We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to: Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com
Will the Real J Street Stand up… For Israel?: Sara Greenberg, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 5, 2014— J Street U, the student-organizing arm of J Street, purports to provide a “political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans” on campus.
Harvard Students Make Time for Arafat, But Not to Honor Terror Victims: Stephen M. Flatow, Algemeiner, Apr. 9, 2014 — The controversy over the Harvard University students who recently posed, smiling, at Yasser Arafat’s grave sent a shot of pain through every one of us who has lost a loved one in the terrorist attacks that Arafat and his allies have waged over the years.
Oppressed by the Ivy League: Wall Street Journal, Apr. 4, 2014 — Academia has been obsessed over identity politics for two generations, so there's some justice in the newest addition to the matrix of oppression: an Ivy League education, according to the Dartmouth College students who this week took over the president's office.
Another Type of Civic Education: Dore Feith & Stu Krantz, The Lion’s Tale, Jan. 29, 2014 — All around the world, schools try to teach about the history and values of their respective countries.
Pro-Israel Event on New Orleans Campus: Lori Lowenthal Marcus, Jewish Press, Apr. 8, 2014
Northeastern U. Suspends ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’: Ilya Feoktistov, Frontpage, Mar. 18, 2014
Harvard Students’ Visit to Arafat’s Grave “Causing Understandable Concern”: Hillel International
: Jewish Tribune, Mar. 25, 2014
Ryerson Student Union Becomes Only the Latest to Support Israel Boycott Campaign: Jen Gerson, National Post, Apr. 4, 2014
California Students Testify About Anti-Semitism on Campus: AMCHA Initiative, Jewish Press, Mar. 27, 2014
Convicted Terrorist to Speak at Tel Aviv University: Jerusalem Post, Apr. 6, 2014
WILL THE REAL J STREET STAND UP… FOR ISRAEL?
Sara Greenberg
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 5, 2014
J Street U, the student-organizing arm of J Street, purports to provide a “political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans” on campus. But is the organization true to their slogan? As a pro-Israel, pro-peace student, I have questions. Anti-Israel activity abounds at American universities. The BDS Movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel) openly asserts its opposition to the existence of a Jewish state and often relies on academic institutions and platforms to promote its cause. In early December, the American Studies Association voted to boycott Israeli universities. At the University of Michigan last week, pro-Israel students opposing a student government resolution to divest from Israel allegedly received death threats and were called “kikes” and “dirty Jews” by backers of BDS. This resolution represented just one of 67 attempted divestment resolutions at various universities since 2010. During 2014 alone, eight divestment resolutions were introduced.
Anti-Israel groups utilize other hate-filled tactics to intimidate pro-Israel students on campus. This month at Northeastern University, the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) posted mock eviction notices on students’ dorm rooms – a tactic used by SJP on many campuses. Allegedly a replica of eviction notices used by Israel, the notices were filled with false accusations including the charge that Israel engages in ethnic cleansing. Subsequently, Northeastern administration suspended the student group responsible for the evictions, citing vandalism of university property and a repeated disregard for university policy.
In this climate, it becomes increasingly important that students be well versed in the facts about Israel and its history. Now, more than ever, pro-Israel students needs the support of pro-Israel campus groups to identify and speak out against inaccuracies and injustices that they may witness on campus related to the Jewish state. But what does it mean to be “pro-Israel” and what role should a “pro-Israel” campus group play? Being “pro-Israel” does not mean that you are in favor of every policy enacted by the Israeli government. It does not mean that you are anti-Palestinian. In simple terms, being pro-Israel means understanding and asserting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in Israel.
