STEVEN PLAUT: SO HOW EXACTLY DO YOU SAY “PSEUDO-ACADEMIC FRAUD” IN BEDUIN?
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20BGU%20-%20Oren%20Yiftachel%20-%20Legacy%20of%20Fraud%20and%20Incompetence.htm
Oren Yiftachel: Legacy of Fraud, Incompetence, and Struggle against the Existence of Israel
So How Exactly do you say “Pseudo-Academic Fraud” in Bedouin?
Oren Yiftachel is one of the worst anti-Israel “academic” extremists
in Israel. After being turned down for an academic position in urban
planning at the Technion due to his poor academic credentials, he was
made a professor of geography at Ben Gurion University, a university
where academic credentials are not always a necessary nor a sufficient
condition for a person to serve on its faculty.
There Yiftachel has built an entire career upon churning out
Bash-Israel propaganda. He specializes in trying to paint Israel as a
racist apartheid entity, or – to use his own favorite nonsense word –
an intolerant “ethnocracy.” He justified the firing of Hamas rockets
into Israel, even when some landed near his own campus, on grounds
that Israel had “jailed” the entire Palestinian population of Gaza.
This “jailing” consisted of refusing to allow the Gazan terrorists to
import advanced weapons systems. (See this anti-Semitic smear by him,
still carried on the BGU official web site:
http://www.geog.bgu.ac.il/members/yiftachel/shorts/the%20jailer%20state.pdf
and see also http://www.martinsherman.net/557/comprehending-the-incomprehensible-%E2%80%93-part-i/)
Yiftachel churns out anti-Israel hate propaganda for some of the most
anti-Semitic groups and magazines on the planet. Along with BGU’s Neve
Gordon and Lev Grinberg, he is part of the core BGU group of tenured
extremists who make no secret of their endorsement of Arab mass murder
of Jews.
Yiftachel is also basically the Ilan Pappe of the Negev, meaning
someone who never hesitates to lie and defraud when it comes to the
holy task of annihilating Israel. And he was recently nailed for this
by an Israeli judge.
For the past few years, Yiftachel has spent much of his time
attempting to demonize Israel for supposedly mistreating its Bedouin
citizens. This “mistreatment” consists of Israel’s refusal to accept
at face value the fictional and imaginary “legal” claims of the Negev
Bedouins to huge portions of the entire Negev. The Bedouins and their
lobby have simply fabricated “claims” for this extremely expensive and
valuable land in land-poor Israel. Yiftachel, who has no training in
law or history or economics, has served as their lobbyist in demanding
that these fictional claims be accepted by the state, in essence
transferring much of the Negev to Bedouins having no legal claim to
the land there whatsoever.
Yiftachel also has a long track record of denouncing Israel for
allowing Jews to move to the Negev and the Galilee, or what he calls
“Judaizing” these territories. The term “judaization” has been used by
anti-Semites as a nonsense term to denounce Jews since the Middle
Ages.
In recent weeks, Yiftachel testified in a Beer Sheba Court about those
Bedouin claims in a suit against the state of Israel brought by the
Bedouin lobby. Yiftachel’s fraudulent testimony has now become the
matter of public record and of a growing number of media reports.
Yiftachel gave false testimony to the court. A second geography
professor from Jerusalem, Prof. Ruth Kark, gave non-fictional and
factually correct testimony on behalf of the state, challenging the
fraudulent claims of Yiftachel and the Bedouin lobby. Kark has
published a serious academic book about the Negev Bedouins, along with
her PhD student, Seth Frantzman, currently an editor at the Jerusalem
Post and someone who often writes for Isracampus.
The court ruled against Yiftachel and his lobby. The judge in
question, Sarah Dovrat, went out of her way to denounce Yiftachel for
fabrication and fraudulent misrepresentation of the contents of a
number of historic documents during his testimony, denouncing him
explicitly for testifying about the contents of documents he had never
even bothered to read!
The denunciation of Yiftachel and his fraud has now appeared in
several news venues. Citations from the judge’s verdict in which
Yiftachel was denounced were posted on an Israeli chat list by the
distinguished Israeli professor of Geography from Tel Aviv University,
Gideon Biger.
On April 20, 2012, a particularly good expose of Yiftachel’s fraud was
carried in Hebrew by the Makor Rishon daily newspaper. It filled a
full newspaper page and is too long to be translated in full here. But
we will paraphrase in English the more important segments of the
story:
It cites Judge Dovrat in describing Oren’s testimony before her court
as a disgrace and embarrassment. It describes the court case in
question as one concerning an illegal encampment of Bedouins on Negev
land they do not own, where the illegal buildings (really shanties)
erected there have been repeatedly demolished by the government of
Israel. The lands on which these were erected are state-owned public
lands. The judge is cited as saying, “I felt terribly ill at easy in
listening to Yiftachel’s testimony when it became apparent that he was
citing sources he had never even bothered to read.”
