FIGHTING ANTI-ISRAEL BIGOTRY, ON CAMPUS AND OFF; IN FRANCE, DEFEATING ANTISEMITIC DIEUDONNÉ

Contents:

How to Fight Academic Bigotry: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Jan. 9, 2014 — For decades, the American Studies Association labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer.

On American Campuses, Hamas’ Well-Educated Cheering Squad: Barbara Kay, National Post, Jan. 8, 2014 — In his response to a boycott resolution endorsed by the 5,000-member American Studies Association (ASA) against Israel's institutes of higher learning, Alan Dershowitz recalled a notoriously anti-Semitic early 20th century president of Harvard University, A. Lawrence Lowell.

The Left Against Zion: Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 19, 2013 — In the 1960s, the American Left embraced the anti-Vietnam War movement as its cri de coeur.

These 70-Year-Old Nazi Hunters Just Took on France's Most Hated Comedian — and Won: Hanna Kozlowska & Katelyn Fossett, Foreign Policy, Jan. 7, 2014 —  It looks like Europe's most famous Nazi-hunting family is back at it again, and this time, they're going after a different kind of opponent: the controversial French-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonné Mbala-Mbala.

On Topic Links

Israel Boycott Debate Sows Dissent at Annual MLA Convention: Aaron Magid, Ha’aretz, Jan. 10, 2014

Israel Has the Right to Exist – Now the Left Must Defend It: Allan Goldstein, Algemeiner, Dec. 15, 2013

Why Nazi Hunting Remains Crucial: Editorial, New York Times, Jan. 10, 2014

Another Schindler: Unsung Blind Hero of Nazi War Finally Honoured: Tony Patterson, Independent, Jan. 7, 2014

HOW TO FIGHT ACADEMIC BIGOTRY                                                   

Charles Krauthammer    

Washington Post, Jan. 9, 2014

For decades, the American Studies Association labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It has now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians. Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange. Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria? And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?

Which makes obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism. And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination. And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism. former Harvard president Larry Summers called the ASA actions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.” I choose to be less polite. The intent is clear: to incite hatred for the largest — and only sovereign — Jewish community on Earth.

What to do? Facing a similar (British) academic boycott of Israelis seven years ago, Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an open letter declaring that, for the purposes of any anti-Israel boycott, they are to be considered Israelis. Meaning: You discriminate against Israelis? Fine. Include us out. We will have nothing to do with you. Thousands of other academics added their signatures to the Dershowitz/Weinberg letter. It was the perfect in-kind response. Boycott the boycotters, with contempt.

But academia isn’t the only home for such prejudice. Throughout the cultural world, the Israel boycott movement is growing. It’s become fashionable for musicians, actors, writers and performers of all kinds to ostentatiously cleanse themselves of Israel and Israelis. The example of the tuxedoed set has spread to the more coarse and unkempt anti-Semites, such as the thugs who a few years ago disrupted London performances of the Jerusalem Quartet and the Israeli Philharmonic. Five years ago in Sweden, Israel’s Davis Cup team had to play its matches in an empty tennis stadium because the authorities could not guarantee the Israelis’ safety from the mob. The most brazen display of rising anti-Semitism today is the spread of the “quenelle,” a reverse Nazi salute, popularized by the openly anti-Semitic French entertainer, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala.

In this sea of easy and open bigotry, an unusual man has made an unusual statement. Russian by birth, European by residence, Evgeny Kissin is arguably the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. He is also a Jew of conviction. Deeply distressed by Israel’s treatment in the cultural world around him, Kissin went beyond the Dershowitz/Weinberg stance of asking to be considered an Israeli. On Dec. 7, he became one, defiantly. Upon taking the oath of citizenship in Jerusalem, he declared: “I am a Jew, Israel is a Jewish state. . . . Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.” Full disclosure: I have a personal connection with Kissin. For the past two years I’ve worked to bring him to Washington to perform for Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit organization (founded by my wife and me) dedicated to reviving lost and forgotten Jewish classical music. We succeeded. On Feb. 24, Kissin will perform at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall masterpieces of Eastern European Jewish music, his first U.S. appearance as an Israeli.

