RUTHFULLY YOURS

Brandeis University’s Mandel Center for the Humanities recently hosted Gideon Levy. Levy, the author of articles such as, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”, is yet another in a line of Students for Justice in Palestine speakers who have justified the racist murder of Jews.

Last year, SJP’s Israel Apartheid Week included Max Blumenthal, an advocate of the ethnic cleansing of Israel, whose views even critics of the Jewish State find horrifying. A Forward reviewer wrote of his previous book that, “It could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”

One of Blumenthal’s attacks on Israel was cited by the Neo-Nazi gunman who tried to murder Jews outside the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City. Blumenthal was deemed too hateful by the German Communists who had invited him to speak. And yet he was not too extreme for Brandeis’ SJP.

Jewish students at Brandeis are forced to cope with a campus where Students for Justice in Palestine campaigns for Rasmieh Odeh, who took part in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket before the Sabbath. Leon Kanner and Edward Joffe, two Hebrew University roommates who had come there to buy canned food, the way so many college students do, were torn to pieces by bombs hidden in coffee cans.

On Islamophobia First, let’s define phobia.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1971):

Phobia: Fear, horror, or aversion, esp. of a morbid character….So Phobist nonce-wd. one who has a horror of or aversion to anything.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1956) states:

Phobia: An irrational, persistent fear of a particular object or class of objects.

The Oxford definition does not claim that a phobia is necessarily irrational, but however stresses its cause as being a person. The Webster’s definition does not even mention a person, just objects or classes of objects, which, of course, can include persons. Other dictionary definitions more or less track the Oxford and Webster’s definitions.

And here is the origin of the term Islamophobia, from Discover the Networks.

The term “Islamophobia” was invented and promoted in the early 1990s by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood. Former IIIT member Abdur-Rahman Muhammad — who was with that organization when the word was formally created, and who has since rejected IIIT’s ideology — now reveals the original intent behind the concept of Islamophobia: “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.” In short, in its very origins, “Islamophobia” was a term designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them….

Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, “Islamophobia” did not become the focus of an active Brotherhood campaign until after 9/11. Since that time, Islamist lobby organizations (including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR) and Muslim civil-rights activists have regularly accused the American people, American institutions, law-enforcement authorities, and the U.S. government of harboring a deep and potentially violent prejudice against Muslims. The accusers charge that as a result of this “Islamophobia,” Muslims are disproportionately targeted by perpetrators of hate crimes and acts of discrimination.

As students ‘occupy’ Brandeis University this week, a look at how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is playing out at universities in a new post-PC world order.

Located on the outskirts of Boston, Brandeis University has been under siege since Friday when a group of some 150 undergrad and graduate students indefinitely “occupied” the Bernstein-Marcus Administration Center. The students, who are taking shifts in the round-the-clock protest, have vowed to remain until 13 demands are met.

On Thursday, the group, which operates under the monikers “Concerned Students 2015” and “Ford Hall 2015,” submitted their 13-point list of demands to acting president Lisa Lynch, giving her 24 hours to comply. The demands include a 10 percent across the board hiring of full-time black faculty and staff, the appointment of a vice president for diversity and inclusion, and mandatory diversity education for all students. (In 2014, the school’s website states the entire student body is under 6,000, of which some five% was black, 6% Hispanic, and 13% Asian.)

In response, over the weekend the acting president wrote the students a multi-page letter validating their feelings and vowing to boost diversity. “The atmosphere described by our students is painful to hear and calls on all of us to address these issues,” Lynch wrote, but she declined to set a timetable for actual action. (In a leaked email, interim Provost Irving Epstein instructs faculty to use discretion in regards to protesters’ class attendance and assignments.)

The Biblical and Post-Biblical Jewish history of Israel’s northwest region, the plateau called the Golan Heights.

Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. In the midst of the terror wave in Israel, in November 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for Israel to return the Golan to Syria. The EU included the Golan Heights in its anti-Semitic labelling decision.

What impelled Prime Minister Netanyahu recently to ask US President Obama to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights during his recent meeting with Obama?

Surely he knew that Obama would categorically reject any Israeli claim to that territory, just as he rejects any Jewish claims to Judea and Samaria and many parts of Jerusalem. Why then did Netanyahu demean himself and, by extension, humiliate the Jewish state, still only reconstituted in parts of its ancestral and biblical homeland?

The answer would seem to be a deep concern that in the wake of the notorious Obama-Iran nuclear deal, the Iranian-Syrian alliance, Russia’s military presence in Syria, and the ever constant threat of attack by Iran’s terror proxy, Hezbollah, Israel needs an “American pledge” supporting Israeli territorial control over the strategic area. It would also seem to be Netanyahu’s attempt to at least put Israel’s concerns on record.