HATE IN, HAVE OUT
Andrew Roberts
National Post, March 17, 2011
This article is excerpted from the transcript of a speech delivered to a Toronto conference titled: “When Middle East Politics Invade Campus,” organized by Advocates for Civil Liberties on Feb. 16.
In May 2008, the University and College Union of Great Britain called for a boycott of Israeli academia, which went into immediate effect. As Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador to the U.K., put it at that time: “Academics, who are supposedly society’s guardians of knowledge, objectivity and informed debate, have seen their union held hostage by radical factions, armed with political agendas and personal interests.” To boycott the professors, teachers and thinkers of an entire country, purely on grounds of nationality, which in the context of Israel effectively means grounds of race (as Arab academics do not seem to be affected), is a morally despicable thing to do, and the University and College Union should be ashamed of doing something so regressive and de facto racist.
One of the key battlegrounds in the struggle over Israel’s survival is on the campuses of the West, where opinions are being formed in the minds of the people who will constitute the national leaderships of tomorrow. I believe the battle is presently being lost, not least in the way that opinions utterly opposed to any sense of tolerance and decency are not only being aired but are being applauded.
Consider the following: In my country, Great Britain, Queen Mary’s University has recently hosted Abu Usamah, who has expressed such sentiments as that homosexuals should be thrown off mountains, that women are “deficient,” and that they should start wearing the hijab from the age of seven, because “by the age of 10 it becomes an obligation on us to force her to wear hijab and if she doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her.” NonMuslims, he says, are “pathological liars,” and “Jews and Christians are enemies to Muslims.”
London’s equally highly respected School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) has a Palestine Society that has recently showed a film that included the following lines: “Allah is the greatest. He who thanks Allah will be rewarded. Oh Allah, loosen your power and strength on the Jews. Please Allah, kill them all. And don’t leave any of them alive.”
The London School of Economics (LSE) has held a lecture by Abdel Bari Atwan titled How much influence does the Zionist lobby exert in the U.S. and U.K.?, and its Palestine Solidarity Society has recently heard from Ahron Cohen, who, despite attending Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent Holocaust Denial conference in Iran, in fact does not only acknowledge that the Holocaust happened, but actually blames Jewry for it: “There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses. However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.”
These academic institutions—Queen Mary’s, SOAS, the LSE and others—are not the kind of unknown Internet colleges where you might expect to hear foul, unhinged language of this kind; they are old, established, respected institutions of learning that have simply abrogated their duties to ensure that the laws regarding hate speech are not broken—and broken flagrantly—on their campuses.
Who can doubt that all this has had a direct effect on some students at least, who have in recent years gone on to perpetrate outrages that have led to deaths and mutilation? The former president of University College London’s Islamic Society, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the so-called underwear bomber—tried to kill everyone on a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day 2009. Omar Khan Sharif, who was a student at King’s College, London, and attended meetings of extremist Islamic organizations there, later carried out a suicide attack in a bar in Tel Aviv. Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, who was radicalized at the University of Bedfordshire, went on to blow up both himself and innocent bystanders in Sweden three months ago. There should be no surprise that the messages of these universities’ radical Islamic societies has led straight to murder and maiming: Hate in, Hate out.
Meanwhile, British trade unions regularly pass motions for economic, cultural and sporting boycotts of Israel. There was even in March 2009 calls to boycott the London Science Museum’s “Israel Day of Science,” which was going to showcase to schoolchildren Israeli advances in cancer research, solar energy and water desalination. The Independent newspaper, as part of its long-term and ongoing campaign of abuse against Israel, dutifully gave over its front-page in support of the boycott. Once you add the Guardian newspaper using its comments pages to normalize extremist ideology and legitimize terrorist organizations, and Channel 4 asking Ahmadinajad to deliver its Christmas Message, you’ll see that we have reached a position where fair-minded debate between people of good faith is at a discount, and the line between rational and irrational has been blurred so badly as to become almost meaningless.…
The Idea of the University, Cardinal John Henry Newman’s great work defining how the republic of the mind should be governed, hailed the importance of increasing the breadth of understanding, promoting excellence in scholarship, advancing student dialogue and freedom of expression and inquiry. These are still what underpin the ideal of the Academy in free societies, over a century later. Yet these are under mortal threat today.
