RUTHFULLY YOURS

At their annual meeting in Atlanta earlier this month, members of the American Historical Association voted down a factually flawed resolution condemning Israel. It was a victory that may also point the way for academic fields in the humanities to regain their lost credibility and stature on campus.

The AHA consists of faculty and graduate students who teach and study history throughout the country. Up for debate and a vote at the January meeting was a resolution condemning Israel for its conduct affecting higher education in Gaza, Israel itself, and the West Bank. For instance, the resolution claimed that Israel refuses “to allow students from Gaza to travel in order to pursue higher education abroad.”
Opponents marshaled evidence to prove this was untrue. Egypt, not Israel, controls the “Rafah crossing” that Gaza students and faculty heading toward universities abroad have used for decades. Unlike the benighted English-department faculty members from Columbia and Wesleyan universities who proposed a similar resolution two years ago, AHA historians were interested in facts. They likely knew that after Egypt closed the Rafah crossing in October 2014, Israel increased the flow of students leaving Gaza through the Erez crossing into Israel to the north, and on to Jordan for flights abroad.

There is no viable Palestinian State. There is no enforceable Oslo Accords. There is no unity Palestinian Arab government. That’s why the source of country labeling requirement was ignored and so it should remain.

Things continue to go downhill in the diplomatic world of U.S.-Israel relations. This week the U.S. State Department re-issued a nearly 20 year old regulation – written at a very different time, under very different circumstances – and insists it will “strictly enforce” this ancient rule which requires any goods produced in the disputed territories be designated as place of origin other than “Israel.”

This old-new restriction came up in one of the most unlikely of places, the Cargo Systems Messaging Service, which is part of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The very short introduction explains that the message was issued in order to “provide guidance to the trade community regarding the country of origin marking requirements for goods that are manufacture in the West Bank.”

This latest message from the Cargo Messaging Service was issued literally in the dead of night – 12:53 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 23. Hmmm.

And the “requirements” to which that message is referring, are ones that require labeling of goods produced in the disputed territories, or as the U.S. likes to call them – despite chastising Israel constantly for “creating facts on the ground” – the West Bank and Gaza but not Israel.

Israel’s supporters in America from the top to the lower community organizers and from left to right agree on one subject, namely that Israel needs better public relations and there is a need to disseminate positive information to portray Israel and its policies in a glowing light.

Unfortunately most of these efforts sound more like the complaints of poor relations rather than good public relations. Even Israel’s staunchest protagonists fall into the trap of thinking that listing Israel’s numerous concessions to its enemies will soften or convince hardened anti-Semites.

As a matter of fact, enumerating Israel’s serial appeasements and the catastrophic results only show a weak, forlorn, and desperate nation begging to be liked by the wrong people at the wrong time. It also displays a nation unable to learn from history which has lost the will to assert its historic and legitimate rights. And, worst of all, it shows political leadership which cravenly puts the escalating demands of its adversaries before defense of its citizens.

Furthermore, too much of this propaganda hints that “recognition of its right to exist as a Jewish state” is what is to be negotiated. A disproportionate number of post-colonial era nations have disintegrated into swamps of famine, chaos, genocide, jihad and tyranny, and only Israel has to plead for “recognition of its right to exist?” That is both idiotic and morally depraved.
A good public relations policy starts with the declaration that Israel will not reward enemies with jihad as their agenda. The nation’s priority is to defend its citizens and the state’s remarkable accomplishments.

The rapture was supposed to happen on September 13, 1988. A few fringe pastors were screaming that the end was nigh, that the righteous would soon disappear into the air while the rest of humanity was doomed to suffer a quite literal hell on earth. Forget the biblical admonition that no man knows the day nor hour of Christ’s return, these men had figured it out. It was time to prepare yourself.

I was a sophomore at a Christian college in Nashville, and it was the talk of the campus. No one likes to make fun of crazy Christian preachers more than irreverent Christian college students, and we couldn’t stop dividing the student body between the saved and the damned.

When the alarm clock rang the morning after the scheduled rapture, I hit snooze, and said, triumphantly, to my roommate, “We’re still here!” There was no response. “Hello?” Still no response. I looked down at his bed, and no one was there. For about nine seconds I was gripped by sheer panic. I’d been left behind. The lake of fire awaits! Then my roommate walked in from the shower, and the crisis passed.

I thought of this story as I watched Rush Limbaugh’s Al Gore “armageddon” clock expire. In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.” Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.

Benjamin B. Wagner, an Obama appointee, is the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, a vast region from Oregon to Los Angeles County. Wagner claims that “preventing acts of terrorism is my top priority” but his recent commentary for the Sacramento Bee leaves room for reasonable doubt.

Wagner refers to “the massacre” at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino but does not call it an act of terrorism. Rather, it is “tragic reminder” of the danger that foreign terrorist organizations, seek to “radicalize” Americans and inspire “violent acts.” Wagner does not name Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national, and American-born Syeed Farook, the Muslim perpetrators of the December 2 terrorist attack. Neither does Wagner name a single one of their 14 victims, who included African Americans, Hispanics and immigrants.

Wagner does refer to Nicholas Teausant, who “pleaded guilty to attempting to travel overseas to join the Islamic State.” The U.S. Attorney also mentions “a young man who lived in Sacramento” who lied about his activities abroad. This “young man” is Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, 23, an Iraqi Muslim who came to the United States as a refugee in 2012 but rejoined the struggle in Syria in company with terrorists.

