RUTHFULLY YOURS

The University of Chicago’s recent decision to not condone “safe spaces” on campus earned a round of applause from First Amendment advocates. “Free speech is at risk at the very institution where it should be assured: the university,” University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer said. But as the University of Chicago has made substantial strides toward freedom of speech on campus, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has opted to narrow the scope of what can be discussed in the classroom.

Last week, three professors co-teaching a course titled “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” released a statement that addressed students who question man-made climate change. “We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” the professors said in a statement obtained by The College Fix. And if you disagree? The professors “respectfully ask that you do not take this course.”

One wonders: If the professors are positive that man-made climate change is occurring exactly in the manner they suggest, then why are they worried about a few students questioning their narrative? Universities are supposed to be places where students can improve themselves and others by debating openly. How does suppressing contradictory views aid that?

University Communications Director Tom Hutton backed the professors’ decision to limit students rather than to encourage free inquiry. “By clearly stating the class focus,” Hutton told The College Fix, “the faculty are allowing students to choose if they wish to enroll in the course or seek an alternative.” On the face of it, this sounds reasonable. And yet, if Hutton’s rationale were to be taken seriously, no student would ever enroll in a course that taught beliefs contrary to his own.

According to an old Israeli anecdote, Charles de Gaulle once complained to David Ben-Gurion, over a glass of (kosher) cognac: ‘Although I am Monsieur le Président, I have to deal with the Prime Minister, and he’s such a potz! You are sooo lucky, Davíd: your Président is just a figurehead; as the Prime Minister, you have all the power…’ ‘Oh, you have no idea!’ said Ben-Gurion with much chagrin. ‘You see, I have to deal with Jews in Israel. That’s currently two and a half million aspiring Prime Ministers and each thinks he can do a better job than I do…’

There are now almost 7 million aspiring Prime Ministers in Israel and about the same number in the Diaspora. And while every Jew thinks s/he can be Prime Minister, some act as if they already are.

Those who closely follow Israeli politics should be familiar with the phenomenon of high-level retired security and military personnel (sometimes even still-serving high-level security/military personnel!) making controversial public statements on political issues. Such statements, often quoted out of context and sometimes creatively ‘interpreted’, invariably cause embarrassment to the country’s political leadership.

The case of the so-called ‘Gatekeepers’ (former chiefs of the ‘Shin-Bet’ Internal Security Service who went public with their own analyses of the situation – mostly critical of Israel’s political leaders) is very well-known – not in the least because they are often cited, both by Israel’s sworn enemies and by various ‘concerned friends’.

What contributes to this situation is the fact that, in Israel, retired security and military ‘celebrities’ very often aspire to (and quite often achieve) top political positions. Out of the six ‘Gatekeepers’, four have been involved in politics after retirement; a fifth (Yuval Diskin) flirted with politics for a couple of years, before deciding to remain just a commentator – at least for the time being; the sixth ‘Gatekeeper’ (Avraham Shalom) is the only one who could never enter politics: hehad to resign from the Service, after allegedly ordering the summary execution of two captured Palestinian terrorists – and thus becoming a political ‘hot potato’.

Given Israel’s fully proportional election system, anyone aspiring to climb the ladder in politics must achieve national (rather than local) recognition. This is particularly important for security chiefs who – until not so long ago – operated mostly in the shadows, away from the public eye. And the sure-fire way to quickly achieve national (and also international) recognition is… to make controversial statements, of the kind that garner media attention and stir the interest of an already jaded public, one that is bombarded with ‘news’ umpteen times a day. Combine that with the Israeli/Jewish penchant for wild exaggeration and bombastic communication (traits that anyone familiar with the country and its people is well aware of) and you’ve got an explosive mixture – at least from a media point of view; a perpetual generator of cheap journalistic ‘scoops’.

The latest such scoop concerns one Tamir Pardo, former head of the Mossad (Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations). His potential political ambitions are, for the moment at least, unclear. But it’s very early in the day: Mr. Pardo retired from the Institute only in June 2016.

A public speech Pardo made a few days ago contained some controversial remarks. Controversial enough, it seems, to attract the attention of Israeli media and – as always – of various interested parties outside Israel.

The Iranian Press-TV, for instance, stated with some glee:

“Israel heads toward civil war: Ex-spy boss”

The ‘forever-worried-over-Israeli-policies’ US Jewish organisation J-Street lamented:

“Mossad chief Tamir Pardo said that the biggest threat to Israel’s security is the conflict with the Palestinians and not Iran’s nuclear program.”