Interestingly, one place where they are not under threat is in Israel and the occupied areas of the West Bank. Ariel University Center of Samaria, near Nablus on the West Bank, has 500 Israeli-Arab students among the 9,000 undergraduates studying at the university. Their presence at an institution that symbolizes the Israeli occupation and is the largest Israeli employer in the West Bank, comes as a surprise to many outsiders. Manar Dewany, a 20-year-old student in math and computer science who commutes each day from the Israeli-Arab town of Taybeh, says: “I never even considered it a reason for not coming here. I have no problem with it. Why not come here? This place is full of Arabs. Politics aren’t a problem here. It’s not even discussed. Studies are one thing and politics are another. Relations on campus are fine, natural. Everyone gets on well with each other. I was the only Arab student in my class last year, and I was treated the same as everyone else.”
There is a wealth of irony in the fact that one of the only places that Middle Eastern politics is not permitted to invade the campus is in the West Bank itself.…
Today we see [the] forces of ignorance and intolerance rising up once more in this campaign to boycott academics, writers and thinkers solely because of their nationality, in effect in the context of Israel therefore, because of their race.…
Israel therefore should not merely see herself as being in the front line in the War Against Terror, although of course she is. But in this present struggle over the academic boycott and the right of free speech in universities, Israel and her supporters—Jew and Gentile alike—are in the forefront of something even more important than that. For today, they stand in the very vanguard of the centuries-old struggle for truth over falsehood, knowledge over ignorance and therefore—ultimately—of civilization over barbarism.
HARROWING SIGHTS IN THE BALTICS
Efraim Zuroff
Jerusalem Post, March 23, 2011
These are hard times for the Jews of Lithuania and Latvia, especially for the Holocaust survivors among them. Within the last two weeks, one of the main avenues of the capital cities of each country hosted a well-attended march likely to send shivers down their spines and arouse tragic memories.
On March 11, about one thousand Lithuanian ultranationalists and neo- Nazis, bolstered by a delegation of their German counterparts, marched down Gediminas Avenue in the heart of Vilnius under police protection (the only persons arrested were two of the handful of brave Lithuanian protestors) shouting “Lithuania for Lithuanians” and waving swastika symbols, which in May 2010 were approved by a local court as “symbols of Lithuanian heritage.”
Five days later, about 2,500 Latvians gathered to support a march in Riga by veterans of the Latvian SS Legion from a local church to lay wreaths at the Freedom Monument, the symbol of Latvian independence. And while the marches are ostensibly different – the one in Lithuania focusing on the present and the one in Latvia dedicated to remembering the past— they both broadcast a chilling message of hostility for minorities and support for the same fascist nationalism which spawned the zealous collaboration of so many of their countrymen with Nazi Germany in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
This was not the first time these marches have taken place. The one in Lithuania was held for the fourth year in a row and the number of its participants has steadily grown. The Latvian march has been going on for longer, but in this case as well, it appears that this year’s crowd was larger than in the past. Every year, efforts are made in both countries to legally prohibit the events, but ultimately local courts opt for freedom of expression.…
Advocates of the march continue to insist that those who served in the Latvian SS Legion had no allegiance to Germany and were “freedom fighters,” battling for an independent Latvia.… Even worse, these nationalists fail to acknowledge the important fact that many of Latvia’s worst murderers of Jews volunteered to serve in the Legion and were among its officers. Thus the attempts to turn these Legion veterans into Latvian heroes is not only a distortion of history, but is also a heartless affront to the Jewish community in general, and the survivors among them in particular.…
In Lithuania, the political leadership failed to speak out in real time and only did so half-heartedly in response to criticism, mostly from Jewish groups abroad. Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius criticized the march only because it discredited “patriotism,” while it took President Dalia Grybauskaite five days to say that “patriotic parades are welcome, but marches inciting ethnic hatred shouldn’t take place.”
Given the fact that among the leaders of the march in Vilnius were Kazimieras Uoka, a member of parliament from the prime minister’s party and Ricardas Cekutis, a high official of the government-sponsored Genocide Research Center, much more unequivocal criticism was sorely lacking. In Latvia, Foreign Minister Girts Kristovskis has nothing bad to say about the march by SS veterans, but used the occasion to lump together Communist and Nazi crimes,as part of the ongoing campaign by the Baltic countries to relativize Holocaust crimes and help hide their own extensive complicity in the atrocities of the Shoa.
In this dismal landscape, a letter of protest signed by 600 Lithuanian intellectuals calling upon the leaders of their country to “condemn and distance themselves from the march of the extreme right and neo-Nazis,” shines out like a beacon of hope, but without external support and pressure, the chances for its success are very minimal. And in that context, the silence from Brussels, Washington, and Jerusalem is incomprehensible.
(The writer is the Israel director and coordinator
of Nazi war crimes research worldwide of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.)
