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Contents:
The Betrayal of the Intellectual: Yair Lapid, Algemeiner, Aug. 11, 2014— I don’t accuse intellectuals of bias or of anti-Semitism but too many of them are certainly guilty of intellectual laziness.
Thinking About Taking a University Course on the Arab-Israeli Conflict? Think Again: Tammi Rossman-Benjamin & Leila Beckwith, Jewish Journal, Sept. 4, 2014— As the fall semester begins, many Jewish students will consider taking courses offered by Middle East scholars on their respective campuses, in order to better understand the current turmoil raging in the Middle East, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Hamas's Academic Apologists: Cinnamon Stillwell, American Thinker, Aug. 31, 2014 — Reaction by Middle East studies professors to Israel’s recent effort to destroy Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure epitomizes their perennial pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-American biases.
Taking the D out of BDS: Jordan Turner, The Métropolitain, Sept. 3, 2014 — With universities worldwide about to begin the new semester we are about to see a surge, as never seen before, of the BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) anti-Israel movement on university campuses.
America’s Medieval Universities: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, June 5, 2014 — Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring.
Ben Shapiro at UCLA: "BDS is Just Another Form of Anti-Semitism" (Video): Israel Unseen, Feb. 26, 2014
Will Taxpayer-Supported Title VI Middle East Studies Centers Boycott Israel?: Winfield Myers, Campus Watch, Sept. 4, 2014
Student Union Membership Should be Voluntary in Canada: Alexia Bystrzycki & Brianna Heinrichs, National Post, Aug. 26, 2014
FIRE Vows to Keep Filing Lawsuits Against Campus Speech Codes: Tatiana Lozano, CNS News, July 7, 2014
University is Actually Quite Cheap – It Just Doesn’t Look That Way: Alex Usher, Globe & Mail, Aug. 26 2014
Campus Liberals Get a Taste of Their Own Nanny-State Medicine: George F. Will, Washington Post, June 5, 2014
THE BETRAYAL OF THE INTELLECTUAL
Yair Lapid Algemeiner, Aug. 11, 2014
I don’t accuse intellectuals of bias or of anti-Semitism but too many of them are certainly guilty of intellectual laziness. Too many American and European intellectuals have taken moral relativism to its absurd extreme, falling back upon the ‘validity of every narrative’ and repeating the mantra that ‘every story has two sides.’ They treat those who have a clear moral stance as primitive. For them, if you take a moral stand or choose a side in a conflict you must lack the necessary tolerance to “see the other side.”
It seems a distant memory but not long ago intellectuals did the exact opposite. They were the ones who helped us differentiate between good and evil, between right and wrong, between justice and injustice. They didn’t delve into the childhood of Senator McCarthy or ask whether the Germans felt a genuine sense of hardship. The debate wasn’t over feelings but the essence of truth.
The betrayal of the intellectuals was especially noticeable during the days of the operation in Gaza. Ostensibly, there should be no question as to who enlightened people should support; on one side of the conflict stands a western democracy, governed by the rule of law, which warns civilians before striking legitimate terrorist targets. On the other side stands an Islamist terrorist organization, homophobic and misogynistic, committed to killing Jews, which does all in its power to murder innocent civilians and hides behind its own women and children when carrying out its vicious attacks.
But those intellectuals see it differently. For them, the Palestinians are suffering more and so they must be right. Why? Because they have turned suffering into the only measure of justice. The suffering in Gaza is truly heartbreaking, but the causes are not clear cut. When Hamas forces civilians to stand on the roof of a building which is used as a terrorist command center despite knowing that the building will be attacked (and they know because we warn them), who are we to hold responsible? When Hamas places rockets and explosives inside UN schools and fires from within hospitals, who are we to hold responsible? When Hamas fires thousands of rockets and mortars at the cities of Israel and fails to kill hundreds of our children only because of our technological edge and the Iron Dome missile defense system should we blame ourselves for suffering less?
Those intellectuals betrayed themselves because they refuse to answer these questions or even to truly appreciate the complex global reality in which we all now live. Instead they stare at the photographs of the injured children in Gaza and compete as to who is the most outraged. Hamas, of course, is acutely aware of the weakness of many western intellectuals and treats them as a tool in its propaganda war. There is significant intelligence information — not only in the hands of Israeli intelligence — which shows that Hamas believes, theologically, that there is no barrier to sacrificing the lives of the children of Gaza to garner sympathy in the western media. Those who are aware of the intelligence also know how the Hamas sees western intellectuals who buy into their gruesome propaganda — they are a tool, to be used and to be mocked.