Given the extent of the forces aligned against Israel on campus, you would think that a pro-Israel organization would work to enable and encourage students to stand up against those seeking to delegitimize the very idea of a Jewish state. While J Street U claims to be “pro-Israel,” unlike other pro-Israel organizations, J Street does not educate or equip students to distinguish between anti-Israel propaganda and fact. Instead, J Street U partners with some of Israel’s greatest enemies on campus including BDS activists and anti-Israel faculty. In a recent example from March 6, the J Street U chapter at Smith College co-sponsored an event with Students for Justice in Palestine and Faculty for Israeli Palestinian Peace entitled “A Forum on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.” At Washington University at St. Louis last week, J Street U initiated and hosted an event promoting a speaker from Breaking the Silence, a group that partners with BDS and claims that the IDF systematically “violate human rights.”
When the Gaza war started in 2008, J Street did not distinguish between terrorists trying to murder Israeli civilians and the Israeli military trying to stop the attacks. J Street asserted that the IDF airstrikes would only “deepen the cycle of violence in the region.” While J Street remained silent while the citizens of Sderot were shelled for eight consecutive years by Hamas rockets, on the first day of the Gaza war, J Street immediately called for a cessation of the hostilities. According to J Street U’s website, “J Street U holds the same policy positions as J Street.” Sadly, J Street seems to focus more on educating its constituents and students about how to defend the agenda of those who seek Israel’s destruction, instead of being honest about the facts on the ground and equipping young people with the tools necessary to stand up for Israel. This is a disservice at best, and a manipulation at worst, of the students who are attracted to J Street’s “pro-Israel, pro-peace” slogan and may sign up to be members of J Street U without knowledge of J Street’s true mission and tactics.
Moreover, instead of informing students about opportunities to support and partner with the multitude of movements within Israel that advocate for peace in the region, J Street encourages students to put pressure on Israel from afar. In a campaign entitled “We Can’t Wait!” on J Street U’s website today, J Street U calls on members of Congress to support the Obama administration’s policies “even when it means publicly disagreeing with both the Israelis and the Palestinians.” American Jews and students can and should be involved in the conversation on the future of the Jewish homeland, but should this include soliciting American pressure on the democratically elected Israeli government? When is it appropriate for an organization to intrude on a sovereign nation’s right to self-rule? The bar should be very high.
Given what we know about J Street and J Street U, does the organization deserve the support and backing of the pro-Israel Jewish community? BDS, most people agree, should not be included or supported by the Jewish community. An anti-Semitic organization that opposes Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state falls outside the boundaries of our community and should not be welcomed and endorsed. If J Street wants to use and have access to the Jewish community’s platforms and institutions, why do they continue to invite BDS activists to speak at their annual conference and co-sponsor events with anti-Israel activists on campus? It is one thing to debate a BDS activist on neutral turf; it’s another thing to lend a “pro-Israel” organization’s name, legitimacy and resources to promote the BDS cause.
Rather than call attention to the challenges and regional threats Israel faces today – including terrorism and an impending nuclear-armed Iran – J Street spends its time lobbying Congress (and asking its student chapters to do the same) against resolutions condemning incitement in Palestinian schools, opposing the introduction of a Senate bill to impose new sanctions on Iran, and endorsing the Palestinian and Arab effort to condemn Israel in the United Nations Security Council. If an organization is never willing to stand up for Israel, should they still be considered pro-Israel? J Street has a right to say and do what it wishes, but if J Street wants to remain part of the pro-Israel Jewish community, shouldn’t it demonstrate willingness to at times stand up for Israel, not just for its enemies? At a time when students need support to speak up for Israel on campus more than ever, shouldn’t J Street equip and encourage students to understand the reality on the ground and at times defend Israel, not only the opposite?…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –Ed.]
HARVARD STUDENTS MAKE TIME FOR ARAFAT,
BUT NOT TO HONOR TERROR VICTIMS
Stephen M. Flatow
Algemeiner, Apr. 9, 2014
The controversy over the Harvard University students who recently posed, smiling, at Yasser Arafat’s grave sent a shot of pain through every one of us who has lost a loved one in the terrorist attacks that Arafat and his allies have waged over the years. But it must have been particularly awful for Dr. Alan Bauer, a Harvard-educated scientist, to see students from his own school smiling and enjoying their visit to the tombstone of the man responsible for the vicious attack that left Bauer and his 7-year-old son permanently maimed.
