http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=283105
Butler, who received Frankfurt’s coveted Theodor Adorno Prize, came to prominence as an anti-Israel agitator.
Judith Butler, who last week received Frankfurt’s coveted Theodor Adorno Prize, came to prominence as an anti- Israel agitator almost a decade ago. In September 2002, Harvard president Lawrence Summers charged that “at Harvard and… universities across the country,” faculty-initiated petitions were calling “for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested.” In August 2003, Butler, then a professor at UC Berkeley and a signatory of nearly every anti-Israel petition circulating on American campuses, including the “divestment” one, published a rebuttal of Summers’s charge, called “No, it’s not anti-semitic,” in the London Review of Books. Summers had chivalrously gone out of his way to say that “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” A primary aim of Butler’s counter-attack was to annihilate this distinction. Using the tu quoque (you too) strategy, she called Summers’s accusations “a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not intent.” His words have had “a chilling effect on political discourse,” she wrote.
Apparently the chill had not taken hold at Harvard itself, which would in November confer honors upon Oxford’s Tom Paulin, who was famous for urging that Jews in Judea and Samaria “should be shot dead.” Butler perfunctorily assented to Summers’s recommendation that anti-Semitism be condemned, but she seemed incapable either of recognizing it in such (to her) mild “public criticisms” as economic warfare against Israel or calls for its dismantling or assaults on Zionism itself for interfering with suicide bombers.