Wagner notes that neither Teausant nor Al-Jayab “was charged with planning violent acts within the United States” but explains that “the threat from overseas terrorist organizations is not my only concern.” The Obama appointee is also concerned about “hostility and violence against our own Muslim American neighbors.” Further, “recent anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign trail and in the media is fraying Muslim Americans’ sense of security.” Wagner does not explain how the San Bernardino attack, along with the Boston Marathon bombing, 9/11 and other terrorist actions might have frayed everyone’s sense of security.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day fell this week on Wednesday. If the day is supposed to serve an educational function, it has largely been a failure.

It was also reported this week that “More than 40% of European Union citizens hold anti-Semitic views and agree with the claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and behaving like the Nazis….” The data come from Israel’s official anti-Semitism report for 2015.

The 40% figure is consistent with earlier findings. A 2011 study by the University of Beilefeld in Germany found 48% of Germans and 63% of Poles agreeing that Israel was carrying out a war of extermination against the Palestinians; the lowest figures were 38% and 39% for Italy and the Netherlands respectively. Polls of Germans in 2013 and 2014 came up with similar numbers.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been marked for about a decade, along with other commemorations and educational efforts. The upshot is that large numbers of citizens of Europe—the continent where the Holocaust occurred—are unable to tell the difference between the deliberate extermination of six million people and an armed conflict whose death tolls, on both sides, are in the thousands.

Even for many of those who seem able to acknowledge the nature and magnitude of the Holocaust, the notion that, seventy years later, Jews have transformed from victims to victimizers appears irresistible.

Over the course of Jewish history, the idea of survival has become essential to understanding the Jewish community. Such understanding has run highest at times when Jews were powerless, such as the end of World War II, and produced at these times a certain amount of world sympathy.

In contrast, when the Zionist enterprise began to lay the foundation for statehood in Mandatory Palestine, Jews began to accumulate power, which caused some to immediately question the enterprise itself. Old anti-Semitic tropes immediately reminded us that such a state would be based on “exploitation” or even Zionist “world domination,” something that generated non-Jewish hostility and, among a Jewish minority, feelings of guilt. Powerlessness was the preferred, even ideal situation.

After the Holocaust we witnessed a trend among many Jews, especially among children of survivors, to distance themselves from the horrors, and the State of Israel, because of the contrast that had emerged between powerlessness and power. This was illustrated in books like The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes by former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering and the writings of critics like the late Tony Judt who categorically rejected Zionism.

https://www.nas.org/

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars.
Recent campus protests and, more importantly, the often anemic responses to those protests by responsible campus officials, have once again put a spotlight on issues of intellectual and academic freedom. In the past, the National Association of Scholars has been quick to point out infringements of these freedoms and to join larger discussions about the underlying principles.
We decided in the episodes that began in September 2015 to take a step back. We did so because the circumstances seemed to have provoked as much confusion among defenders of academic freedom as among its would-be opponents. Responses in the form of vigorous declarations that the university should uphold academic freedom as a cardinal principle seemed to us inadequate in light of the radical denials of that principle in word and deed by the campus activists. Some of these activists claim the mantle of academic freedom even as they violate it in spirit and in substance. And clearly some college officials who purport to uphold the principle of academic freedom have proved feckless when put to the test.

A restatement of principles means little if it fails to engage the minds and imaginations of members of the community who must bring those principles to life. Have academic and intellectual freedom become merely stuffed eagles brought out on ceremonial occasions for display? We think that, though weakened, they are still alive, and that what may help them recover is some good counsel to the people whose job it is to help them thrive.

That counsel takes two parts. The first is this document, which attempts to restore the contexts of academic and intellectual freedom. The second is a separate document that builds on this one to explain how these principles should be applied to liberal arts education.

The argument in this first document is that intellectual freedom is a foundational principle of American higher education, but it is not the only foundational principle. To understand intellectual freedom accurately, it must be considered as part of a complex whole that sustains the university.

From remarks by Brendan O’Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked, at the “What Cannot Be Said” conference at the University of California, Irvine, Jan. 23:

This censorship is more insidious than the old censorships. It is vast and unwieldy and can turn its attention to almost anything: magazines, clothing, monuments, jokes, conversational blunders. It’s as if students feel they deserve their own personal blasphemy law to protect them from scurrilous comments or images or objects. . . .

Campus censors can’t be held entirely responsible for this therapeutic censorship. In fact, in many ways they are the products of a culture that has been growing for decades: a culture of diminished moral autonomy; a culture which sees individuals as fragile and incapable of coping without therapeutic assistance; a culture which treats individual self-esteem as more important than the right to be offensive; a culture that was developed by older generations—in fact by the fortysomethings and fiftysomethings now mocking campus censors as infantile and ridiculous.

Yes, we should mock these little tyrants who fantasize that their feelings should trump other people’s freedom. But we must go further than that. We must remake the case for robust individualism and the virtue of moral autonomy against the fashion for fragility; against the misanthropic view of people as objects shaped and damaged by speech rather than as active subjects who can independently imbibe, judge and make decisions about the speech they hear.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon committed an egregious error a few days
ago. He woke up and got out of bed. He shouldn’t have. Had he remained
in bed, perhaps, perhaps, he might have managed to get through the day
without saying something exceedingly stupid.

Before a meeting of the UN Security Council, Ban Ki-moon justified
terrorism. That’s right, he said it was “human nature.” His exact
words were “It is human nature to react to occupation.”

Human nature to stick a knife in someone’s head or ram a car into a
baby carriage? Honestly, I have no idea what kind of society Ban is
from but I’m thinking it (and he) needs to be reprogrammed.

Human nature?