Bauer and his son Jonathan were walking on King George Street in downtown Jerusalem on March 21, 2002, when a terrorist from Arafat’s Fatah movement blew himself up. His explosive device was packed with metal spikes and nails, in order to inflict the maximum amount of pain and destruction and the defenseless Israeli civilians walking by. Three passersby were killed, 87 were wounded. Dr. Bauer and Jonathan were hit by multiple metal projectiles. Two of the metal spikes penetrated little Jonathan’s brain.
The attack was in the news for a few days, and then it was out of the public’s sight, and out of the public’s mind. Who today remembers Alan and Jonathan Bauer? Certainly not the 50 or so Harvard students who recently visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories, paid for by Combined Jewish Philanthropies (Boston Jewish’s federation) and Harvard Hillel.
I’m sure Alan, as a Harvard alumnus, would have appreciated a friendly visit to his Jerusalem home and a few words of sympathy from the Harvard students. Apparently the tour organizers never bothered to check on whether there are any Harvard graduates among the terror victims in Israel. But don’t put all the blame on the organizers. These students know how to do a little research on the Internet. In a few minutes, they could have learned about Alan and Jonathan. They didn’t make the time to do that. But they did make the time to pose, grinning, at the gravesite of the man responsible for that Jerusalem bombing and so many other war crimes against the Jewish people. And they were so proud of the photo that they rushed to share it with the world via social media.
I was disappointed to read an article by three Boston Jewish federation officials, declaring that criticism of the Arafat photo-op is “absurd.” The most they would concede is that some of the trip organizers showed “poor judgment,” but they refused to condemn the students’ action. They shouldn’t be treating the students as if they were babies. They are young adults who either knew what they were doing, or should have.
I was equally disappointed to see that Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, on her Facebook page, wrote this about the Jewish officials’ article defending the Harvard students: “What a thoughtful article. Lucky is the community with such thoughtful leader who know how to keep their heads screwed on straight.” As a Holocaust scholar, Prof. Lipstadt, of all people, should be able to recognize Arafat was engaged in the attempted genocide of Israel’s Jews. She should have been as outraged by the Arafat visit, as she would have been if the Harvard students had visited Afghanistan and posed at the grave of an Al-Qaeda leader, or if they went to South Africa and had a giggle-and-selfie fest at the grave of an apartheid regime police officer who tortured or murdered black activists.
Last week marked the 12th anniversary of the bombing that maimed the Bauers. This week is the 19th anniversary of the Palestinian bombing attack in which my daughter Alisa was murdered. She was a student at Brandeis University, just a few miles down the road from Harvard. The students at Harvard have shown as little interest in Alisa as they have in Alan or Jonathan Bauer. One of the Harvard students, by the name of Kelsey, last week defended her participation in the Arafat grave visit on the grounds that, “Acknowledging one person’s lived experience neither negates nor diminishes another person’s lived experience.” Actually, Kelsey, you have not at all acknowledged Arafat’s “lived experience”—you did not write anything about the mass murders and maimings he perpetrated. And you have indeed negated and diminished “another person’s lived experience”—you have negated and diminished the suffering of his victims and their families. Until you understand that, you have learned nothing from your years of learning in the prestigious halls of Harvard.
Wall Street Journal, Apr. 4, 2014
Academia has been obsessed over identity politics for two generations, so there's some justice in the newest addition to the matrix of oppression: an Ivy League education, according to the Dartmouth College students who this week took over the president's office. On Tuesday Dartmouth's finest seized the main administration building and disrupted college business. The squatters were allowed to remain until Thursday night, when the dean of the college negotiated and signed an exit settlement assuring them the non-dialogue would continue. The demonstrators had a 72-point manifesto instructing the college to establish pre-set racial admission quotas and a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum for all students. Their other inspirations are for more "womyn or people of color" faculty; covering sex change operations on the college health plan ("we demand body and gender self-determination"); censoring the library catalog for offensive terms; and installing "gender-neutral bathrooms" in every campus facility, specifically including sports locker rooms.
