled with promises from God to give the Land to the children of Israel. Chanukah turns from a holiday of rededicating the Temple in Jerusalem to...Palestinian olive oil.

They realize that Judaism without Israel isn't Judaism, so they are literally trying to create a new religion that they want to pretend is a legitimate branch of Judaism. The hoops they need to jump through prove what a sham they are.

More hypocrisy from Judith Butler/JVP and their narrow definition of antisemitism

Jewish Voice for Peace sent out a fundraiser yesterday written by Judith Butler, the anti-Israel professor who twists Judaism itself to justify her bizarre opinions (which include that Hamas and Hezbollah are part of the global Left.)

Butler complains about rumors that Facebook will adopt the excellent IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which is - she says - an assault on free speech. Nothing new there.

She also claims:

Apart from a chilling effect on social media, any definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism would, if accepted, threaten free speech, scholarly inquiry on the Middle East, academic freedom on campuses, and the ability of nonprofits to support projects in and for Palestine, while establishing a dangerous norm for governments across the world.

According to Butler, it is impossible for scholars to discuss the Middle East or nonprofits to raise money for Palestinian causes without violating the IHRA working definition. This is patently absurd. One does not need to claim Israel is racist or that Israeli Jews are Nazi-like to be pro-Palestinian, and her assertion to the contrary proves that anti-Israel rhetoric goes way beyond what is considered acceptable discourse for any other nation on Earth - because the IHRA definition explicitly states that criticism of Israel similar to that of any other nation cannot be considered antisemitic.

Butler is saying that it is impossible to support Palestinians without holding Israel to a standard that no other nation is held to. That is quite an amazing argument.

Her next statement is even more absurd:

To dismantle antisemitism, we have to know its history, how best to identify its forms, and how to devise strategies for defeating its every instance. Conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism makes this work impossible...

Over the past month we saw the first anniversaries of the Jersey City massacre and the Monsey Chanukah machete attack that left several Jews dead. Jewish Voice for Peace and its socialist Left allies who pretend to be against antisemitism did not say a word about them.

The reason is simple. The attackers were Black. Which means they weren't white supremacists. And to the "brilliant" Judith Butler, that means that these attacks targeting Jews weren't antisemitic!

Butler has the chutzpah to say that "we have to know its history" but she and JVP will never discuss Soviet antisemitism, or Arab antisemitism, or Muslim antisemitism, or Black Hebrew antisemitism, or Nation of Islam antisemitism, or last summer's online Black celebrity antisemitism. If it isn't Christian or right wing, it doesn't exist in their minds.

Which means that they are erasing lots of antisemitism from the history books. And they then claim that they "have to know its history!"

The hypocrisy of Judith Butler and JVP is off the charts.

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.

Critiquing Judith Butler's critique of Bari Weiss

For some reason, Jewish Currents chose rabid anti-Israel ideologue Judith Butler to review Bari Weiss' "How to Fight Anti-Semitism," a book that describes in detail why modern anti-Zionism is a new form of antisemitism just as toxic as white supremacism, a thesis with which Butler violently disagrees.

Butler's "gotcha" of Weiss is this:

Intersectionality theory does have much to say about the possibility of being oppressed in one respect and responsible for oppression in another respect—a part of that theory that Weiss does not address. The mechanics of the concept do not seem to elude her; in fact, we might describe her as arguing in an intersectional spirit when she claims, for instance, that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is subject to racist attacks at the same time that, in Weiss’s view, she is guilty of antisemitism. “Two things can be true at once,” Weiss reminds us. Indeed they can. This situation is well-known by many Jews who vigilantly oppose antisemitism and yet also bear responsibility for a continuing and unjust occupation of Palestine.

