Wednesday, June 01, 2016
From Ian:
Intellectual Antisemites and the Left
IsraellyCool: WATCH: Sign The Petition For Speakers Trust
Martin Kramer: The Return of Bernard Lewis
Intellectual Antisemites and the Left
A recent example shows just how this works. (There are plenty of others, like professors Puar of Rutgers and Karega of Oberlin, but I’ll focus on a less widely reported example.)
An April article in Tablet tells of a Stanford University professor of Comparative Literature, David Palumbo-Liu. Comparative Literature is a very high-brow field. A generation ago the deconstructionist gospel, inculcating a sophisticated nihilism with leftist inflections, was received there first and remains alive and well. From Stanford’s heights, Professor Palumbo-Liu looked down upon mainstream media’s coverage of Israel and lo, it was not good. He thus told his readers to direct their attention to more reliable sites. “Look at Mondoweiss, the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the American Friends Service Committee, Electronic Intifada, If Americans Knew,” he wrote.
Okay, let’s look. The first three are fiercely anti-Israel voices of what I guess one must still call the Left. The Electronic Intifada is a straightforward Palestinian propaganda site. But If Americans Knew is something entirely different, namely an “anti-Zionist” website run by a woman named Alison Weir. Weir, as the Tablet Magazine piece explains, is in fact a classic Jew-hater, who even spreads the modern blood libel canards. Palumbo-Liu, soon realizing his tactical error in citing the site, quickly backtracked: “While the organization If Americans Knew, which was previously listed here, provides much useful information from reliable, neutral sources, I disagree with many of the public comments of its director. I have removed the original reference to prevent any confusion.”
Too late, Professor. As always, the gaffe is in telling the truth. This high-brow Stanford professor takes his “reliable information” from a Jew-hating blood-libeler.
Too late, too, it turns out, for Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2015 they published an open letter claiming to dissociate themselves from If Americans Knew, citing good evidence of Weir’s outright antisemitism. But, six months later, as chronicled on the blog Legal Insurrection, JVP cohosted a talk by Weir in Cleveland. So much for the dissociation.
Mondoweiss, for its part, hosted a round-table with various opinions about whether Weir is antisemitic and if so, whether that matters. That roundtable reveals wonderfully how the process of assimilation of Jew-hatred works. Thus, Susan Landau (who proclaims herself vigilantly against antisemitism) still thinks that “Differences within our movement exist; we stifle them to our peril.” And Russ Greenleaf defends Weir outright: when she appears with right-wing antisemites she is only trying to educate them, of course.
For such people, in a word, there’s really no reason not to associate with antisemites.
IsraellyCool: WATCH: Sign The Petition For Speakers Trust
Here’s the introductory video for a petition that has been started over the Leanne Mohamad, Wanstead High School hate speech video.
I know the outcry we’ve started over this 3 minute video is going to mean it’s seen by many more people than would otherwise have seen it. We may end up turning Leanne Mohamad into some sort of minor child star like Shirley Temper. I’m willing to accept that.
The reason I’m doing this and keeping the pressure on is that I see it as a test case. Her 3 minute video contains no new claims. Lies like that are repeated ad-nauseum any time two or three Jew hating BDSHoles are gathered together. Her video was short and to the point and it was delivered by a child, to children with the connivance of a multitude of adults. That’s why it represents a test.
If we can’t make reasonable un-aligned people in the UK understand why this video is so bad, then the UK will continue to become increasingly toxic for Jews. Jews will be forced not just to keep quiet about Israel but to outright denounce the Jewish State over and over again.
We’re fighting a cognitive war to get the truth to displace their lies.
Martin Kramer: The Return of Bernard Lewis
Forty years ago, nobody foresaw the rise of radical Islam—except for the preeminent historian who both predicted and explained it, and much else besides.
As the year 1976 opened, the Middle East hardly seem poised for a great transformation. The shah of Iran remained firmly seated on his peacock throne. Off in Iraqi exile, an elderly Iranian cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini nursed his grievances in obscurity. Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s confident president, had the country under his thumb; the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots languished in ineffectual opposition. In Saudi Arabia, a young man named Osama bin Laden finished his education in an elite high school, where he had worn a tie and blazer. Since the previous summer, Lebanon had been roiled by battles, according to Western reportage, between “leftists” and “rightists.” A key player there was the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasir Arafat, darling of the international left and champion of a “democratic, secular state” in Palestine.
The role of Islam in politics? There wasn’t any to speak of.
Imagine, then, the surprise of the readers of Commentary magazine when the January issue landed in their mailboxes bearing these words on the bright yellow cover: “The Return of Islam.” The byline beneath that sensational headline did not belong to a roving journalist or a think-tank pundit but to Bernard Lewis, the eminent British historian of the Middle East, just recently transplanted to America. Thus did the West receive its very first warning that a new era was beginning in the Middle East—one that would produce a tide of revolution, assassination, and terrorism, conceived and executed explicitly in the name of Islam.