THINKING ABOUT TAKING A UNIVERSITY COURSE ON THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT? THINK AGAIN
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin & Leila Beckwith
Jewish Journal, Sept. 4, 2014
As the fall semester begins, many Jewish students will consider taking courses offered by Middle East scholars on their respective campuses, in order to better understand the current turmoil raging in the Middle East, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict. We recommend that students exercise great care in choosing which courses they will take. Consider this: last month, about 200 professors identifying themselves as "Middle East scholars" on more than 100 U.S. campuses signed a petition decrying “ongoing Israeli massacres in Gaza,” calling on their colleagues in Middle East Studies "to boycott Israeli academic institutions," and pledging "not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel.”
Many of the petition’s signatories are professors affiliated with highly respected, federally-funded Middle East studies programs at universities throughout the country: Columbia University, Duke University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of Chicago, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington Seattle, and Yale University.
Five of the signatories even direct federally-funded programs on their campuses: Lila Abu-Lughod directs the Middle East Institute at Columbia University; Miriam Cooke directs the Middle East Studies Center at Duke University; Osama Abi-Mershed chairs the Middle East and North Africa program at Georgetown University; and Sondra Hale and Gabriel Piterberg co-direct the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA.
Yet despite the fact that its signatories identify themselves as “Middle East scholars," the boycott petition is extremely unbalanced and unscholarly, and holds Israel to a breathtaking double standard. For example, it laments "the ongoing Israeli massacres in Gaza" which are "ghastly reminders of the complicity of Israeli academics", without even mentioning Hamas, its genocidal aims, its firing of missiles into Israeli population centers from Gazan schools and hospitals, or its use of Palestinians as human shields.
Even more disturbingly, the “Middle East Scholars” who have signed the petition are embracing a boycott of Israel whose principal promoters call for the elimination of the Jewish state through any means necessary, including by harming Jews. The 2005 Palestinian call to boycott Israel, which forms the basis for the professors' petition, was founded for the purpose of creating "a unified effort of Palestinian factions to oppose Israel and coordinate terror attacks." The first and primary signatory of the Palestinian BDS Call was the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, which includes among its member organizations Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the PFLP-General Command, all three of which are on the U.S. Department of State's list of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations and are committed to the elimination of the Jewish state through violent means.
We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion. Students who wish to become better educated about the conflict without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias or antisemitic rhetoric would do well to see which faculty members from their university are signatories of the petition before registering for their classes.
A full list of professors who have signed the petition at each U.S. college and university can be found here.
Cinnamon Stillwell
American Thinker, Aug. 31, 2014
Reaction by Middle East studies professors to Israel’s recent effort to destroy Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure epitomizes their perennial pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-American biases. In lieu of reasoned, informed, and balanced assessments, they proffer extremist rhetoric that demonizes Israel and America while ignoring Hamas’s misdeeds: rockets aimed at Israeli civilians, kidnappings and murder, disregard for ceasefires, and the cynical use of Palestinian civilians — including children — as human shields. Two groups — Middle East Scholars and Librarians and Historians Against the War — signed letters advocating a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and accusing Israel of war crimes that demand the end to U.S. military aid, respectively. Many, however, took their pro-Hamas, anti-Israel antipathies far beyond petitioning to spew forth hyperbolic and mendacious rhetoric that reveals far more about the fevered imaginations of the professoriate than about their intended target.
Ignoring that Hamas started the war, Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, declared that, “Israel’s only real strategy is causing war, not ending war.” Despite the fact that no Israeli politician has advocated genocide and that none has been committed, Cole alleged that, “Israeli nationalists have been arguing for war crimes at an alarming rate. . . . Too many Israelis have justifications in their minds for genocide.” Similarly, Rashid Khalidi, who teaches modern Arab Studies at the Columbia University, maintained that, “By parroting deceitful Israeli talking points about ‘self-defense’ and ‘human shields,’ they — US and its allies — make themselves complicit in what may well amount to war crimes.” Meanwhile, As'ad AbuKhalil, a political scientist at California State University, Stanislaus, argued that, “With every war, with every massacre, and with every ‘assault,’ Israel (the government and its people) genuinely thinks that this war crime would do the job and finish off the flame of Palestinian nationalism once and for all.” “The US media and government are willing to justify any Israeli war crime no matter the scale,” he added.