But that tension remains oblique in this ahistorical text. Weiss regards Israel’s founding as a state based on Jewish political sovereignty as the end of a “clear line” that ran from biblical times through the aftermath of the Holocaust, spanning “two thousand years of history [which] have shown definitively that the Jewish people require a safe haven and an army.” The Holocaust, in other words, necessitated “the fulfillment of a biblical promise” to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. And yet another line of history runs through and past the Naqba, a history that intersects with the story Weiss tells: state Zionism provided sanctuary for Jewish refugees even as it dispossessed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, producing more refugees for whom there is no clear sanctuary. 1948 was a year in which multiple histories intersected. There is no one line of history. If we accept wholesale Weiss’s proposition that Israel exists and is therefore legitimate, then we are excused from asking too many historical questions about why it was established in the way that it was—on what legal terms, and at what price, and through the vanquishing of what alternative possibilities.

But if two things can both be true at once, shouldn’t we be able to think through the paradox of a dispossessed population gaining sanctuary only through the dispossession of another population? Shall we not name this as a founding contradiction, one that remains unsolved, and whose resolution could lead to less violence and more common life—cohabitation on equal grounds? Unfortunately, that order of complexity does not enter into this book and seems rather rigorously excluded.

OK, let's deal with the issues that Butler brings up that she says is excluded. (I haven't yet finished reading Weiss' 'book.)

Butler falsely claims that Weiss is referring only to the Holocaust when she says “two thousand years of history have shown definitively that the Jewish people require a safe haven and an army.” This is obviously wrong, since the Holocaust took place over only a tiny slice of the two thousand years of Jews being persecuted that Weiss refers to. Butler chooses to ignore that in implying that the Holocaust is the only reason for Israel to exist, to provide sanctuary for Holocaust victims and no one else, and therefore the Shoah is used as an excuse for dispossessing Palestinian Arabs. It isn't. Zionism came before the Holocaust and its arguments are based on Jews being treated as any other nation.

Butler then moves onto her next false assumption: that considering Israel to be a legitimate state somehow stops people from delving into the details of how it was established, a process that Butler clearly thinks was on the whole immoral. This is also obviously not true. The United States and Australia may have done immoral things to aboriginal peoples when they were founded, but no one questions the legitimacy of those and most other countries the way Israel's legitimacy is questioned daily, including in this very essay. No one says that one cannot question the historical details any state including Israel Yet to Butler, only Israel's very legitimacy is dependent on the moral "price" she claims it paid. Butler even seems to also be saying that Israel's legality is open to question - a Jewish state that the UN itself recommended be established, that the UN accepted as a full member, a Jewish homeland accepted by the League of Nations decades earlier - it is difficult to find a state that has more legitimacy in international law than Israel.

If the only state whose legitimacy is questioned is the only Jewish state, then we also have the right to ask questions: Why it Israel singled out to adhere to standards that no other state has ever reached? Why is the Jewish state the only one that is assumed to be illegitimate? Why are people like Butler obsessed over Israel and only Israel? The only answer that fully explains the visceral hate for Israel is indeed antisemitism. Weiss shows how the Soviets used Jews to spearhead antisemitic initiatives - and how those Jews ended up being persecuted themselves, despite their being as "good" as they could be. Butler fits exactly into that mold. It is not surprising she doesn't mention that part of the book.

Butler claims that Zionism necessitated the dispossession of Arabs from the land. This is nonsense; one has to truly cherry pick Zionist quotes from the first half of the 20th century to build that case (which is exactly what anti-Zionists like Butler do.) If one reads actual Zionist literature from the period - just peruse any random issue of the Palestine Post during the 1930s - the idea of ethnically cleansing Arabs not considered. On the contrary, it is assumed that Jews and Arabs would live together in harmony and that the influx of Jews would improve the lives of Arabs. One could argue whether that is true or even if that is a colonial mindset, but one cannot seriously argue that Zionism caused the flight of Arabs from the area. War is what caused the flight, and it was not a war that Zionists started.

Judith Butler has a different vision of a wonderful world where Jew and Arab live together in peace, one that necessitates dismantling the Jewish state and replacing it with a single state where Palestinians can "return" and make the Jews a minority. Instead of relying on Jewish ideas of equal rights for an Arab minority we should rely on the Arab majority to protect the rights for a Jewish minority. This will, she says, resolve the "founding contradiction" of Israel - by destroying the Jewish state.

