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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She's just misunderstood and human.

Really.

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

The hypocrisy of Schulman is astounding. But not surprising.

(h/t Andrew)

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A useful list of academic frauds who demand textbooks publish lying anti-Israel propaganda

The "Jewish Voice for Peace" group seems very upset that McGraw-Hill removed a textbook from circulation after I showed that it included a false piece of anti-Israel propaganda.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 12, 2016

Dozens of Prominent Academics Urge McGraw-Hill Education to Reverse Decision to Censor Palestinian Loss of Land Maps

Last month, publishing giant McGraw-Hill Education withdrew and destroyed copies of a US college level textbook because of complaints from supporters of Israel over a series of maps showing loss of Palestinian land from 1946, shortly before Israel was established, to 2000.

In response to this shocking and outrageous act of censorship of the Palestinian narrative from US schoolbooks, dozens of respected Palestinian, Israeli, and American academics have signed onto the enclosed open letter calling on McGraw-Hill Education to reverse its decision. Signatories include Rashid Khalidi, Noura Erakat, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Sarah Schulman, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, and Angela Davis.

Here is the letter they signed. Keep in mind that these people are considered "academics."

Academics Urge McGraw-Hill Education to Reverse Decision to Destroy Textbook

We, the undersigned, urge McGraw-Hill Education to reverse its recent decision to withdraw and destroy the US college level textbook, “Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World”, which was made following complaints about a series of maps showing loss of Palestinian land from 1946 to 2000.

This blatant act of censorship, in response to complaints from those who seek to suppress a free exchange of knowledge and ideas about Israel and Palestine, is shocking and unacceptable.

The maps in question are historically accurate and vividly illustrate Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinian people and appropriation of their land, which is why the Israeli government and its supporters wish to suppress them. If there were in fact any minor errors with the maps they should have been corrected rather than removed altogether. Last year, in a similar act of censorship, the cable news network MSNBC apologized for airing a similar series of maps and retracted them.

It is imperative that students be able to visualize history, including through the use of maps, in order to learn how to analyze and understand it. Further, it is essential that faculty and students have access to educational materials that speak to the dispossession Palestinians have experienced, and continue to experience today. We cannot have a truly comprehensive understanding of Palestine or Israel without this information.

We urge McGraw-Hill Education to reverse its decision and reinstate the maps and textbooks in question.

First these academics say that the maps are historically accurate, but they they admit that the maps may have "minor errors" that "should have been corrected." Which is it?

It is neither. The maps are lies from beginning to end, both individually as well as in the way they are presented as a series. But you wont find any of these "academics" actually answering the proofs that they are propaganda. If they were true academics, who wouldn't lower themselves to answer my proofs, they should answer the objections of Yaacov Lozowick, who really is a historian unlike virtually all of the signatories.

If you need more proof that these "academics" are academic frauds, think about this: I am willing to bet that not one of them has actually seen a copy of this textbook. They are defending this propaganda map without knowing if it even fits in with what the text is saying! They argue that "it is essential that faculty and students have access to educational materials that speak to the dispossession Palestinians have experienced" but without reading the book, how can they know that this is appropriate in this case?

Here are the facts, since I've seen the full context and they haven't. The section of the book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is less than two pages. The text  mentions the separation fence and refers to the series of maps as showing where the fence is - but the maps don't show that.

I don't know whether it is the authors or copy-editors of the book who are to blame, but the reference the book gives for the Map that Lies is an obscure article, written in Arabic, that was published in a now defunct website. It was not published as an academic paper anywhere as far as I can tell.

Furthermore, the map was not created by the author of that paper; it was grabbed from some propaganda site and thrown in by the webmaster just to add an illustration. The paper was about possible security-specific solutions between Israel and a Palestinian state and had nothing to do with supposed land loss.

In short, there is no academic source for this series of maps. It was placed in the textbook even though it had nothing to do with the text, referencing a paper that had no relationship with the map to give it academic cover. There was some effort involved on the part of someone to include this piece of propaganda and to hide its origins from anti-Israel hate groups.

The academics who signed this don't give a damn about truth. They are saying that anti-Israel lies must be inserted in every possible medium and venue. In this sense they are echoing what professor Amy Kaplan said at a BDS conference on how to try to incorporate anti-Israel propaganda in courses that have little to do with the topic.

McGraw Hill did the right thing because the maps are filled with lies, the source for the maps was falsified (or laundered, if you prefer,) , and the graphics had nothing to do with the actual text. The Isrsel-haters know that the maps are a great propaganda tool and they cannot stand the fact that its lies have been exposed so publicly, both in this case and by MSNBC last year.