The persistence of anti-Semitism, that most ancient of poisons, is one of history’s great mysteries. Even the shame of the Holocaust proved no antidote. It provided but a temporary respite. Anti-Semitism is back. Alas, a new generation must learn to confront it. How? How to answer the thugs, physical and intellectual, who single out Jews for attack? The best way, the most dignified way, is to do like Dershowitz, Weinberg or Kissin.

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ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES, HAMAS’

WELL-EDUCATED CHEERING SQUAD                                         

Barbara Kay                                              

National Post, Jan. 8, 2014

In his response to a boycott resolution endorsed by the 5,000-member American Studies Association (ASA) against Israel's institutes of higher learning, Alan Dershowitz recalled a notoriously anti-Semitic early 20th century president of Harvard University, A. Lawrence Lowell. When asked why he singled Jews out for quotas, Lowell responded, "Jews cheat." The redoubtable Judge Learned Hand reminded Lowell that Christians also cheat. Lowell retorted: "You're changing the subject. We are talking about Jews now."

When university professors, stewards of knowledge for the next generation of thinkers, propose to fence off all contact, all mental commerce, with others of their kind, they lose the right to be called professors. When they selectively embrace a boycott of a single country's academics and institutions, they reveal themselves as activists. Not professors but propagandists. No scholar with any intellectual integrity would support freezing all contact, or seeking to isolate other scholars and researchers, simply because of their national origin, ethnicity or religion. The very idea of an "intellectual boycott" is a betrayal of a scholar's mission.

There, in a nutshell, is why left-wing academics do not call for boycotts against (quoting Dershowitz again) "China, which imprisons dissenting academics … Iran, which executes dissenting academics … Russia, whose universities fire dissenting academics, [or] Cuba, whose universities have no dissenting academics."

The human rights violations of all other nations are invisible to these Western academics because "we are talking about Jews now." "Now," it turns out, means yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the day, month and year after tomorrow. Every group of true believers needs a scapegoat to blame for the disparity between their utopian dreams and imperfect reality. And the Jewish state is a tried-and-true magnet for blame without blowback. (We Zionists don't wish violence upon our detractors, only upon those terrorists who try to kill us.) Even the pathologically altruistic amongst Jewish intellectuals themselves can be counted on to provide support for the deligitimization of the Jewish homeland.

The left's hatred of Israel is real and consequential, but it is also irrational. It is of no consequence to leftists that Israeli universities adhere to the highest standards of academic freedom. (Israel's own universities, ironically, harbour many of the world's most virulent anti-Zionists). The backlash against the ASA (which included a fine column by Rex Murphy in Saturday's edition of the National Post) was heartening and even surprising, considering that the ASA is an obscure organization with little clout, and lacks any ties with Israeli institutions. Perhaps it is because the ASA's gesture was perceived as a tipping point in the public-relations battle over Israel's legitimacy; and also the crossing of what had been perceived as an inviolable line between protected hate speech and a form of hate action. Some universities – Indiana, Brandeis, Penn State Harrisburg among others – withdrew affiliation from the ASA, and almost 100 others condemned the resolution. Several prominent American higher-education organizations – the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities – have denounced the resolution. But ominously, the Modern Languages Association, with 30,000 members, as well as smaller organizations such as the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, are poised to follow suit with their own anti-Israel resolutions.

Even when these resolutions fail to pass, as they usually do, the battle itself counts as a success for Israel's enemies, as the Jewish state assumes a cumulatively negative image in the public mind. The influence-makers of tomorrow on campuses today are likely to graduate with the idea that Israel is a rogue, or at least quasi-rogue, nation. Students must actively seek out objective information if they wish to approach Israel with an open mind. What is the average student to think at the University of California at Berkeley and Irvine, where such resolutions have actually passed? According to popular and even-handed Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, who often gives talks at Western universities, there is more sympathy for Hamas on U.S. campuses than in the West Bank administrative center of Ramallah. He says we "should not be surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university campuses across the U.S."

The singling out of Israel by academics as an object of hatred is reminiscent of what happened in the German universities of the 1930s: The greatest minds can be the most susceptible to the disease of bigotry.

As chancellor of Freiburg University, philosopher Martin Heidegger "boycotted" Jewish academics. He was no outlier. Like Harvard's President Lowell, he represented the temper of his times. It's disappointing to see how little has changed.

