RUTHFULLY YOURS

On May 31, Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes joined an estimated 2,000 diplomats, public officials, journalists, and other opinion makers from around the world at a special conference on the delegitimization of the State of Israel at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

The unprecedented nature and size of the conference, entitled “Building Bridges, Not Boycotts,” befits the scope of this growing problem. Founded nearly 11 years ago, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) seeks to lobby governments, companies, universities, artists, and others to sever ties with Israel. Supporters say that Israel alone should be singled out among the nations of the world for its alleged human rights abuses and violations of international law.

Opponents say BDS has nothing to do with actual Israeli transgressions and is “not about helping the Palestinians or bringing peace,” as Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon remarked in his address to the conference. Its “only goal is to bring an end to the Jewish state … BDS is the true face of modern anti-Semitism.” As MEF fellows Alexander H. Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky explain, the BDS movement in the West is propelled by “an unholy alliance of far-left organizations and Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamists,” centered primarily in universities and unions.

According to a new poll, a third of Americans now think boycotting Israel is ‘justified.’

Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour boasted that conference is an “admission” that Israel is “losing ground at American universities and colleges to BDS,” and he’s right. In fact, the BDS movement has continued to make advances on U.S. campuses, winning 12 of 26 BDS referendums last year, as well as a Middle East Studies Association (MESA) resolution lauding “calls for [anti-Israel] institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions” as “legitimate forms of non-violent political action.”

The success of America’s institutions of higher learning is thanks in no small part to the largesse of America’s most generous citizens — persons with names such as Rockefeller and Carnegie. That tradition continues today. But one of the names has left-wing groups in a fit.

According to UnKoch My Campus (UKMC), a group of “students and activists” dedicated to exposing “the Kochs and their vast network of front groups,” the brothers have donated to more than 300 colleges since 2005. Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times estimated the total amount at $68 million as of 2013. UKMC alleges that these donations are intended “to undermine the issues many students today care about: environmental protection, worker’s rights, healthcare expansion, and quality public education, to name just a few.”

Supposedly in the interest of “accountability,” UKMC has been using open-records laws to intimidate professors and administrators involved in any academic work associated with Koch donations.

Last year, Ross Emmett, co-director of Michigan State University’s Center for Innovation & Economic Prosperity, who used Koch money to found a seminar — the Koch Scholars — that studies political economists such as F. A. Hayek and Karl Marx, was forced to release documents to student activists. In 2014, the head of the University of Kansas’s Students for a Sustainable Future filed a state records request demanding a decade’s worth of private correspondence from Professor Art Hall, director of the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business. Hall, who had received a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation and testified against green-energy quotas before the state legislature, sued, alleging a “fishing expedition.” A year later, he reached a settlement with the university.

And as we see, the Israel-haters from the “Australia Palestine Advocacy Network”are on the campaign trail:AIJAC, meanwhile, has posed thirteen questions a-piece to current prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his main rival, ALP leader Bill Shorten, regarding their respective policies regarding Israel.

As will be seen by clicking this link, both parties are broadly similar on most issues. There is nothing that can be considered over-the-top hostile or alarming from either of them. Nevertheless, there seems to be little doubt that the ALP is worse from a Jewish communal perspective, especially if we read between the lines.

For unlike the Coalition the ALP is increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, especially in western Sydney and in north Melbourne. It also is dependent on the Greens, who are openly hostile to Israel. The ALP also has various left-wing anti-Israel activists.

Reading the answers to the questions, there are several areas of concern:

– Counter-terrorism”: The ALP emphasises “early intervention and community engagement” and quotes that “we can’t arrest our way to success”. These are cop-outs, and suggest that terrorists won’t be monitored and stopped as effectively under an ALP government as under the Coalition.

-Schools: There is little between the two parties, but the ALP purely needs-based policy should be looked at closely for its possible impact on Jewish day school funding.

– The ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the BBC): The Coalition hasn’t been great, not with Turnbull as Communications Minister, but it seems clear that an ALP government would adopt a hands-off policy towards the ABC, even if (as it is) it is blatantly controlled by the Left and is hostile to Israel.

– 18C: This legislation can be used, and has been used, by leftists to silence conservative columnist Andrew Bolt and others, and should be repealed or modified. It is an open invitation, under an ALP government, to silence anti-Muslim blogs. It should have been repealed by Tony Abbott, who chickened out, but at least it is not being used as a left-wing weapon.

– UN Votes: An ALP government would obviously be more critical of Israel at the UN than a Coalition government.

So, leaving aside other policy issues, it seems clear that the ALP is at least marginally worse across the board.