There are 37 signatories of this absurd letter. Being a signatory of this letter defending the indefensible is a very good indicator that these "academics" are simply frauds who are willing to sacrifice the truth in their hatred for Israel.

So here is the list of these academic frauds, courtesy of JVP.  I include links where I previously showed them to be liars and deceptive (or quoted others who did.) Note also that there is at least one prominent J-Street member, Rebecca Alpert.

• Nadia Abu-El-Haj, Professor at Barnard College and Columbia University
• Rebecca Alpert, Professor of Religion, Temple University
• Sofya Aptekar, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Sa’ed Atshan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, Swarthmore College
• Elsa Auerbach, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley
• George Bisharat, Emeritus Professor of Law, UC Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco
• Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley
• Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Omar Dajani, Professor of Law at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law
• Angela Davis, Author and activist
• Estelle Disch, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
• Nada Elia, Program Manager, Global Cultures Program, Northwest Language Academy
• Noura Erakat, Assistant Professor at George Mason University
• Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, Political Science Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Margaret Ferguson, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Davis
• Katherine Franke, Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Director of the Open University Project, and member of the steering committee of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University
• Marilyn Frankenstein, Professor of Media and Society, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Randa Jarrar, President of Radius of Arab American Writers
• Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Columbia University
• Martha London, University of Massachusetts Boston
• David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside
• Saree Makdisi, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA
• Ussama S. Makdisi, Professor of History and Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies, Rice University
• Bill V. Mullen, Professor of American Studies, Purdue University
• Nadine Naber, Associate Professor, Gender & Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
• David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
• Ilan Pappé, Professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies
• Rachel Rubin, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Sarah Schulman, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York, College of Staten Island
• Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, St. Antony’s College, Oxford
• C. Heike Schotten, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Boston
• Jack Shaheen, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute and The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
• Simona Sharoni, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh
• Barry Trachtenberg, Director, Judaic Studies Program, University at Albany – SUNY
• Judith E. Tucker, Professor of History, Georgetown University

This is a very useful list - a list of so-called academics who act in opposition of what academia is supposed to stand for. Anyone who attends any of their schools - or pays tuition for someone who does - should really ask their deans whether they are proud to have educators who explicitly favor hate and lies over the truth.

(h/t Alyssa)

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Sarah Schulman of "pinkwashing" fame is a paranoid fraud

Remember Sarah Schulman, who wrote one of the most bizarre op-eds in NYT history in her crazed attempt to say that anything Israel does that is gay-friendly is really to whitewash its alleged crimes,  and whose hate for Israel makes it impossible for her to say a bad word about the undeniably homophobic terror group Hamas?

Well, she organized a conference on "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing" at CUNY earlier this year. I pointed out some of the nuttier parts of the conference description, but it turns out that Schulman's hate for Israel caused her to disallow anyone to speak at - or even attend! - the conference unless their hate for the Jewish state was as pure as hers is.

James Kirchick in Tablet describes how Schulman rejected numerous papers at the conference, even papers critical of Israel, if they did not toe her line that the only possible reason for Israel's being friendly to gays is to pursue its agenda of crushing Palestinian Arabs.

Beyond that, when one man proposed a paper saying that Israel's support of gays was meant to help tourism rather than provide cove for genocide, Schulman not only angrily rejected the paper but publicly accused him of being an "Israeli operative:"

But the most revealing of Schulman’s interactions was with Jayson Littman, a New York-based organizer of social events for gay Jewish men who has led gay-themed Birthright trips to Israel. Last spring, Littman sent a proposal titled “The Myth of Pinkwashing,” which, along the line of Jonathan Miller’s, explained that the Israeli government’s advertising its gay life is primarily about tourism dollars, not propaganda. Schulman sent him a similar response to the ones she fired off to the other three individuals described above. Littman’s dedication to connecting gay Jews with Zionism, however, appears to have made him a prominent target of Schulman’s florid campaign to portray any and all mention of gay life in Israel as part of a dark Israeli government-controlled conspiracy to oppress Palestinians.

In a November 2012 interview with the British lesbian magazine Diva, Schulman said that “the more I work in this arena, the more aware I become of the involvement of the Israeli government in the US LGBT community.” She named Littman, among others, as “Israeli government operatives … who work for the Foreign Ministry, whose job it is to work our community along pinkwashing lines.” Among their tasks, she said, are to “plant stories in newspapers, co-opt our events … and flood websites with propaganda.”

Littman, of course, is nothing of the sort.