Stanford University history professor Joel Beinin vilified Israeli society while portraying Palestinians as passive victims: “The public devaluation of Arab life enables a society that sees itself as ‘enlightened’ and ‘democratic’ to repeatedly send its army to slaughter the largely defenseless population of the Gaza Strip.” Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, imagined in characteristically lurid detail, “The carnage that Israeli Jewish soldiers and international Zionist Jewish brigades of baby-killers are committing in Gaza (and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, let alone against Palestinian citizens of Israel).” Employing a grossly ahistorical comparison to the Holocaust, Hamid Dabashi, who teaches Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, likened Israelis to Nazis and Gaza to Auschwitz: “After Gaza, not a single living Israeli can utter the word ‘Auschwitz’ without it sounding like ‘Gaza.’ Auschwitz as a historical fact is now archival. Auschwitz as a metaphor is now Palestinian. From now on, every time any Israeli, every time any Jew, anywhere in the world, utters the word ‘Auschwitz,’ or the word ‘Holocaust,’ the world will hear ‘Gaza.’” Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor at Barnard College–Columbia University, exploited another overwrought and mendacious analogy: “The IDF’s tactics recall the logic of the British and American fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities during the Second World War: target the civilian population. Make them pay an unbearable price. Then they will turn against their own regime.”
Peddling a disproven conspiracy theory involving the three Israeli teenagers whose kidnapping and murder preceded the war, Noura Erekat, a human rights law professor at George Mason University , claimed that “Israel knew that these boys had been murdered very early on,” but that it nonetheless, “continued to fan racist and war-mongering flames.” Erekat also disregarded the vulnerability of Israeli civilians: “Hamas cannot hurt Israel at all militarily. . . . Israeli citizens enjoy relative security. In contrast, Palestinians are enduring an all-out massacre.”… Such cheerleading for Palestinian terrorism and willful disregard of historical facts discredits the individuals who advance it and the academic culture of Middle East studies that rewards it. It is politicized rather than objective, propagandistic rather than principled. American interests at home and abroad are ill-served by these apologists for terrorists.
Jordan Turner
The Métropolitain, Sept. 3, 2014
With universities worldwide about to begin the new semester we are about to see a surge, as never seen before, for the BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) anti-Israel movement on university campuses. The rhetoric, protests, demonstrations and intimidation of Jews, and of those whom believe in Israel’s right to exist, will be rampant. Just this past week in Canada the Ontario branch of the Canadian Federation of Students representing over 300, 000 university students have unanimously passed a motion to boycott Israel. This was preceded by Ryerson University’s student union voting last April to boycott Israel. These boycotts are only the start of what will be a well-organized push to delegitimize Israel and its supporters.
Many people who might not agree with Israel’s policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians believe that the BDS movement’s boycotting of Israel businesses, products and intellectuals is a fair approach to pressure the Israeli government to alter is policies. Although many of those involved have much more sinister motives and you can see this in their popular mantra; “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” There is no call for a two State solution but instead a call for the destruction of the State of Israel to be replaced by a Palestinian one. To the rest of those involved in the movement they either do not understand the ramifications of supporting a boycott or they do not care.
What is lost on many who contemplate joining the BDS movement is that when someone has decided to accept a boycott they have decided that one side of the conflict is unequivocally right and the other is unequivocally wrong. That one side is intrinsically good and the other side is inherently evil. When one decides to join a boycott they have left no room for ambiguity. They have accepted, without reservation, the Palestinian version of history, their violent struggle and their vision of a possible future state. They have concluded that only Israel is culpable in the conflict and that Palestinians share absolutely no blame or responsibility for their plight. It means they support Hamas and their indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli town and cities as they have chosen to Boycott Israel and not the unity Palestinian government or the countries providing financial and/or political support to Hamas. The BDS movement calls Israel an apartheid state but continuously fails to mention that they are the only genuine democracy in the Middle East. That Israel has a population of over 1.6 Million Israeli Arabs who have full voting rights, who have members in the Israeli parliament and a sitting judge on the Israeli supreme court. People often forget that over 20% of Israel’s population is Arab and that a boycott against Israel includes a boycott of all its citizens.
Israel policies are allowed to be subjected to criticism just as any other country in the world. However, Israel is continuously being singled out for boycotts while the BDS movement casually turns a blind eye from actual human rights abuses occurring on a daily basis around the world. The BDS movement’s hypocrisy and complete lack of objectivity only help to create animosity, hatred, and violence. It’s so tragic that students unions worldwide, instead of focusing on the well-being of their own students, have chosen to focus on boycotts, divestments and sanctions against the only democracy in the Middle East. It’s tragic that they preach diversity yet by boycotting Israeli academics have firmly declared they are against the diversity of ideas. One can hope that the student unions will reverse their decisions to boycott Israel but sadly when they have accepted an ideology that completely disregards and vilifies the Israeli point of view there is not much hope.
AMERICA’S MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, June 5, 2014
Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities’ international reputations. For over two centuries, our superb system of American public and private higher education kept pace with radically changing times and so ensured our prosperity and reinforced democratic pluralism.