But this is no longer 1948, and we have over seven decades of evidence of what these competing visions look like. On the one hand, we have an Israel that provides legal equal rights to its Arab minority and that, in fits and starts, has been trying to live up to that vision in all spheres. On the other hand, we have abundant evidence of how Arab nations treated their Jews both before and during Israel's establishment.

Egypt created nationality laws in the 1920s that defined as someone who was an Arab or Muslim, pointedly excluding Jews. Libya stripped Jews of the right to vote in 1951. In Iraq, Jewish history and Hebrew language instruction were prohibited in Jewish schools during the 1920s and Jews were expelled from public service and education in the 1930s. In Yemen, Jews were excluded from public service positions and the army during the 1920s. Jews could no longer purchase property in Syria in 1947. In 1948, Iraq prohibited Jews from leaving the country, and Yemen followed in 1949. In 1951, Libyan Jews were no longer allowed to have passports or Libyan nationality certificates.

These Arab laws were aimed at all Jews, citizens of their countries, not "Zionists." And today, Jews who venture into Arab areas controlled fully by the Palestinian Authority put their lives at risk. Israel was and remains the only country in the Middle East where Jews can live without fear. Pretending that a binational state would protect the Jews is to ignore a century of evidence that proves otherwise - Jews ostensibly had equal rights in Egypt and Libya and Algeria and Lebanon, and they were forced out. By any rational yardstick, Arabs are more protected under Jewish rule than Jews ever have been under Arab rule.

Considering Butler's kumbaya solution and comparing it with the reality of Israel today is indeed what gives Israel its moral legitimacy. The Holocaust was unique, but Jewish persecution is not. Israel is the refuge for Jews from Arab lands untouched by the Holocaust as well as from the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and other places they were persecuted or tolerated as not-quite full citizens. Weiss reminds us of the statement of the prime minister of France in 1980, Raymond Barre, after a synagogue bombing that killed two Jews and two non-Jews: ”They aimed at the Jews and they hit innocent Frenchmen.” With few exceptions, Jews have never been considered full citizens of the countries they lived in, and today's white nationalists as well as leftists who want to exclude Jews from student government on campus show that this thinking exists even in the US today.

No one is silencing anyone. All questions about Israel should be asked and forthrightly answered. But Butler isn't just asking questions - she is attacking the very idea of Jews as a people having the same rights as any other people to self-determination. She is disingenuous when she characterizes her criticisms as merely asking questions, since she is not interested in the answers, which an honest academic would welcome. She is singling out Israel for vitriol that is way out of proportion to its supposed crimes, to the point that it is the only state in the world that is assumed to be illegitimate. That isn't debate - that is hate. And it is hate that is identical to the hate that Jews have been subjected to throughout history, that also was justified as merely asking questions.

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.

Jewish Voice for Peace publishes a book to justify some kinds of antisemitism

The virulently anti-Israel "Jewish Voice for Peace" has released a book that is ostensibly about antisemitism. But it doesn' ttake much to realize that the book is really about justifying the merciless criticism of the Jewish state, and only Israel, beyond any context and beyond criticism of any other country, as legitimate.

The foreword is by Judith Butler, the fundamentally dishonest academic who twists Judaism itself to find a philosophical framework for her hatred of Israel. She is also the person who absurdly called Hamas and Hezbollah "progressive."

Her foreword shows more of her duplicity in trying to reframe the question of what antisemitism is into the charge of how Zionists supposedly use the charge of antisemitism to silence criticism:

Given the contemporary framework in which the matter of antisemitism is discussed, the conflict about how to identify its forms (given that some forms are fugitive) is clearly heightened. The claim that criticisms of the State of Israel are antisemitic is the most highly contested of contemporary views. It is complex and dubious for many reasons. First: what is meant by it? Is it that the person who utters criticisms of Israel nurses antisemitic feelings and, if Jewish, then self-hating ones? That interpretation depends on a psychological insight into the inner workings of the person who expresses such criticisms.But who has access to that psychological interiority? It is an attributed motive, but there is no way to demonstrate whether that speculation is a grounded one. If the antisemitism is understood to be a consequence of the expressed criticism of the State of Israel, then we would have to be able to show in
concrete terms that the criticism of the State of Israel results in discrimination against Jews.