Meanwhile, from the BDSers in Adelaide, who are a persistent bunch indeed, a singularly amateurish piece of work kicks of a new campaign of theirs:

Americans have difficulty in grasping the random nature of the stabbings, stoning and car-ramming attacks against Israelis. This is, in large part, is due to a basic assumption that everyone aspires to the same goals of a productive life and a positive future for their family and children asserts Elan Journo, a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and its Director of Policy Research. The inability of Americans to accept that a majority of Palestinian Arabs do not share this vision undermines our ability to understand the underlying causes of the conflict. [19]

American leaders foster this common misconception. “Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life,” declared President Bill Clinton during his remarks at the Signing Ceremony for the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principle on the South Lawn at the White House on September 13, 1993. [20]

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright quoted Clinton’s erroneous assessment of the desire for “the quiet miracle of a normal life” at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 8, 1997. [21] After visiting a school in Ramallah, Albright thought “The young Palestinians aren’t responsible for the unfair hand history has dealt them; they’ll never achieve what is fully fair in their eyes, but the peace process is the best path to the best deal they can get.” [22]

“Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life,” declared President Bill Clinton.
At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria; ten years later, Ehud Olmert offered Abbas 93.6 percent with a one-to-one land swap. In other words, expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state. [23] Abrams said that there “has been no deliberate policy or government push to expand settlements; on the contrary, there have been official constraints. The government has officially approved only 9,197 residential construction permits in the entirety of Judea and Samaria (i.e., the entire West Bank including the major blocs, excluding Jerusalem) in the six years since Netanyahu took office in 2009. Approximately two-thirds of those units approved were built inside the major blocs. That means only 500 or so units were approved each year for construction outside the settlement blocs.” [24]

At the Annapolis Conference, held on November 27, 2007 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, President George W. Bush insisted that “The Palestinian people are blessed with many gifts and talents. They want the opportunity to use those gifts to better their own lives and build a future for their children. They want the dignity that comes with sovereignty and independence. They want justice and equality under the rule of law. They want freedom from violence and fear. [25]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice revealed her own confusion about the conflict during what she thought was an off the record meeting of leading international leaders, including former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Rice indicated she had no intention of drawing historical parallels or being too introspective, but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama “at a time of separation and tension.”

There is no Palestinian constituency for peace with Israel. The more Israel offers the Palestinians, the less interested they are in settling.
The Israeli Left is a one trick pony. As it sees things, all of Israel’s problems – with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with Europe and with the American Left – can be solved by giving up Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem (along with Gaza which we gave up already).

Once Israel does this, the Left insists, then the Palestinians, the Arab world, Europe and Bernie Sanders voters will love us as they’ve never loved us before.

The events of the past quarter century have shown the Left’s position to be entirely wrong. Every time Israel has given the Palestinians land, it has become less secure. The Arabs have become more hostile.

The West has become more hostile. The Palestinians have expanded their demands.

Because of their negative experience with the Left’s policy, most Israelis reject it. This is why the Right keeps winning elections.

Given the failure of its plan, the Left could have been expected to abandon it and strike out on a different course. But it didn’t. Instead it has tried to hide its continued allegiance to its failed withdrawal strategy by pretending it is something else.

A central component of the Left’s concealment strategy is its use of former generals.

Over the past quarter century, and particularly since the Palestinians began demonstrating in 2000 that they have no interest in a state living side by side with Israel, the Left has carted out retired generals at regular intervals to proclaim that continued allegiance to the Left’s failed policy of withdrawal is not irrational.

Every couple of years, a new initiative of former generals – often funded by the EU – is published.

The Department of State and USAID have just issued a report entitled the “Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism.”

There are some ideas in this “strategy” for what is now called CVE, but at bottom it is hopeless. If this is really the United States’s strategy, we are in even bigger trouble than we thought.

Here’s just one fact that will show you why: The word ‘Islam’ does not once appear in the US government’s CVE document. Neither does ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamist’, ‘radical-Islam’, ‘radical-Islamist’ or any other such formulation.

That phrase comes from the assessment of the Henry Jackson Society in London, an NGO named after the late Senator Henry M. Jackson (for whom I had the honor to work in the 1970s). Here is their full text:

The US government has released a new CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) strategy consisting of a 12-page document, with a foreword by Secretary of State John Kerry. Although the release has been little commented upon either in the US or the UK, both countries should take an urgent interest in the document.

Firstly because the whole framing of the strategy is an import from the UK. It was the UK government that first came up with the presentation of its counter-extremism strategy as ‘countering violent extremism’. Many UK government experts extolled the virtues of the British strategy to the US. In fact through this process Britain has exported some of our worst habits to America.

For the glaring problem with the strategy is that it lacks any apparent desire to deal with the problem, or even to identify it. The new strategy is a follow-on document from last year’s White House convened conference on the same subject. The resulting document, like the conference, is notable for its attempt to avoid pin-pointing the problem. For although there are multiple domestic and foreign security threats to the US as there are to the UK, there is no point in setting up strategies to counter them unless you are willing to say which ones you are talking about.

The truth about the circumstances and numbers of the 1948 Arab refugees has been sacrificed – by the UN, Arab regimes, the “elite” Western media and most Western Foreign Offices – on the altar of Arab-appeasement and Israel-bashing.

For instance, the Palestinian Arab leadership collaborated with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, seeking Nazi support to settle “the Jewish problem” in British Mandate Palestine in accordance with the practice used in Europe. Thus, the top Palestinian Arab leader, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, incited his people in a March 1, 1944 Arabic broadcast on the Nazi Berlin Radio – consistent with anti-Jewish Arab terrorism during the 1920s and 1930s – “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. It would please God, history and religion.”

