Northeastern University Attacks Holocaust Survivors By Stella Paul
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/04/northeastern_university_attacks_holocaust_survivors.html at April 22, 2012 – 09:03:12 PM CDT
“Why would anyone want to give money to Northeastern University?” asks Holocaust survivor Helga Lustig. That’s a question that many donors and parents may be asking, after watching a chilling new video that documents Northeastern’s institutional anti-Semitism and its vicious attacks on survivors of Nazi genocide.
Located in Boston, Northeastern is one of the country’s largest private universities, and was recently ranked by Forbes as America’s fourth-most entrepreneurial academy. Well, it’s certainly entrepreneurial at taking money from well-meaning Jewish donors and then smugly using their funds to defame the Jewish people.
In December 2010, Steven Stotsky wrote an article in Boston’s Jewish newspaper criticizing the misuse of funds donated by his father. A World War II veteran, Dr. Bernard Stotsky had endowed a chair at Northeastern to study the Holocaust, because he was concerned that the genocide of the Jewish people would be trivialized or forgotten.
What drove Steven Stotsky to go public was his shock at Northeastern’s official programming for Holocaust Awareness Week, an annual series of events advertised as “bearing witness” to the Jewish genocide.
With exquisite sadism, the Holocaust Awareness Committee, which plans the events, had invited self-loathing, Euro-financed Israel filmmaker Yoav Shamir to showcase Defamation, a cinematic rant that accuses Holocaust survivors of exploiting their experiences for financial gain and condemns Israel for committing Nazi-like crimes.
Defamation stars the notorious Norman Finkelstein, a hatchet-faced “scholar” with the academic integrity of Charles Manson. Finkelstein wrote The Holocaust Industry, which posits that “Jewish elites” use the Holocaust as a cynical ploy to extort money, and once called Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel “the resident clown of the Holocaust circus.”
In the film, Yoav Shamir praises Finkelstein as reminiscent of “biblical prophets” who are condemned for “saying things nobody wanted to hear.” Well, sign me up as somebody who doesn’t want to hear the rancid lies about Israel that Finkelstein hurls in the film, such as his cockamamie calumny that Israel exploits the Holocaust as an excuse to torture Palestinians.
Israel Arbeiter, an Auschwitz survivor who serves as president of the American Association of Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston, says, “It is outrageous to me as a Holocaust survivor what is happening in Northeastern. They are using the Holocaust and turning it into a political action, turning against Israel. And that is very painful to me.”
I suspect that the hardcore leftist operatives who control Northeastern’s Holocaust Awareness Committee aren’t terribly concerned about inflicting pain on Auschwitz survivors like Israel Arbeiter. But they do worry about blowback against their cozy fiefdom, where they enjoy such delicious freedom to poison young minds.
So when Steven Stotsky exposed their plan to desecrate Holocaust Awareness Week with an anti-Semitic slime-fest, they quietly withdrew their invitation to Yoav Shamir to participate in Holocaust Awareness Week. Instead, they asked him to come back a few months later, which he did. Problem solved!
Now a new 16-minute video released by Americans for Peace and Tolerance/On Campus (APT/OC) documents this sorry saga and turns over a whole lot of other rocks, exposing the new anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism that’s been crawling around certain corridors at Northeastern for years. To Northeastern’s eternal shame, some of the worst offenders were Stotsky Professors, whose salaries were supported with donations from Dr. Bernard Stotsky, in absolute violation of his trust.
There’s Stotsky Professor William Miles, who commemorated Holocaust Awareness Week in 2001 by staging a three-day symposium on “Third World Views of the Holocaust.” Will you be terribly surprised to learn that the “third world view” of its honored speaker, Professor Nadim Rouhanna of Tufts, was that Israel is worse than the Nazis? Then there’s Marxist Stotsky Professor Inez Hedges, who rolled out the blood-red carpet for Dr. Alice Rothchild, so she could blast hatred at Israel, à la Finkelstein, for exploiting the Holocaust to oppress and kill Palestinians.
You’d think Northeastern officials might be embarrassed at the public exposure of their anti-Semitic carnivals…but no, they’re congratulating themselves. Chief Spinmeister Stephen W. Director, Provost of Northeastern, wrote a letter to Boston’s Jewish Advocate, in which he lavished praise on Northeastern and magisterially claimed that the charges “are completely unfounded, and we reject them.”
Such self-satisfaction is contradicted by Rabbi Paul Levenson, the former Hillel director at Northeastern, who wrote that Northeastern should apologize to the Stotsky family, and volunteered to “lead my beloved Northeastern in returning Holocaust Remembrance Week and Dr. Stotsky’s endowed chair to their original purpose.”
Watch the video and study the faces.
Look at the contorted hatred emanating from Norman Finkelstein and the icy smugness of Alice Rothchild. Then bask in the dignified warmth of the Holocaust survivors as they tell their stories and reveal the pain that Northeastern’s attacks are causing them. As Rose Kasmer says, “[i]t is very hard to understand the university, which is supposed to be tolerant, understanding, and fighting for the truth. How can they come out with such lies about us and Israel?”
Potential donors and parents paying $53,000 a year should consider that question, too.
Write Stella Paul at stellapundit@aol.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/04/northeastern_university_attacks_holocaust_survivors.html at April 22, 2012 – 09:03:12 PM CDT
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