We rarely sympathize with college administrators but we'll make an exception for Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon, an accomplished mathematician who for some reason took the job last year. The occupiers filmed their confrontation and uploaded the hostage video to the Web, where Mr. Hanlon can be seen agog as his charges berate him for his "micro-aggressions." Those are bias infractions that can't be identified without the right political training. Mr. Hanlon left after an hour and told the little tyrants that he welcomed a "conversation" about their ultimatums. They responded in a statement that conversations—to be clear, talking—will lead to "further physical and emotional violence enacted against us by the racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, transphobic, xenophobic, and ableist structures at Dartmouth." They added: "Our bodies are already on the line, in danger, and under attack." If that sounds more like Syria than Hanover, N.H., meet the resurgence of the anti-liberal campus left. The intellectual mentor of the protestors is a history professor named Russell Rickford, who calls Dartmouth "White Supremacy U." Hostile to free expression, open debate and due process, their politics of anger and resentment can't be pacified. Reality is not an admissable defense.
To wit, the most tolerant-to-a-fault places in America are unlikely bastions for white male privilege. Dartmouth's elaborate diversity bureaucracy is designed to accommodate any need or desire. Some 37% of its freshman class comes from a background "of color," and 10% are first-generation college students. Note to any of them taking on loans for the $65,133 annual tuition, room and board: The special locker rooms will be itemized in the next term's invoice. These downtrodden souls also have powerful allies—namely, the U.S. government. Since 2011, the Education Department has used enforcement discretion to expand the legal scope of Title IX (on sex discrimination) and the Clery Act (on campus crime). The civil-rights shop encourages activists to file legal complaints and threatens to withhold federal funding unless schools acquiesce. Dartmouth has been a target of this method for two years, but there are cases against Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Occidental and others.
Thus it is understandable that nominal authority figures like Mr. Hanlon seem helpless to defend their reputations or maintain discipline and public order. But it is still unacceptable. An institution more confident in its character and mission would defend itself. A college that purports to support free inquiry ought to be able to muster the courage to speak up for its own rules and for debate that respects the rights of others. Mr. Hanlon might have told the kids occupying his office that most of mankind—forgive the micro-aggression—would love to be as oppressed as they are. Few young men and women in the world are more "privileged" than those admitted to the Ivy League. The takeover's benefit to Dartmouth is that it might inspire the small minority of like-minded high schoolers to find another college to terrorize. Most elite U.S. students are well adjusted and grateful for their opportunity.
Dartmouth and any other school in this position should tell the students they have an hour to leave the premises, and if they don't they will be arrested for trespassing and expelled. Since Mr. Hanlon missed that chance, he and the school's trustees should now tell the students that if they are so unhappy they should transfer. Surely the occupiers would be welcomed by at least one of the other 4,431 universities or colleges in the U.S. But they may discover the problem is their own sense of privilege, not Dartmouth's.
ANOTHER TYPE OF CIVIC EDUCATION
Dore Feith & Stu Krantz
The Lion’s Tale, Jan. 29, 2014
All around the world, schools try to teach about the history and values of their respective countries. CESJDS is no different, except it does not just teach about the United States. Israel, too, is on the curriculum. We all understand that there is a difference between proper academic study and propaganda. We want our school – in both its history courses and in its Jewish history courses – to be doing the former, not the latter. At the same time, there is such a thing as civic education that liberal democratic countries, including the U.S., do all over the world. These curricula promote love of country, respect for the country’s institutions and the ability to defend the country against unfair criticism. Beyond this factual education is the hope to give students…both a sense that each of their countries deserves to be defended, and the tools with which they can defend the country against ideological enemies. JDS should be doing the same with regard to Israel.