But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 21st century. Colleges that were once our most enlightened and tolerant institutions became America’s dinosaurs. Start with ossified institutions. Tenure may have been a good idea in the last century to ensure faculty members free expression. But such a spoils system now encourages the opposite result of protecting monotonies of thought. In a globalized world where jobs disappear in an eye blink and professionals must be attuned to the slightest changes in the global marketplace, academics insist that after six years they still deserve lifetime guarantees of employment. In the age of the Internet and global readerships, faculty promotion is still based largely on narrow publication in little-read, peer-reviewed journals. Many are often incestuous and have no bearing on enhancing faculty teaching skills. Post-tenure review and peer evaluations have become pro forma quid pro quos among guild members. The result is a calcified professoriate that demands it alone can still live in the protected world of the 1950s. Part-time teachers and graduate students are not so lucky. They are often paid less than half for the same work done by full-time faculty, in illiberal fashion that would be unacceptable at Walmart or Target. Universities are the least transparent of U.S. institutions, defending protocols more secretive than those of the Swiss banking system. Few colleges publish the profile of students who were favored in the admission process through legacies, athletic prowess, or race and gender preferences. The result is that almost no one knows why one student gets into Yale or Stanford and another with a far more impressive academic record does not.
Universities claim they are committed to creating a student body that looks like America. In fact, they deliberately ignore the most important diversity of all — thought. About half the country is fairly conservative. Yet by any measure — faculty profiles, campus speakers, student organizations — colleges discriminate against those not deemed sufficiently progressive. Conservative speakers are now routinely disinvited from commencement addresses. Students or faculty members who offer public skepticism about gay marriage or unfettered abortion, voice pro-Israel sentiments, or express doubts about man-caused global warming can easily earn campus pariah status. The liberal-arts curricula are likewise fossils of the 1960s, the era of their professors’ race, class, and gender activism. Such therapeutic courses short the very skills — written and oral proficiency, historical knowledge, and math and science mastery — that alone prepare graduates for a chance at a successful career trajectory. Most disturbing is the inability of the modern university to adjust to the 21st-century workplace. Students are not graduating in four years. They are piling up crippling debt. They cannot figure out the byzantine nature of their high-interest student-loan packages. And they are hardly assured of jobs commensurate with their unsustainable investment in education. The university’s reactionary response is to keep jacking up tuition faster than the rate of inflation, to count on still more open-ended federally guaranteed student loans, and to keep its budgetary figures mostly hidden.
How odd, then, that the campus is more reactionary than the objects of its frequent vituperation, from the corporation to the military. Academics resist the sort of long-needed reforms that they always seem to demand of others in American society. We cannot expect the current self-interested establishment in charge of the university to reform it. Its failure to educate students for well-paying jobs while charging them excessive fees, may alone force a reckoning. The Internet, tech schools, and correspondence courses are already eroding the monopolies of the campus. Whether the academic establishment likes it or not, a new generation of leadership will have to ensure equal pay for equal work, an end to lifetime sinecures, a new way of assessing university achievement, transparency in budgeting and admissions, political balance and tolerance, and a complete overhaul of the liberal-arts curriculum.
Either higher education will give up its medieval privileges, begin to be accountable, and live in the modern world, or it will be reduced to a costly relic for a tiny elite. An aging campus generation that has nearly wrecked the university should bow out and let more open-minded and innovative minds repair the damage that the old generation has wrought.
Ben Shapiro at UCLA: "BDS is Just Another Form of Anti-Semitism" (Video): Israel Unseen, Feb. 26, 2014
Will Taxpayer-Supported Title VI Middle East Studies Centers Boycott Israel?: Winfield Myers, Campus Watch, Sept. 4, 2014—Will the taxpayer-supported Middle East studies centers at five American universities join a boycott of Israeli academic institutions? Or were their directors, who signed a recent letter pledging "not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions," engaged in personal protests that won't affect their schools' official relations with Israeli universities?
Student Union Membership Should be Voluntary in Canada: Alexia Bystrzycki & Brianna Heinrichs, National Post, Aug. 26, 2014—Next month, university students will cough up money for tuition, textbooks, residence and additional fees. Student fees, which include transit passes and health and dental insurance, range from $500 to $1000 a year at Canadian universities, of which approximately $100-$200 goes directly to student unions.
FIRE Vows to Keep Filing Lawsuits Against Campus Speech Codes: Tatiana Lozano, CNS News, July 7, 2014— The foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has unveiled its Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, a new initiative supporting the free speech rights of college students nationwide.
University is Actually Quite Cheap – It Just Doesn’t Look That Way: Alex Usher, Globe & Mail, Aug. 26 2014 —Every September, Statistics Canada publishes its annual Tuition and Living Accommodation Cost survey. Inevitably, the press coverage focuses on the sticker price, and the narrative is driven by people claiming that education is increasingly unaffordable.
Campus Liberals Get a Taste of Their Own Nanny-State Medicine: George F. Will, Washington Post, June 5, 2014 —Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating.
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