Kirchick also reveals this little tidbit:

Schulman’s behavior—accusing someone (by all accounts falsely) of being a spy for a foreign government and then compiling a dossier full of inaccurate “evidence” when challenged on the veracity of her claim—is the work of an activist, or of a secret policeman in the old Soviet-bloc states, not a scholar. Indeed, despite having the title of “Distinguished Professor” at CUNY, Schulman has no degree higher than a Bachelor’s from Empire State College.

Empire State College is known for its distance learning program; meaning that her degree is pretty much a mail order  bachelor's degree, from a little known albeit accredited institution. CUNY hiring someone with those credentials as a "Distinguished Professor" makes one wonder about CUNY altogether.

Kirchick concludes with the undeniable:

In her opening speech, Schulman dropped any pretense of being anything other than an ideologue. Noting that some critics of her conference had suggested she invite “a keynote speaker from the other side,” she responded, “Like there’s two sides!” By offering a veneer of academic respectability to Sarah Schulman and her acolytes, CUNY has provided legitimacy to agitprop posing as scholarship.

FrontPage had a nice review of the entire joke of a conference.

(h/t Gidon)

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The hypocrisy of "gay rights advocate" Sarah Schulman

I have written about Sarah Schulman before when she wrote a truly hateful NYT op-ed and elsewhere.

An article in Tablet by Sohrab Ahmari exposes her sheer hypocrisy:

I couldn’t help but raise my hand. “So is Hamas part of the ‘they?’” I asked.

Schulman answered: “Hamas—you know, every time I give one of these talks one guy asks about Hamas.” Then a flurry of protests: “I have never supported any political party! I don’t even support the Democratic Party!”

But of course I didn’t ask Schulman if she supports Hamas. “What I meant is: Is Hamas engaged in ‘systems of supremacy?’ Does Hamas fit into your definition of ‘they,’ of people who are implicated in ‘systems of supremacy?’ ”

“It depends?” Schulman responded, her tone seesawing between the declarative and interrogative modes. “You know, sometimes—I don’t know enough about Hamas to give you a complete, intelligent analysis of Hamas. But there are people who get into all kinds of movements because they have particular needs. And I don’t—let me say it this way: All over the world there is conflict between religion and politics. In the United States we are unable to separate religion and politics, and that’s true in Israel, it’s true in the Arab world, it’s true all over the world. Do I think that there should be religious governments? No, because I’m not in favor of that. I’m not a religious person, and I see it as a negative force in the world. But if people elect, democratically elect a religious government, that’s their government. That would be my answer.”

Here was the BDS movement in a nutshell. In a room filled with progressive activists, an American academic with unimpeachable progressive credentials claimed she didn’t know enough about Hamas to criticize its views on matters of gender and sexual orientation. She had heard somewhere that Hamas was “democratically elected”—apparently Schulman had missed the news about how, the last time Hamas seized power in Gaza, it was via defenestration—and that sufficed to render the group above judgment. Acknowledging the obvious about Hamas would have demoralized the BDS faithful gathered at the LGBT Center that night, and what sort of religious movement would want to do that?

Schulman, a supposed gay-rights activist, is actually claiming that anti-gay policies are beyond criticism when legislated by an elected government!

But in her mind the elected government of Israel, which protects gay rights, has no legitimacy.

How can any self-respecting gay-rights activist hold such absurdly illogical opinions?

Simple. Sarah Schulman is not a gay-right activist. She is a hater of Israel, and she tries to shoe-horn her hatred of the Jewish state in to a gay-rights agenda. The fact that her positions are thoroughly inconsistent with any sane gay-rights agenda doesn't matter since, to haters like Schulman, consistency and gay rights are far less important than destroying the state that provides safe refuge to the people of her ancestral religion.

The poster I made of Schulman has never been more appropriate.

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Anti-Israel gay conference on "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing" at CUNY

From Times of Israel:

An academic conference planned for next year in New York will use Israel’s largely positive record on gay rights to denounce its treatment of Palestinians.

City University of New York last week announced Homonationalism and Pinkwashing, a gathering that will provide “an opportunity to examine Queer Resistance and Complicity globally” — but with a special emphasis on Israel. Hosted by CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the conference will take Israel to task for “pinkwashing,” a term that accuses the country of promoting its progressive treatment of sexual minorities as a way of diverting attention from its conflict with the Palestinians. “Faced with intensifying criticism and the threat of economic boycott,” the conference website states, “the Israeli government expanded their marketing plan by harnessing Homonationalism to reposition its global image.”