On January 9, 2013, Mahmoud Abbas honored the Nazi collaborator: “We pledge to continue on the path of the martyrs [suicide bombers]…. We must remember the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin Al-Husseini….” In 2016, Hitler’s Mein Kemp and the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion feature prominently in Mahmoud Abbas’ hate-education and incitement systems.

On October 11, 1947, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, the first Secretary General of the Arab League told the Egyptian daily Akhbar al Yom: “…This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacres, or the Crusaders’ wars…. Each fighter deems death on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise….The war will be an opportunity for vast plunder…. ” On August 2, 1948, the NY Times reported that the founder of the largest Islamic terror organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, instigated: “Drive the Jews into the sea… and never accept the Jewish State.”

Certain tough choices that the Israeli military regularly faces have been overlooked lately, and it’s no wonder. As the government ironed out its coalition agreements to make way for the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as defense minister — and in the wake of statements made by top brass over the past few months — the focus of discussion has been the “morality” of the IDF.

Though “purity of arms” is not a new topic of debate in Israel, it recently became a particularly hot bone of contention, after an IDF soldier shot and killed a subdued Palestinian terrorist in Hebron. Though the soldier is on trial for manslaughter, and his guilt or innocence will be established in court, his action has been used as an example of what’s wrong with Israeli ethics in general and the dangers of such turpitude infecting the army in particular.

Since this is what the world’s BDS advocates and other anti-Semites have been trying tirelessly to convey in word and deed, they couldn’t have been more pleased to be given unwitting legitimacy by the likes of the IDF chief of staff and his deputy. The former handed them the utter fallacy that poverty leads to terrorism. The latter virtually likened the atmosphere of the Jewish state to that of 1930s Germany. And the now-former defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, defended both of them, while offering his own warnings about the perils of abandoning societal and military morals.

Meanwhile, although Israelis have been forced to contend with a surge in Palestinian terrorism that came to be called the “lone-wolf intifada,” the international onslaught — from the corridors of the United Nations to the British Labour Party to university campuses across the world — do not restrict their criticism to what is currently going on in Israel. No, they continue to raise the issue of IDF behavior during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza.

Never mind that the war itself was not only justified, but late in coming, as the bloodthirsty terrorist organization fired rockets, missiles and mortars into Israeli population centers without let-up. Forget that an extensive network of tunnels for the smuggling of weapons and kidnapping of Israelis was revealed prior to and during the incursion. Ignore the fact that the many millions of dollars and euros provided for the subsequent rehabilitation of the Hamas-controlled enclave have been spent on rebuilding tunnel-and-rocket capabilities. And dismiss the glorification of terrorists — as well as the continued calls for the killing of Jews — by Palestinian leaders. In the eyes of the Israel-bashers, all of the above pales in comparison to the ills inherent in and perpetuated by the Jewish state’s flawed democracy.

CLASSIC liberalism exalted tolerance, reflected in a line often (and probably wrongly) attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

On university campuses, that is sometimes updated to: “I disapprove of what you say, so shut up.”

In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians.

As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.

“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”

Finally, this one recommended by readers: “I am grossly disappointed in you for this essay, Mr. Kristof. You have spent so much time in troubled places seemingly calling out misogyny and bigotry. And yet here you are, scolding and shaming progressives for not mindlessly accepting patriarchy, misogyny, complementarianism, and hateful, hateful bigotry against the LGBTQ community into the academy.”

Mixed in here are legitimate issues. I don’t think that a university should hire a nincompoop who disputes evolution, or a racist who preaches inequality. But as I see it, the bigger problem is not that conservatives are infiltrating social science departments to spread hatred, but rather that liberals have turned departments into enclaves of ideological homogeneity.

Sure, there are dumb or dogmatic conservatives, just as there are dumb and dogmatic liberals. So let’s avoid those who are dumb and dogmatic, without using politics or faith as a shorthand for mental acuity.

College is a time for intellectual curiosity, or at least it used to be. As liberals have increasingly dominated the academic profession, college has been transformed from a thinking space into a safe space and its culture from politically open into politically correct. While on the surface it may seem that liberal professors have accomplished their goal of indoctrinating college students, the work of the professors has had an unintended consequence: young conservatives now know how to fight back against political suppression, and they are in a position to succeed.

In case after case, colleges have instituted a culture that has removed political discourse from campus altogether. From claiming that the use of the word “American” is “problematic” to banning the use of the word “mankind,” colleges have created a culture that forces students to live in a bubble of liberalism, whether students like it or not. George Orwell was not far off in his assessment of the future if these professors were the thought police he was talking about.

Efforts by the left to remove political discourse from college campuses have been met with strong resistance from the right. Conservative speakers such as Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder have been traveling to college campuses across the country to share their message with young people, to the ire of campus liberals and progressives.

The left’s response has been to repeatedly protest these speakers and prevent them from speaking at all. This has not stopped the speakers from continuing to fight back, and Shapiro has even helped file a lawsuit against the notorious California State University, Los Angeles for preventing him from speaking in February.