So what did Tamir Pardo actually say?

Among those diplomats and journalists who don’t simply blame the Arab-Israeli conflict entirely on Israel, the preferred approach is “evenhandedness.” This approach, epitomized by the “cycle of violence” cliché, holds that both sides want peace and are equally to blame for its absence. Remarkably, this view has persisted despite decades of proving wrong in ways that hurt the very countries which espouse it – as demonstrated yet again by newly released documents from the Nixon Administration.

The documents, which Amir Oren reported this week in Haaretz, include redacted versions of the CIA’s daily presidential briefings on the eve of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The agency’s cluelessness is mind-blowing.

On October 5, 1973, one day before the war began, the CIA acknowledged that “The military exercises underway in Egypt seem to be on a larger scale and are being conducted more realistically than previous ones,” but nevertheless insisted that “they do not appear to be preparations for an offensive against Israel.” The agency even dismissed an obvious danger sign as a reasonable response to fears of Israeli aggression: “Cairo may have put its air defense and air forces on alert as a precaution against an Israeli reaction to the initial phase of the exercise.”

On October 6, just hours before the war began, the CIA’s briefing was similarly disconnected from reality:

Tension along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria has been heightened by a Soviet airlift that is in its second day. Neither the Israelis nor the Arabs seem bent on starting hostilities, but in this atmosphere the risk of clashes is greater than usual. … Both the Israelis and the Arabs are becoming increasingly concerned about their adversaries’ military activities, but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities … A military initiative at this time would make little sense for either Cairo or Damascus.

Once again, the agency seemed to view potential Israeli aggression as the main concern: “Syria’s cautious President [Hafez] Assad appears braced for a possible second blow from Israel rather than seeking revenge for his recent loss of 13 MIGs to Israeli fighters … Nevertheless, the Syrians’ fears could lead to a mobilization of their defenses, which in turn could alarm and galvanize the Israelis. Such a cycle of action and reaction would increase the risk of military clashes which neither side originally intended.”

And once again, it ignored clear danger signs, like the evacuation of Soviet dependents from Egypt and Syria. While admitting that this could be due to “fear of an outbreak of hostilities,” it optimistically suggested that instead, “The Soviets might be using the excuse of rising tensions to reduce their presence without annoying the Egyptians.”

The film was referred to by ‘The New York Times’ as “one of the first close-up view of the motives and personalities in a group that rarely opens up to outsiders.”

Syracuse University has passed over formally inviting Israeli film director Shimon Dotan to their international film conference “The Place of Religion in Film.”
Dotan had previously been informally invited by one of the events organizers, William L. Blizek, according to The Atlantic. The film Dotan was due to show at the March 2017 conference was his feature-length documentary ‘The Settlers’ which chronicles the history of the settlements, the people who live there and the movement as a whole.

The film itself was referred to by The New York Times as “one of the first close-up views of the motives and personalities in a group that rarely opens up to outsiders.”

It was shown at the Sundance Film Festival (and was made with financial support from the Israeli network YES and from the European network ARTE, among others) and opened throughout Israel recently.

However, despite an invitation, and interest on the part of the filmmaker Dotan, he was uninvited to the event due to the “BDS faction on campus.”

The Syracuse University BDS faction made no known statements or threats to Dotan’s possible participation and were perhaps unaware of it all together.

A rejection email Dotan received from Professor Hamner of the Religion Department of Syracuse University stated that the group would make things unpleasant for the Israeli filmmaker and possibly damage the reputation and credibility of the organizers and the event.

The email added that they regretted not having the opportunity to see the film and as such they could not vouch for it.

The film has been highly rated among critics. It mainly focuses on the radical fringe settlers and, according to reviews, is perceived as showing settlers in a negative light.

Dotan said he wants people to understand the reality, in all its complexity. “I don’t think Israel faces a military threat, but I think it does face the threat of disintegration from within… I think there is a threat to democracy and to the moral fabric of the country… I want the film to present a dialogue with the settlers in a way that will enlighten people.”