Based on the list of proposed topics, conference organizers don’t plan to examine the persecution of gays in the Muslim world, except as it pertains to generating Islamophobia and to “justify military assault” in Iraq and Iran.

Coordinating the gathering is Sarah Schulman, a humanities professor at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. Schulman raised the profile of the “pinkwashing” accusation last fall in a controversial New York Times op-ed, in which she argued that Israel’s “gay soldiers and the relative openness of Tel Aviv” shouldn’t be used to distract attention from “the Palestinians’ insistence on a land to call home.”

Scheduled speakers include Berkeley professor Judith Butler, a veteran of Israeli Apartheid Week, and Haneen Maikey, the director of Palestinian LGBT group alQaws.

AlQaws, which appears to hold its recurring “Palestinian queer party“ in Israel, is headquartered in Jerusalem Open House, a gay center in the Jewish-majority part of the city.

The official description of the conference is a must-read for its pretentious tone and sheer vacuity.

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies is pleased to announce a conference “Homonationalism and Pinkwashing” to be held April 10-11, 2013 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in all configurations around the world have always experienced dramatic differences in representation and power. Today, after generations of sacrifice and organization, some LGBT people have won full legal rights with different degrees of implementation. Once hard to imagine, protection from discrimination, full relationship recognition, and inclusion in representation are now daily possibilities for some. In the United States, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have been invited into an equality defined, not by rights, but by the ability to participate openly in immoral wars. The co-opting of some LGBT people by anti-immigrant and in particular anti-Muslim political forces is widespread and growing. Rutgers Professor Jasbir Puar has coined the term “Homonationalism” to define collusion between LGBT people and identification with the nation state, re-enforcement of racial and national boundary, and systems of supremacy ideology no longer interrupted by homophobia. Homonationalism has spread far from its roots in European xenophobia and US militarism to become an increasingly potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Faced with intensifying criticism and the threat of economic boycott, the Israeli government expanded their marketing plan by harnessing Homonationalism to reposition its global image. The campaign intended "to improve Israel's image through the gay community in Israel," The Jerusalem Post quoted one government supporter of the campaign. This deliberate and highly funded program is what anti-occupation activists have named "Pinkwashing."The campaign not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel's gay rights movement, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. These groups rightly note that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, a keynote speaker at our conference and the director of Al Qaws:For Gender and Sexual Diversity in Palestinian Society, said in a recent lecture tour in the United States, "When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is."

Homonationalism and Pinkwashing mark a crucial turning point for Queer Scholars and Activists. This conference provides an opportunity to examine Queer Resistance and Complicity globally, in all of their complexities, with a political maturity that acknowledges the responsibility of access, the activism of necessity, the potential and impossible communities, identifications, solidarities, unities and consequential calls for action. Acknowledging these conditions make it imperative for Activists and Scholars to convene and bring together the theoretical and the applied, repositioning our resources to focus on a rejuvenated Queer future, movement, movements, efforts, actions, organizing and focus towards a vision of freedom that finally includes us all.

Do you get that? Do you see how a nation that doesn't discriminate against gays is to be held accountable by gays because some of its soldiers are gay? Do you understand how the entire concept of national boundaries is inherently immoral? Finally, do you understand that when Activists and Scholars capitalize certain Words, they show how vitally Critical their pretentious and self-contradictory Ideas are?

But wait - it gets better!

Possible topics we would love to include but are not limited to:

-Expanding our understandings of Queer Resistance and Complicity
-Hindus, Islamaphobia and Queer Emergence [apparently some Queer Adacemics cannot Spell]
-Arab Jews (Mizrachis) and Occupation/Pinkwashing/Diaspora
-Iran, Iraq and the Use of anti-LGBT Persecution to Justify Military Assault
-Transfeminism and the Global LGBT
-Race, Sexuality and the US Military
-Queer and The Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions Movement
-Christian Evangelicals: Differing strategies for Uganda and Israel
-The rise of LGBT wings of European Right Wing Movements
-HRC, GLAAD, and the Gay Corporate Auxilliaries [Again!]
-AIDS, NGO’s and Partnering With Global Pharma
-Homonationalism, Hollywood and Popular Culture
-Pinkwashing and Israeli Queer Cinema

"Pinkwashing" and "homonationalism" as such catchy terms. We need to create a new term to describe people who want to use their sexual orientation as a means to bash states that support them and to support states that bash them.

Homocrites?

(h/t Ian)

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"Pinkwashing:" Visceral hate for Israel in a NYT op-ed

The New York Times has an op-ed by Sarah Schulman, a professor of humanities at CUNY, that can only be described as pure, visceral hate for Israel under the veneer of fake liberalism.