ARE ISRAELI SETTLERS HUMAN?
Bret StephensWall Street Journal, March 15, 2011
A few years ago, British poet and Oxford don Tom Paulin offered a view on what should be done to certain Jewish settlers. “[They] should be shot dead,” he told Al-Ahram Weekly. “I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them.” As for Israel itself, it was, he said, “an historical obscenity.”
Last Friday, apparently one or more members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the terrorist wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah party, broke into the West Bank home of Udi and Ruth Fogel. The Jewish couple were stabbed to death along with their 11-year-old son Yoav, their 4-year-old son Elad and their 3-month-old daughter Hadas. Photographs taken after the murders and posted online show a literal bloodbath. Is Mr. Paulin satisfied now?
Unquestionably pleased are residents of the Palestinian town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, who “hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack” and “handed out candy and sweets,” according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. The paper quoted one Rafah resident saying the massacre was “a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank.” Just what kind of society thinks it’s “natural” to slit the throats of children in their beds?
The answer: The same society that has named summer camps, soccer tournaments and a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian woman who in March 1978 killed an American photographer and hijacked a pair of Israeli buses, leading to the slaughter of 37 Israeli civilians, 13 children among them.
I have a feeling that years from now Palestinians will look back and wonder: How did we allow ourselves to become that? If and when that happens—though not until that happens—Palestinians and Israelis will at long last be able to live alongside each other in genuine peace and security.
But I also wonder whether a similar question will ever occur to the Palestinian movement’s legion of fellow travelers in the West. To wit, how did they become so infatuated with a cause that they were willing to ignore its crimes—or, if not quite ignore them, treat them as no more than a function of the supposedly infinitely greater crime of Israeli occupation?…
[The] Palestinians have grown accustomed to the waiver the rest of the world has consistently granted them over the years no matter what they do. Palestinians ought to have expectations of themselves if they mean to build a viable state. But their chances of doing so are considerably diminished if the world expects nothing of them and forgives them everything.…
[I] long entertained doubts about the wisdom and viability of much of the settlement enterprise, though I’ve never considered it the core issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a point well borne out by the example of Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal. Now I find myself cheering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for announcing, in the wake of the Fogel family massacre, the construction of hundreds of additional homes in the settlements.…
For 60 years, no nation has been held to such stringent moral account, or such ceaseless international hectoring, as Israel. And no people has been held to so slight an account as the Palestinians. Redressing that imbalance is the essential first step in finding a solution to the conflict. The grotesque murders of the Fogels and their little children demands nothing less.
SELF-REFLECTION AND SELF-BLAME; ISRAEL AND OBAMA
Kenneth Levin
American Thinker, March 20, 2011
Much has been written about President Obama’s reported statement to a Jewish group earlier this month that Israelis should search their souls concerning the quest for peace. In this offensive comment and related remarks, Obama once more put the onus on Israel for the absence of movement towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while he characterized Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas as eager for a fair deal.
In fact, Abbas has used the mosques, media and schools under his control to militate against any genuine peace. The message conveyed by all three is that Jews have no historical connection to any part of Palestine, that they are mere usurpers whose presence must be expunged, and that it is the duty of every Palestinian to pursue that goal. In addition, Abbas has personally praised terrorists who have killed Israelis as the ideal all Palestinians should strive to emulate and has explicitly endorsed efforts to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist within any borders.
But Obama’s hostility to Israel appears impervious to all such realities. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as his jaundiced view of America’s traditional role in world affairs is hardly more responsive to counter-evidence. Thus, he pursues the reining in of American leadership, and the reaching out to those who wish America ill, even as his doing so entails, among other travesties, allowing Muammar Gaddafi to slaughter most of his way back to full control of Libya; promising carrots to Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir despite the continuing genocide in Darfur; and doing nothing meaningful to help the bloodied people of Iran throw off the totalitarian yoke of their nation’s theocracy.
Obama’s insulting call for Israeli soul-searching reminded many of a similarly hostile statement in July, 2009, in which he urged Israelis to do some “serious self-reflection.” But commentary on Obama’s “advice,” both then and now, has generally failed to note that, for many Israelis, the last decade has, in fact, been one of intense soul-searching and self-reflection.…
[When] in the late 1970’s [after the Six Day War], Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, broke ranks with the rest of the Arab world and agreed to a negotiated peace. Israelis now anticipated that this presaged a widening circle of Arab-Israeli accommodation. But Egypt was ostracized by all other Arab states for its accord with Israel. In addition, Egypt refused to implement the approximately two dozen agreements on normalization of trade and other relations that were part of the treaty with Israel. Instead, it fashioned a “cold peace” that has entailed, for example, ongoing intense defamation of Israel in state-controlled media and an actual increase of anti-Semitic propaganda in Egyptian print and broadcast outlets.