Prof. Efraim Karsh, the incoming director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, skewers the Oslo diplomatic process as “the starkest strategic blunder in Israel’s history” and as “one of the worst calamities ever to have afflicted Israelis and Palestinians.”
“Twenty three years after its euphoric launch on the White House lawn,” Karsh writes in this comprehensive study, “the Oslo ‘peace process’ has substantially worsened the position of both parties and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation ever more remote.”
“The process has led to establishment of an ineradicable terror entity on Israel’s doorstep, deepened Israel’s internal cleavages, destabilized its political system, and weakened its international standing.”
“It has been a disaster for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians too. It has brought about subjugation to corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes. These regimes have reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these territories, shattered their socioeconomic wellbeing, and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote.”
“This abject failure is a direct result of the Palestinian leadership’s perception of the process as a pathway not to a two-state solution – meaning Israel alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza – but to the subversion of the State of Israel. They view Oslo not as a path to nation-building and state creation, but to the formation of a repressive terror entity that perpetuates conflict with Israel, while keeping its hapless constituents in constant and bewildered awe as Palestinian leaders line their pockets from the proceeds of this misery.”
Karsh details at length how the Oslo process has weakened Israel’s national security in several key respects.
On the strategic and military levels, it allowed the PLO to achieve in one fell swoop its strategic vision of transforming the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into terror hotbeds that would disrupt Israel’s way of life (to use Yasser Arafat’s words).

After arriving in Marco Polo Airport in Venice, Italy, Yonah Mishaan and I went to get our rented 9-seater Fiat van, which the coach calls our Mercava tank. We proceeded to drive to the host city of Lignano Sabbiadoro, located about an hour’s drive away. Thanks to the Israeli-invented Waze GPS, our journey was easy. Before arriving at our hotel, I spotted a soccer stadium and we soon realized that this was “Stadio G. Teghil” where our football games would be played in the coming days. Italian football officials were on the field, placing all the markings for the gridiron. We were greeted warmly by our Italian friends who we had gotten to know at previous football events organized by the International Federation of American football. They graciously showed us the Israeli team locker room that had already been inspected by our Israeli security personnel.

Upon reaching Hotel Falcon, Yonah and I met the Israeli cooks who arrived a day earlier to prepare kosher food for our team. Feeding 45 football players and 18 support staff is a daunting task, when all of the food is kosher. Only about a third of our team are observant, but our entire team, including non-Jewish players and coaches, will eat kosher in Italy. We have many observant players and the Israel American Football Federation is the only sports federation in the country that will not play on Shabbat, and observes Jewish dietary laws.

In the evening, Yonah and I visited the beautiful coastal town of Lignano Sabbiadoro, which is not usually on the tourist agenda of most Israeli visitors.

Thursday morning, we headed to meet the rest of the team, back at the Venice airport, where a bus was waiting to bring the full contingent to the hotel. Loading up the players, each carrying their football gear, reminded me of mobilizing a reserve IDF platoon. Each player carried a duffle bag, with his helmet, shoulder pads, cleats and uniform. They looked grim and determined for the battle ahead.

A Response to Yesterday’s Anti-Semitic Hate CrimeBy William Meyer – From the Swarthmore College Newspaper

By now you’ve probably already heard that on Tuesday night students discovered swastikas graffitied in McCabe. I’m not sure what’s worse: the fact that this incident happened or the fact that I wasn’t all that surprised.

You’d think that I’d be shocked to learn that the symbol of the regime that brutally murdered dozens of my own family members, including my great-grandfather and his brothers, was drawn in my campus library. Instead, I find myself feeling depressingly unfazed, almost numb.

Maybe seeing Nazi imagery across Europe when I was there last January desensitized me. Maybe reading about anti-Semitic incidents at colleges across the country has prepared me. Maybe constantly seeing images of anti-Semitic graffiti in the news shared by frightened Jews, like the image accompanying this article, has numbed me to the horror of what such graffiti represents.

Drawing swastikas, the symbol of Nazi Germany, has long been a method of intimidating and spreading terror amongst those groups targeted by the Nazis, particularly Jews. Yet, the growing global and national tide of anti-Semitism made this all too predictable.

Bill McKibben loves the climate. Unfortunately, he hates the environment.

For proof of that, consider McKibben’s recent cover story in The New Republic, where he asserts that the U.S. must mobilize to fight climate change with the same fervor the Allies used to defeat Hitler during World War II. After citing a few examples of recent weather events, which, in his view, prove that global warming is happening now, McKibben writes, “If Nazis were the ones threatening destruction on such a global scale today, America and its allies would already be mobilizing for a full-scale war.”