Yiftachel was called to testify by the Far-Leftist lawyer representing
the Bedouins, Michael Sfard, in order to grant academic credibility to
their false claims. The judge adds in her verdict: “Yiftachel twisted
and squirmed on the witness stand in a manner that caused me to feel
completely uneasy, in fact completely embarrassed.” She adds that
Yiftachel clearly never bothered to read the documents he was
attempting to cite into evidence. Yiftachel was not the only fraud
brought by Sfard and his clients to the court. A surveyor who was
asked to testify about the lands in question had never surveyed them,
merely looking them up on an internet web site. The judge tossed out
the entire suit by Sfard and his Bedouin would-be land thieves.
A particularly acrimonious letter was then published by the University
of Haifa’s geography professor Arnon Soffer, blasting Yiftachel. In
that letter, Soffer writes that he has followed Yiftachel’s “work” for
years and has always found it to be shallow political propaganda and
not academic scholarship. He expresses satisfaction that Judge Dovrat
essentially confirms officially everything he already knew about
Yiftachel. When interviewed for the Makor Rishon piece, Prof. Soffer
adds that Yiftachel is basically a traitor to the state of Israel,
someone attempting to turn the Negev over to Bedouin squatters. Anyone
proposing such an idea, says Soffer, is a rotten villain as well as a
traitor.
Soffer is also quoted there as calling Yiftachel a serial liar. For
example, Yiftachel likes to pretend that he “ONLY” endorses Bedouin
claims to a “mere” 5% of the Negev. It is 5% if one counts all the
Arava wastelands going all the way down to Eilat as included in the
Negev. But in the fertile Negev land north of Beer Sheba, Yiftachel
and his clients are demanding 100% of those lands for the Bedouins,
says Soffer. He also accuses Yiftachel of intentionally lying about
the number of “unrecognized” – meaning illegal – Bedouin squatter
villages in the Negev. Soffer claims that in reality 10% of the land
in Israel is being illegally held by the two and a half percent of the
population who are Negev Bedouins. Soffer’s characterization of
Yiftachel was also backed by Prof. Gideon Biger from the geography
department at Tel Aviv University, also interviewed for the piece in
Makor Rishon. Biger says that Yiftachel’s political agenda and biases
govern everything he does and writes, and Biger accuses him of
producing pseudo-scientific pseudo-research.
The newspaper editorializes that the entire court case in which
Yiftachel testified was in fact not at all about legal rights to land
but rather about the legitimacy of Israel as a state and its right to
enforce its own laws. Things Yiftachel opposes.
The Israeli anti-Zionist Left has been denouncing the judge in shrill
tones for her decision. The judge has been defended, however, by many
of Israel’s serious legal academics, including the left-leaning
eminent Prof. Ruth Gavison. She insists that if dubious Bedouin claims
from the 1920s are to be taken at face value by the courts, then so
must all Jewish claims to lands across the Green Line in the
“Palestinian” territories. Yiftachel and his buddies of course
consider such statements to be fascist racism. The case is expected to
be appealed to the Supreme Court.
A second somewhat similar article appears this week on the internet at
http://2nd-ops.com/adiby/?p=5658 (in Hebrew). It accuses Yiftachel of
forgery and perjury, when he submitted to the court a corrected later
affidavit carrying the false date of an earlier affidavit he had
submitted.
It should be noted that Yiftachel is not the only anti-Israel
“geographer” on the faculty of BGU. Geographer David Newman, currently
the Dean of Social Sciences and the Humanities at BGU, shares most of
Yiftachel’s political biases and passions for anti-Israel
propagandizing. Dean Newman can be counted upon to stand by his man
and prevent any sanctions against Yiftachel for his misbehavior! BGU
president Rivka Carmi can also be counted upon to forget all about
Yiftachel whenever she insist there is only one single anti-Israel
lunatic in the entire faculty of BGU.
Neve Gordon and Lev Grinberg are probably better known as the global
symbols of the absence of serious academic standards at Ben Gurion
University. They are notorious realizations of the long track record
of BGU in hiring faculty with near empty “academic” records, promoting
them and granting them tenure. There are dozens of others at BGU!
But the lesser known Yiftachel is just as much of a full-time
pro-terror anti-Israel hate propagandist, hired and promoted in spite
of his absence of serious academic credentials – all thanks entirely
to his hatred of Israel. Hating Israel is a far weightier factor in
getting hired and promoted at Ben Gurion University than is scholarly
performance!
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