Already Butler is purposefully distancing herself from any definition of antisemitism that includes being against Israel. And one part of that definition is quite easy: opposition to the Jewish people's right to self determination. The more expansive definition is Natan Sharansky's 3D test: if the criticism is based on demonization, delegitimization and double standards it is antisemitic.

Naturally, Butler wants to obfuscate the issue rather than deal with it, because, well, she agrees with all three and she doesn't want to be called an antisemite.

Instead, she floats the straw man that some nefarious people are claiming that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism.

If modern democratic states have to bear criticism, even criticisms about the process by which a state gained legitimation, then it would be odd to claim that those who exercise those democratic rights of critical expression are governed only or predominantly by hatred and prejudice. We could just as easily imagine that someone who criticizes the Israeli state, even the conditions of its founding-coincident with the Nakba, the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians
from their homes-has a passion for justice or wishes to see a polity that embraces equality and freedom for all the people living there. In the case of Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews and their allies come together to demonstrate that Jews must reclaim a politics of social justice, a tradition that is considered to be imperiled by the Israeli state.

Here she uses the myth, and then she actually promulgates another myth. 800,000 Arabs were not expelled from their homes in 1948. Not even close. But Butler isn't interested in facts; she is interested in using big words to pretend that she is not avoiding the real issue of left-wing antisemitism such as is practiced by JVP.

Her zeal to divide antisemitism from anti-Zionism would be comical if only she was being honest. She admits that saying that Jews control the media and the banks is antisemitic; what about those who claim the "Zionists" do the same thing? What about those who claim the Zionists control the US and other governments? I bet most of the authors in this collection believe that fervently.

Finally Butler gets to the crux of her misdirection:

So to answer the question, why is antisemitism attributed to those who express criticisms of the Israeli state?, we have to change the terms of the question itself. We have been asking, under what conditions can we decide whether or not the charge of antisemitism is warranted? What if we ask: What does the charge of antisemitism do? ...

When the charge of antisemitism is used to censor or quell open debate and the public exchange of critical views on the State of Israel, then it is not exactly communicating a truth, but seeking to rule out certain perspectives from being heard.

Butler's straw man is complete. No one is saying that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but her thesis that this is what is happening allows her to create an entirely new spurious charge: that critics of Israel are being silenced by false accusations of antisemitism.

Therefore, this preface to this volume supposedly about antisemitism is really showing that the book is about justifying modern antisemitism.

Indeed, the first essay by Antony Lerman starts off with his rejection of any definition of antisemitism that includes demonization, delegitimization and double standards concerning Israel:

For activists battling daily against the abuse of antisemitism to stifle free speech on Israel/Palestine, on university campuses and in Jewish religious and communal bodies of all kinds, it may seem something of a luxury to dwell on the reasons why contemporary understanding of antisemitism has become so politicized, bitterly contested, and controversial.

A look at the authors of essays in the volume show that every one is not just a critic of Israel but they question Israel's right to exist as a Jewish homeland:

Preface by Judith Butler

Introduction by Rebecca Vilkomerson

Part I: Histories and Theories of Antisemitism
Antisemitism Redefined: Israel’s Imagined National Narrative of Endless External Threat by Antony Lerman
Palestinian Activism and Christian Antisemitism in the Church by Walt Davis
Black and Palestinian Lives Matter: Black and Jewish America in the Twenty-First Century by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Intersections of Antisemitism, Racism, and Nationalism: A Sephardi/Mizrahi Perspective by Ilise Benshushan Cohen
On Antisemitism and Its Uses by Shaul Magid
Antisemitism, Palestine, and the Mizrahi Question by Tallie Ben Daniel

