RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration calls its national security strategy “Countering Violent Extremism.” In the benighted times before January 20, 2009, we used to call it counter-terrorism.

Why does Obama insist on the more fuzzy “extremism”? Because “terror” has its roots in Islamic scripture. This fact ought to be undeniable, but Obama denies it — and in Washington, he’s far from alone in that.

It is not just that the word terror appears several times in the Koran; it is that the word appears in a particular context: The duty of Muslims to act as Allah’s instrument to terrorize non-Muslims is a recurring scriptural theme. In Sura 3:151, to take one of several examples, Muslims are admonished:

Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.

Those who oppose the national identity of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael, Jewish sovereignty, Zionism, oppose the “life equation” that defines Israel’s mission and its existence.The most famous mathematical equation is E=mc2 because it is associated with the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Put simply, Einstein described a law in physics: mass (m) is another form of energy (E); and, when mass is multiplied by the speed of light (c) times itself, the result will produce tremendous energy.

Einstein showed that the increased relativistic mass of a body comes from the energy of motion of the body – that is, its kinetic energy (E) – divided by the speed of light squared (c2).

In another context, however, the equation could be used as a symbolic metaphor to explain something about modern Jewish history: The energy of the Jewish people, expressed in its return en masse to its homeland, Eretz Yisrael, will illuminate the world with Jewish values and ideals.

BACK TO 1933?

How the Academic Boycott Began*

On April 6, 2002, 123 university academics and researchers (their number -would later rise to 250) from across Europe signed an open letter, published in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, calling for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel until the Israeli government abided by (unspecified) UN resolutions and returned yet again to negotiations with Yasser Arafat to be conducted in accordance with the principles laid down in the latest Saudi peace plan. The petition was organized and published at the very time Israelis were being butchered on a daily basis, mainly by brainwashed teenage suicide bombers, Arab versions of the Hitler Youth. It declared, in high Pecksniffian style, that since the Israeli government was “impervious to moral appeals from world leaders” Israel’s cultural and research institutions should be denied further funding from the European Union and the European Science Foundation. It neglected to recommend that the European Union suspend its very generous financing of Yasser Arafat or that Chinese scholars be boycotted until China withdraws from Tibet. The petition was the brainchild of Steven Rose, director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at Gresham College, London, and the great majority of its signatories were British. But it included academics from a host of European countries, a number sufficient to give it the appearance of a pan-European campaign against the Jews. It even had the obligatory display Israeli, one Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University. (Nine other Israeli leftists added their names as soon as they found out about this opportunity for international renown.)

In June, Mona Baker, director of the Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) decided to practice what the all-European petitioners had preached: She dismissed from the boards of the two journals she owns and edits two Israelis, Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University. She also added that she would no longer accept articles from Israeli researchers, and it was later revealed that she would not “allow” books originating from her private publishing house (St. Jerome) to be purchased by Israeli institutions. One paradox of the firing, which would be repeated often in later stages of the boycott, was that Shlesinger was a member in good standing of the Israeli Left, former chairman of Amnesty International’s Israeli chapter, and ever at the ready with “criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank…” Toury, for his part, opposed taking any retaliatory action against Baker — this had been proposed by an American teaching fellow at Leeds named Michael Weingrad — because “a boycott is a boycott is a boycott.” A small contingent of Toury’s (mostly British) friends in linguistics issued a statement objecting to his dismissal because: “We agree with Noam Chomsky’s view that one does not boycott people or their cultural institutions as an expression of political protest.”