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THE LEFT AGAINST ZION

Caroline Glick                                                 

Jerusalem Post, Dec. 19, 2013

In the 1960s, the American Left embraced the anti-Vietnam War movement as its cri de coeur. In the 1970s, the Left’s foreign policy focus shifted to calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US and its Western allies. In the 1980s, supporting the Sandinista Communists’ takeover of Nicaragua became the catechism of the Left. In the 1990s, the war on global capitalism – that is, the anti-globalization movement – captivated the passions of US Leftists from coast to coast. In the 2000s, it was again, the anti-war movement. This time the Left rioted and demonstrated against the war in Iraq. And in this decade, the main foreign policy issue that galvanizes the passions and energies of the committed American Left is the movement to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.

This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few days, two quasi academic organizations – the American Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association – have launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian Studies Association. These groups’ actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of a piece with ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college campuses throughout the United States. Between the growth of Israel Apartheid Day (or Week, or Month) from a fringe exercise on isolated campuses to a staple of the academic calendar in universities throughout the US and Canada, and the rise of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement to wage economic war against the Jewish state, anti-Israel activism has become the focal point of Leftist foreign policy activism in the US and throughout the Western world.

Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake eviction notices from the university’s housing office. A pro-Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians. At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel’s good offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders. And the Left’s doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses. At New York’s 92nd Street Y, Commentary editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to explain why the ASA’s just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of bigotry.

Many commentators have rightly pointed out that the ASA and the NAISA are fringe groups. They represent doctorate holders who chose to devote their careers to disciplines predicated not on scholarship, but on political activism cloaked in academic regalia whose goal is to discredit American power. The ASA has only 5,000 members, and only 1,200 of them voted on the Israel- boycott resolution. The NAISA has even fewer members. It would be wrong, however, to use the paltry number of these fringe groups’ members as means to dismiss the phenomenon that they represent. They are very much in line with the general drift of the Left. Rejecting Israel’s right to exist has become part of the Left’s dogma. It is a part of the catechism. Holding a negative view of the Jewish state is a condition for membership in the ideological camp. It is an article of faith, not fact.

Consider the background of the president of the ASA. Curtis Marez is an associate professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. His area of expertise is Chicano Film and Media Studies. He doesn’t know anything about Israel. He just knows that he’s a Leftist. And today, Leftists demonize Israel. Their actions have nothing to do with anything Israel does or has ever done. They have nothing to do with human rights. Hating Israel, slandering Israel and supporting the destruction of Israel are just things that good Leftists do. And Marez was not out of step with his fellow Leftists who rule the roost at UCSD. This past March the student council passed a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel.

Why? Because hating Israel is what Leftists do. The Left’s crusade against the Jewish state began in earnest in late 2000. The Palestinians’ decision to reject statehood and renew their terror war against Israel ushered in the move by anti-Israel forces on the Left to take over the movement. And as they have risen, they have managed to silence and discredit previously fully accredited members of the ideological Left for the heresy of supporting Israel.

This week, Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz retired after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-Israel Left that Dershowitz represented. For years, Dershowitz has been a non-entity in leftist circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart. And now Beinart is finding himself increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max Blumenthal. The progression is unmistakable.                                                                                                         [To Read the Full Article Follow the Link –ed.] 

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THESE 70-YEAR-OLD NAZI HUNTERS JUST TOOK ON                         

FRANCE'S MOST HATED COMEDIAN — AND WON                                                                                           

Hanna Kozlowska & Katelyn Fossett                                                         

Foreign Policy, Jan. 7, 2014

It looks like Europe's most famous Nazi-hunting family is back at it again, and this time, they're going after a different kind of opponent: the controversial French-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonné Mbala-Mbala, who most recently made headlines after French soccer star Nicolas Anelka used the comedian's trademark gesture, widely interpreted as a Nazi salute — a reverse "Heil Hitler"– and ignited a debate about anti-Semitism across Europe.

Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, a married couple now both in their seventies, have made a name for themselves over the past half-century going after Nazi war criminals who have escaped persecution. And though their Nazi-hunting days are over, along with their son, Arno, they called for a protest of a performance by Dieudonné in the French city of Nantes. On Jan. 7, a day before the planned show, the Nantes authorities announced that it was cancelled, making Nantes the third city after Bordeaux and Marseille to ban the comedian. French President François Hollande has also called on city authorities to prohibit Dieudonné's one-man show. Not that Dieudonné is going quietly. He enjoys the cover of comedy, huge success, and a fan base that is fiercely loyal to his shocking on-stage antics. Most of his shows at his regular Paris theater are sold out; his YouTube videos get millions of hits.