Part II: Confronting Antisemitism and Islamophobia
Trump, the Alt-right, Antisemitism, and Zionism by Arthur Goldwag
“Our Liberation Is Intertwined”: An Interview with Linda Sarsour
Centering Our Work on Challenging Islamophobia by Donna Nevel
Who Am I to Speak? by Aurora Levins Morales
Captured Narratives by Rev. Graylan Hagler
“We’re Here Because You Were There”: Refugee Rights Advocacy and Antisemitism by Rachel Ida Buff
European Antisemitism: Is It “Happening Again”? by Rabbi Brant Rosen

Part III: Fighting False Charges of Antisemitism
Two Degrees of Separation: Israel, Its Palestinian Victims, and the Fraudulent Use of Antisemitism by Omar Barghouti
A Double-Edged Sword: Palestine Activism and Antisemitism on College Campuses by Kelsey Waxman
This Campus Will Divest! The Specter of Antisemitism and the Stifling of Dissent on College Campuses by Ben Lorber
Antisemitism on the American College Campus in the Age of Corporate Education, Identity Politics, and Power-Blindness by Orian Zakai
Chilling and Censoring of Palestine Advocacy in the United States by Dima Khalidi

Conclusion
Let the Semites End the World! On Decolonial Resistance, Solidarity, and Pluriversal Struggle by Alexander Abbasi
Building toward the Next World by Rabbi Alissa Wise

Omar Barghouti? Linda Sarsour? Dima Khalidi? These are the experts on antisemitism that contribute to this volume?

As far as I can tell, only one writer here does not support boycotting Israel, and that is Shaul Magid. Everyone else seems to support it, meaning that they are guilty of double standards towards Israel (no one boycotts other countries nowadays.) So the entire book is an apologia on how singling out the Jewish state for punishment for crimes that, at worst, are committed by every other nation in active conflicts is not really antisemitic.

Moreover, the nature of the arguments visible from the preview available of the book indicates that the authors not only deny that any leftist criticism of Israel can possibly be antisemitic, but also that any Arab criticism of Israel can be antisemitic. A glance through this blog, Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI shows hundreds of examples of explicit Arab antisemitism, so when Arabs cloak their criticism of Israel in human rights or international law terms, they are obviously masking their true motives. How many "progressive" critics of Israel share those same antisemitic motives? I can't say, but to ignore the issue altogether is not scholarship.

It is propaganda.

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 Conceptual Penis" and Israel

Skeptic has a hilarious article about a new hoax paper successfully published in a peer-reviewed journal. The article is named “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.

Our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.”

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

They point out that they chose to lampoon "gender studies" because "we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified."

I have noted in the past that the academics who support Israel and oppose boycotting the Jewish state tend to be concentrated in fields where truth matters: law, physics, medicine, engineering.

On the other hand, anti-Israel pseudo-academics are heavily involved in social sciences, gender studies. art history and other fields where the truth is what you pretend it is.

An extreme example was when the National Women's Studies Association supported BDS, with the same sort of nonsensical verbiage that "The Conceptual Penis" lampooned:

As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression. In the spirit of this intersectional perspective, we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.

Who needs facts when you can have assertions and back them up with specious, overreached concepts like "intersectionaliuty"?

Judith Butler, the Goddez* of gender studies (*I just made up that word between god and goddess so as not to appear to be sexist by ascribing a gender to her godlike status) who is in the forefront of anti-Israel academics, writes things that are nearly as incomprehensible. In this paragraph from "Undoing Gender", Butler seems to embrace her unintelligible writing as a wonderful thing.

Maybe there is a universe where this nonsense is regarded as insight.

However, when I analyzed Butler's analysis of something I know a little about - her attempt to justify her hatred of Israel in Jewish sources - I showed that the emperez* (ditto) has no clothes, lacking even basic knowledge of history and Judaism (she claimed that ancient Egyptians are Arab, for example.)

The people who hate Israel build an edifice of lies and add scaffolding onto the edifice - and then claim that the scaffolding proves their theory since it doesn't collapse in their self-defined and quite fictional universe.

In short, the morons who fell for "The Conceptual Penis" are the type of morons who pretend Islam is progressive and the type of morons who tend to hate the most progressive state in the Middle East - in the name of progressivism.

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.