http://q4j-middle-east.com
Jabotinsky was both brilliant and essential in the human aspects of Israel’s resurrection and survival.
During my own graduate study days in the late ’70s, I will never forget a conversation I had with the tenured chief honcho professor of one of the doctor seminars. He would later see to it that my own academic career would be nipped in the bud by denying me a Ph.D. dissertation advisor. I was the most advanced doctoral student in the program and the department used me to secure additional funding. But, I asked too many of the wrong questions. Professor Daniel Pipes’ organization, Campus Watch, Professor Martin Kramer’s book, Ivory Towers On Sand…, and a brand new, break away academic organization from MESA, ASMEA, would later emerge over the same issues–all too late to help me, however.
After hearing a fellow doctoral student’s oral summary of her own research project covering the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (Amin al-Husseini), it was my turn to do likewise with the extensive research I had done on Jabotinsky.
At no time during the presentation about the Mufti was it reported that Hitler had made him the leader of the Waffen SS Division in the Balkans in charge of atrocities against Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews. And the professor asked no prodding questions about such things afterwards as well. He simply went along with the whitewash.
Yet, after my discussion about Jabotinsky, the same professor was quick to question about his alleged “fascist connections.”
Alas, such experiences were and still are quite common in too many duplicitous MESA-run classrooms where one set of lenses is used to scrutinize Israel and Zionism and quite a different set–if any at all–is used to critique the “Arab” world.