Since 2000, the comedian has been fined 65,000 euros for defamation, using insulting language, hate speech, and discrimination. On Friday, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls vowed to ensure that the comedian would have to pay the fines, which he has reportedly evaded thus far by placing his assets in his wife's name. "[Dieudonné] unites anti-Semites from all sides. They are Islamists, ultra-left or far-right…. His shows are anti-Semitic political rallies," Arno Klarsfeld told Agence France Press.

But though it's Dieudonné who's getting all the attention, it's the Klarsfelds who are far more interesting. They belong to a small club of professional Nazi hunters — men and women who have dedicated their lives to tracing World War II criminals and bringing them to justice. And though they never quite reached the fame of the charismatic Simon Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds' Nazi-hunting tactics have made them a subject of many a front-page headline over the years, landed them in court, and provoked attempts on their lives — including a bomb placed in their car in 1979.

The star-crossed lovers — Beate, a daughter of a Wermacht soldier, and Serge, whose father had perished in a concentration camp — met in 1960. Their lifelong mission to track down Nazis began soon after. In 1968, Beate famously slapped in the face Chancellor Kurt Kiesenger, a former Nazi who rose to power in post-war Germany. In 1973, Serge walked up to Kurt Lischka, a prominent SS commander and Gestapo chief and put a gun against his head. Eventually, Lischka was sentenced to 10 years in prison for war crimes. In their most famous hunt, after a failed attempt to kidnap Klaus Barbie, a Lyon Gestapo chief who was hiding in Bolivia, the Klarsfelds succeeded in tracking him down, getting him extradited to France and tried.

Since, Nazi hunting has become the family business. Since the 1980s, Serge and Beate have been working with their children Arno and Lida, both lawyers. (Arno, former aide to Nicolas Sarkozy and, perhaps awkwardly, ex-boyfriend of Carla Bruni, has been making headlines of his own, and has even been called a "darling of the French tabloids"). In one case, three members of the Nazi-hunting family presented evidence against a former war criminal. The Klarsfelds have been widely recognized for being unrelenting in their mission to bring former Nazis to justice. On Jan. 1, Serge and Beate were named grand officer and commander of the French Legion of Honor, respectively. The matriarch of the family, and arguably also its most daring member — she had been arrested in at least 11 countries — was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the state of Israel twice (the Klarsfelds are also known for being fiercely Zionist). In 1986, she was portrayed by Farah Fawcett in a TV film "The Beate Klarsfeld Story."

The Klarsfelds, who were both small children during World War II, are significantly younger than their Nazi prey. As nature took its course, and the only remaining Nazis became low-level prison guards — now decrepit nonagenarians — they adapted their lifelong mission. Today they focus on commemorating the fate of Jewish deportees from France and working with their children. In 2009, they told the BBC that after five decades, their hunt was over. And yet, just five years later, Dieudonné's anti-Semitic comedy and the rise in Nazi gestures on the soccer field have brought them back from retirement. With little effort, they've already made a popular comedian's life much harder. Dieudonné, brace yourself for a tough fight.

CIJR wishes all its friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom!

Contents

Israel Boycott Debate Sows Dissent at Annual MLA Convention: Aaron Magid, Ha’aretz, Jan. 10, 2014 — Panelists launched a harsh attack against Israel at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago on Thursday, as part of the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign spreading throughout American academia.

Israel Has the Right to Exist – Now the Left Must Defend It: Allan Goldstein, Algemeiner, Dec. 15, 2013 — Supporters of Israel have erected a strong wall around the threatened state.

Why Nazi Hunting Remains Crucial: Editorial, New York Times, Jan. 10, 2014 — Sooner or later, time will run out in the pursuit of Nazi-era war criminals as they are overtaken by death after decades of undeserved freedom.

Another Schindler: Unsung Blind Hero of Nazi War Finally Honoured: Tony Patterson, Independent, Jan. 7, 2014 — A new film records the story of an unsung Schindler — a factory owner who hid Jewish employees from the Gestapo, and went to great lengths to save the life of one with whom he had fallen in love.

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