Unfortunately, we believe that JDS does not adequately prepare its students to defend Israel on college campuses. Among both students and faculties on these campuses, there exists an active ideological war over Zionism and over Israel’s right to exist. It’s not unreasonable to request that Israel classes provide an academic study of the history of the conflict while also presenting both sides of any issue so that students can defend Israel when the time comes. After all, our school’s mission statement includes ahavat yisrael (love of Israel).
We have taken good courses taught by great teachers, but we have noticed an odd bending-over-backwards that we haven’t seen in any other history class. For the sake of open-mindedness, the curriculum has lost sight of its ahavat yisrael goal…we feel that the curriculum currently cultivates the negative rather than the positive. Of course, there is no problem with teaching some criticisms of Israel. But there has to be balance. The Arab-Israeli Conflict course predominantly uses sources that are preoccupied with criticizing Israel rather than defending it, which gives the impression that the goal of the course is to inspire students to criticize Israel.
We were assigned Avi Shlaim’s “The Debate About 1948” as our only academic reading on Israel’s War of Independence. Shlaim’s works are not just strongly critical of Israel, but also highly controversial and in some places factually wrong. In order to escape the charge that we’re being brainwashed to defend Israel, the bending-over-backwards results in the presentation of anti-Israel propaganda. In “The Debate About 1948,” Shlaim claims that the Arab countries’ invasion of the newly established Jewish State was motivated by territorial desires, and not by antisemitism and a hatred of Jews. Because Shlaim’s work was our sole reading on Israel’s War of Independence, some students may have come away thinking that his is the most accurate piece of history. The two of us recall receiving little warning, if any, about Shlaim’s political views before receiving the reading. Instead, we were just told that he was party of the New Historians who, as a group, rejected Israel’s conventional history.
Our teachers have encyclopaedic knowledge and teach in engaging and creative ways. We hope they look at models around the world to teach love of Israel in the way liberal democratic countries teach love of country. We know for a fact that Israel’s enemies are teaching why Israel should be destroyed. It’s time for JDS to teach why Israel is worth defending.
[Dore Feith is editor-in-chief, and Stu Krantz is managing editor, of Lion’s Tale, a high-school newspaper produced by the students of the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD.]
Pro-Israel Event on New Orleans Campus: Lori Lowenthal Marcus, Jewish Press, Apr. 8, 2014 —With the help of many friends, on Sunday, March 30, that African American Christian Zionist college student the pro-Israel world has been marveling over for more than a year, Chloé Simone Valdary, pulled off another huge student-led pro-Israel event in New Orleans.
Northeastern U. Suspends ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’: Ilya Feoktistov, Frontpage, Mar. 18, 2014—A young man from Brookline, Massachusetts poses for a photo somewhere inside the Palestinian territories.
Harvard Students’ Visit to Arafat’s Grave “Causing Understandable Concern”: Hillel International: Jewish Tribune, Mar. 25, 2014 — Hillel International responded to growing criticism over a visit by Harvard University students on a Hillel-sponsored tour of Israel to former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s grave near Ramallah.
Ryerson Student Union Becomes Only the Latest to Support Israel Boycott Campaign: Jen Gerson, National Post, Apr. 4, 2014 — Another Ontario university student union has voted in support of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) campaign.
California Students Testify About Anti-Semitism on Campus: AMCHA Initiative, Jewish Press, Mar. 27, 2014—Last week the new California Assembly Select Committee on Campus Climate held its first hearing.
Convicted Terrorist to Speak at Tel Aviv University: Jerusalem Post, Apr. 6, 2014 —Tel Aviv University's right-wing student groups will hold a rally in Antin Square on Sunday at noon to protest the scheduled speech by a convicted terrorist to take place on Monday.
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