While Nazi analogies can be fun, the climate cure that McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and his friends are pushing would result in the despoliation of vast swaths of the American landscape. Indeed, it would require that an area the size of Texas and Louisiana combined be covered with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines.

The strategist behind McKibben’s climate crusade is Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has published papers arguing that the U.S. doesn’t need oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy. According to Jacobson, the U.S. can rely solely on energy derived from wind, water, and the sun.

Jacobson has an entire claque of admirers. During his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, (I., Vt.) adopted Jacobson’s all-renewable scheme whole cloth and made it his energy plan. That move immediately won praise from the leaders of both the Sierra Club and Greenpeace USA. In addition, the recent Democratic-party platform claims that the U.S. should be running entirely on “clean” energy by 2050. Jacobson’s all-renewable dystopia is also being promoted by actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as well as by anti-fracking activist Josh Fox. In addition, Jacobson has formed a group call the Solutions Project, which is avidly promoting his 100 percent–renewables plan.

In his essay, McKibben adheres to the liberal-left orthodoxy by completely ignoring nuclear energy’s pivotal role in cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead, he praises Jacobson’s work, claiming that it “demonstrates conclusively” that the U.S. could be running solely on renewables by 2050. Achieving that, says McKibben, would need about 6,448 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity.

As usual, the devil is in the details. Jacobson’s 50-state scenario, which is available on a Stanford University website, needs about 2,500 gigawatts of wind-energy capacity and another 3,200 gigawatts or so of solar capacity. Those are staggering quantities, particularly when you consider that current U.S. generation capacity — from nuclear to geothermal — totals about 1,000 gigawatts.

Milan Chatterjee, the former president of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Graduate Students Association and third-year law student, informed UCLA that he would be leaving the school due to a “hostile and unsafe campus climate” fostered by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) groups.

“It’s really unfortunate,” Chatterjee told the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. “I love UCLA, I think it’s a great school and I have a lot of friends there. It has just become so hostile and unsafe I can’t stay there anymore.”

While he was student president, Chatterjee, who is Indian-American and a Hindu, made the distribution of funds from the Graduate Students Association (GSA) for a school diversity event contingent on its sponsors not being associated with the BDS movement.

This move brought protests from BDS supporters, and a June 2016 investigation by the UCLA Discrimination Prevention Office (DPO) concluded that Chatterjee violated school policy requiring a neutral viewpoint on the distribution of funds.

In a statement, UCLA spokesman Ricardo Vazquez expressed disappointment over Chatterjee’s decision to leave but stood by the DPO’s judgement.

“Although we regret learning that Milan Chatterjee has chosen to finish his legal education at a different institution, UCLA firmly stands by its thorough and impartial investigation, which found that Chatterjee violated the university’s viewpoint neutrality policy,” the Aug. 31 statement read.

Reprinted from the Times of Israel.

A recent film clip showing ex-Israeli academic Ilan Pappé has raised eyebrows. Asked whether it was Palestinians who launched the BDS campaign in 2005 Pappé conceded, “Not really, but yes. OK. For historical records, yes.” Both Israel supporters and Israel haters have been taken aback by this forthright statement, from a leading Israel hater, that Palestinians did not create this now iconic movement.

What are the BDS movement’s origins? The question is, at one level, an historical curiosity. The movement exists, it is forging ever-deeper links with the far left and the ‘progressive’ movement, and is a force to be reckoned with. At another level, however, the history of the BDS movement is emblematic of Palestinian political history, and the recent development global antisemitism, as a whole.

Two trends are immediately evident in the history of BDS, the role of Palestinian political factions and professional Palestinians from the diaspora, which have led Palestinians toward rejectionism.

It is easy to dismiss the movement’s own origins story, the 2005 call from Palestinian ‘civil society’ organizations. The call for boycotting Israel was in explicit opposition to the Palestinian Authority (which, indeed, rejected it) and may well have originated with a rejectionist PLO faction. Indeed, many of the ‘grassroots’ organizations that signed the document cannot be traced. They were likely organs of political factions or just fabrications.

The message was simple: the “representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.”

The call also put forward three demands; “1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall 2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and 3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” In short, the call demanded dismantling of Israel through the ‘right of return.’ This has not changed: the end of Israel is the core BDS goal.