In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.

Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States....

This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

Yes, a professor at a prestigious university is arguing that every positive Israeli action is not positive, but an immoral attempt to whitewash Israeli crimes.

We've seen this same kind of thinking before, when Israel set up field hospitals in Japan and Haiti after natural disasters. Critics charge that the doctors and other volunteers who spend countless hours helping ordinary victims far away from Israel are really doing propaganda for the evil state of Israel, and their efforts are a transparent effort to distract the world from Israeli crimes.

In both these cases, we have a pure manifestation of psychological projection at play.

Strident critics of Israel look at the state through a single lens: one that shows Israel to be a purely evil entity whose entire raison d'etre is the subjugation and oppression of innocent Arabs. There are no shades of grey, no other issues at play - everything Israel does is somehow connected to its inherently evil nature. (Shulman's "proof" is that homophobia still exists in Israel, as if there is anywhere on the planet that it has been eradicated.)

Since the critics define Israel this way, they assume that Israel defines itself this way as well. If Israel exhibits any whiff of charity, or liberalism, or kindness - it is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover for its genocidal, racist ways. The idea that Israel has both good and bad parts, or that different Israelis (outside the enlightened anti-Zionist variety) can ever do something different or orthogonal to their real goal of oppressing Arabs, is simply not possible. If some Israelis start a charitable organization it is not because they actually want to help people, but because they want to cover up their constant crimes. Kindness and morality are not possible, so any examples must really be sophisticated manifestations of Israel's inherent evil.

To these sick people, it is literally impossible for Israel or Israelis to do anything admirable outside the context of the conflict. The conflict is everything. To them, Israel itself is defined by its own desire to rid itself of Arabs. Any counter-proof is readily dismissed as nothing more than PR. The concept that most Israelis are just trying to live their lives like everyone else, and that they might even be nice, normal, relatable people, must be combated. If Israelis are perceived by the world as human beings, their message of Israeli criminality gets diluted - and that must be fought. Anything that could blunt the demonization of the Jewish state is by definition as evil as the Jewish state itself is.

This is hate, pure and simple. It is the exact opposite of the liberalism these haters profess. It is the bigoted stereotyping of an entire people and their democratically elected government in order to twist reality to reflect their own visceral loathing.

And just as the bullying Israeli Jews cannot possibly do anything positive for gays, the eternal victims in "Palestine" cannot do anything wrong:

Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. 

So not only is Israel incomparably evil, but Palestinian Arabs are incomparably tolerant and liberal, according to this faux crusader for gay rights.

A quick look through the websites of the three Palestinian Arab gay-rights groups she mentions reveals something interesting: it is nearly impossible to find the names of any of their members or leaders.

And the reason is explained at the Awsat site:

Most of Aswat members are "closeted" to some extent. Consequently, only one or two members can go public and identify themselves as Aswat members in our activities involving a certain amount of exposure i.e., advocacy & outreach, education etc. The 'closet' is an outcome of a homophobic and patriarchal society which has an undeniable impact on Aswat activities. Yet, group members develop different strategies in order to participate in various activities. For example, some members use nicknames when presenting themselves or reaching out to other community members, while others choose to promote activities which allow a reasonable degree of anonymity such as translations, Committee meetings, virtual support to others, information gathering, fundraising tasks etc. Thus, due to personal safety considerations, Aswat members have requested their names not to be disclosed.

The cognitive dissonance that runs through Sarah Schulman's head must be overwhelming. According to their own activists, Palestinian Arab gays live under the constant fear of being physically harmed - a fear that the evil Israeli gay community simply does not have. Schulman is trying to give the impression that it is Israel that has the problems with gays, and Palestinian Arabs are the tolerant ones, even as this is shown to be a lie by the Palestinian Arab gay community itself!

The only way to explain this self-contradictory thought process is that logic and simple facts fly out the window when you are dealing with a hater. Their hate is all-encompassing. They are consumed by it, and their brains are infected by it.

We've seen the same hate and concomitant lack of rational thinking  in the absurd ramblings all over the Internet from the KKK, from neo-Nazis, from Islamists, from the far-right as well as the far-left. This same laughable "logic" has been used to justify hate against Jews, blacks, gays and women. They also have only one lens through which they look at the world. Pure, unbridled hate is no more moral when it is against members of a nation than when it is against any other group.

Being a professor does not inoculate one against infection with this virus of hate.

Sarah Schulman is just another hater.

And this op-ed proves it.

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