Thursday, April 01, 2021
From Ian:
Cornell West, Campus Politics, and BDS
Cornell West, Campus Politics, and BDS
One of the most notable BDS related developments in March was the claim by Harvard Divinity School professor Cornell West that he was “denied tenure” as a result of his support for “Palestinian rights” and an organized effort by pro-Israel forces. West, 67, had been teaching at Harvard for five years as a non-tenure track professor of practice, and had been offered a 10-year contract and substantial raise. He rejected this and announced his return to Union Theological Seminary.Lies in the cognitive war against Israel Part 2
West blamed the “powers that be at Harvard” for his failure to be moved to a tenure track position, and stated, “In my case, my controversial and outspoken views about and critiques of empire, capitalism, white supremacy, male supremacy, and homophobia are tolerated, but any serious engagement around the issues of the Israeli occupation are rendered highly suspect and reduced to anti-Jewish hatred or prejudice.”
While claims that anti-Israel faculty are being denied tenure are not uncommon, this incident has the appearance of using the accusation as a means of blackmailing a university during a contract renegotiation. West received considerable support from student and faculty groups, which accepted his claims without question.
Responding to criticism, West stated his willingness to debate the issue, but then failed to accept an invitation to do so.
Celebrity academics using BDS and “Palestine” as tools for their own careers and left-wing bona fides is increasingly common. The emerging accusation “progressive except for Palestine” is a gloss on the title of Marc Lamont Hill’s new book, and is now regularly repeated in various settings.
In Britain, the parallel case of Bristol University’s David Miller, long accused of abusing students and of promoting elaborate antisemitic conspiracies, has finally produced a university investigation. Not surprisingly, hundreds of academics have expressed support for Miller, even as a separate police investigation has been opened against him regarding “a hate crime or hate incident taking place during lectures at the University of Bristol.”
The Lie of Israelis Being the New NazisIsrael to pay for 10 Plagues?
When SJP activists and their invited speakers demonstrate against Israel, their speech and literature is peppered with allegations about Israel’s alleged “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, echoing comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity, at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.
What is the purpose of this grotesque campaign to transmogrify the Jewish state into the Third Reich? The insidious answer is that once Israel has been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state has been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought.
What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the 'long-suffering Palestinians'.
Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism—clear examples of both Holocaust minimization and inversion and both contemporary versions of anti-Semitic thought and expression.
That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”
Bible study meets modern litigiousness in a story that may one day yield a riveting courtroom drama.
Ahmad al-Gamal, an Egyptian columnist for Egyptian daily Al-Yawm Al-Sabi, advocated in the newspaper on March 11 that Egypt sue the State of Israel for damages caused by the 10 Biblical plagues,
“We want compensation for the plagues that were inflicted upon [us] as a result of the curses that the Jews’ ancient forefathers [cast] upon our ancient forefathers, who did not deserve to pay for the mistake that Egypt’s ruler at the time, Pharaoh, committed,” the cranky journalist wrote, according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
According to the Biblical Book of Exodus, the Egyptian king prevented Moses from liberating the Jews and leading them out of Egypt.
The plagues that summarily struck Egypt in consequence included the Nile turning into blood, an outbreak of lice, diseased livestock, boils, and so on, culminating in darkness and the deaths of all Egyptian firstborn males. The telling of the tale features prominently in the Jewish observance of the spring holiday of Passover.
“For what is written in the Torah proves that it was Pharaoh who oppressed the children of Israel, rather than the Egyptian people,” Gamal continued, “[But] they inflicted upon us the plague of locusts that didn’t leave anything behind them; the plague that transformed the Nile’s waters into blood, so nobody could drink of them for a long time; the plague of darkness that kept the world dark day and night; the plague of frogs; and the plague of the killing of the firstborn, namely every first offspring born to woman or beast, and so on.”
Gamal also pressed suing Israel for the “precious materials” used by the ancient Israelites in order to construct their desert tabernacle.
“We want compensation for the gold, silver, copper, precious stones, fabrics, hides and lumber, and for [all] animal meat, hair, hides and wool, and for other materials that I will mention [below], when quoting the language of the Torah. All these are materials that the Jews used in their rituals. These are resources that cannot be found among desert wanderers unless they took them before their departure.”