As the continuation of the Arab siege, and recurrent disappointment in hopes for a change in Arab attitudes, wore away anticipation of a soon-to-be-realized genuine peace, a significant portion of the Israeli public.…embraced the delusion, despite all the evidence against it, that Arab hatred was actually due to past Israeli missteps and fault and that if Israel would only make sufficient amends, especially retreat to the pre-1967 armistice lines, then Arab hostility would be assuaged and peace would ensue.…
They abandoned all serious self-reflection and rushed en masse to endorse the Oslo agreements and embrace arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and his cadres as their “peace partners.” On the September, 1993, evening after the signing of the initial Oslo accords on the White House lawn, Arafat declared in a broadcast to his Palestinian constituents and to the wider Arab world that they should understand Oslo as the first step in implementing the PLO’s 1974…“plan of phases…” for pursuing Israel’s annihilation. But Israel’s Oslo enthusiasts ignored Arafat’s speech and celebrated the outbreak of “peace.…”
In 1997, senior Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, a former Oslo enthusiast, wrote, “In the early 90’s…we, the enlightened Israelis, were infected with a messianic craze.… All of a sudden, we believed that…the end of the old Middle East was near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict.… We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness.”
But Shavit’s opening his eyes was then a rare act among Oslo’s true believers, and he was vilified by other “enlightened Israelis.” It was only in 2000, when Arafat and his associates rejected Israel’s dramatic concessions at Camp David, rejected as well President Clinton’s bridging proposals, refused to offer any counter-proposals and instead launched their terror war against Israel, that Oslo enthusiasts in large numbers began to engage in serious self-reflection and free themselves from their erstwhile delusions.…
Today, the great majority of Israelis understand they have no “peace partner.” They understand the agenda of Hamas, which explicitly declares in its charter, in its media, in its mosques, in its schools, its dedication not only to the annihilation of Israel but to the murder of all Jews, and which daily seeks to translate its words into acts. They understand that so-called “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas, while talking of peace to foreign audiences, makes clear to his own people that he and his Fatah movement will likewise not reconcile themselves to Israel’s existence.…
Israel’s shift to serious self-reflection, to looking open-eyed at the nation’s predicament, did not come cheaply. Nearly 1,500 lives have been lost to the anti-Israel terror enabled by Oslo. With the American population some fifty times that of Israel, a proportional loss would be 75,000 dead. Let us hope President Obama’s path from apologetics, and from the hubris of ignoring the world’s grim realities, to genuine soul-searching and self-reflection does not entail America’s paying such a dear price.
(Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian
and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.)
‘I KNEW I WAS WITNESSING AN EXPLOSION ABOUT TO HAPPEN’
Jonah Mandel
Jerusalem Post, March 25, 2011
Speaking with David Amoyal on Thursday should not be taken for granted. The 52-year-old, who on Wednesday afternoon sensed that there was something very wrong about the black bag near his brother-in-law’s kiosk across from Binyenei Ha’uma, distanced people from its vicinity and called the police to report a suspicious object. Moments into the conversation with the police dispatcher, the bomb exploded and nearly took his life.
From his bed in the surgical department at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem, Amoyal spoke about his harrowing near-death experience. “So there I was at my brother- in-law’s kiosk, standing in for him,” he said. “A haredi youth comes up and says there’s a suspicious bag outside.… I got a very bad feeling right away—the bag was brand new, with a shiny zipper and a box-like shape to it. That’s not the way duffel bags are supposed to look. “I immediately told the kids to get away from the bag, and called the police while distancing myself. I felt as though I was witnessing an explosion about to happen. “While I was talking to the policewoman on the phone, the bomb exploded.…
Amoyal has no plans to stop working at the kiosk, nor will he change his attitude toward any of the many people who buy there or ask for information about the bus lines. “I’ll be back there in total spite of them,” he said of the terrorists who planted the bomb. “I will also continue to help people in any way they need, including our cousins,” he said referring to the many Arabs who patronize the kiosk, which in 1994 was destroyed in a suicide bombing.
In an act of humorous defiance, the kiosk’s owner, when he rebuilt it, named it Pitzutz Shel Kiosk (“A blast of a kiosk”). “I won’t discriminate against anyone,” Moyal said. “We are a chosen people. Not like them,” he said, as he adjusted his broken body in the hospital bed and grimaced in pain.
