Raising the Alarm - What May Come After Evacuation of Jewish Settlers From the Gaza Strip


We, the undersigned, feel that it is urgent and necessary to raise the alarm regarding what may come during and after evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip occupied by Israel in 1967, in the event that the evacuation is implemented.

We held back on getting this statement published and circulated, seeking additional feedback from our peers. The publication in HaAretz (22 June 2005) quoting statements by General (Reserves) Eival Giladi, the head of the Coordination and Strategy team of the Prime Minister's Office, motivated us not to delay publication and circulation any further. Confirming our worst fears, General (Res.) Eival Giladi went on record in print and on television to the effect that "Israel will act in a very resolute manner in order to prevent terror attacks and [militant] fire while the disengagement is being implemented" and that "If pinpoint response proves insufficient, we may have to use weaponry that causes major collateral damage, including helicopters and planes, with mounting danger to surrounding people."

We believe that one primary, unstated motive for the determination of the government of the State of Israel to get the Jewish settlers of the Qatif (Katif) settlement block out of the Gaza Strip may be to keep them out of harm's way when the Israeli government and military possibly trigger an intensified mass attack on the approximately one and a half million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, of whom about half are 1948 Palestine refugees.

The scenario could be similar to what has already happened in the past - a tactic that Ariel Sharon has used many times in his military career - i.e., utilizing provocation in order to launch massive attacks.

Following this pattern, we believe that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz are considering to utilize provocation for vicious attacks in the near future on the approximately one and a half million Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip: a possible combination of intensified state terror and mass killing.
The Israeli army is not likely to risk the kind of casualties to its soldiers that would be involved in employing ground troops on a large scale in the Gaza Strip. With General Dan Halutz as Chief of Staff they don’t need to. It was General Dan Halutz, in his capacity as Commander of the Israeli Air Force, who authorized the bombing of a civilian Gaza City quarter with a bomb weighing one ton, and then went on record as saying that he sleeps well and that the only thing he feels when dropping a bomb is a slight bump of the aircraft.

The initiators of this alarm have been active for many decades in the defence of human rights inside the State of Israel and beyond. We do not have the academic evidence to support our feeling, but given past behavior, ideological leanings and current media spin initiated by the Israeli government and military, we believe that the designs of the State of Israel are clear, and we submit that our educated intuition with matters pertaining to the defence of human rights has been more often correct than otherwise.

We urge all those who share the concern above to add their names to ours and urgently give this alarm as wide a circulation as possible.

Circulating and publishing this text may constitute a significant factor in deterring the Israeli government, thus protecting the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip from this very possible catastrophe and contributing to prevent yet more war crimes from occurring.

Please sign, circulate, and publish this alarm without delay!

Please send notification of your signature to
Tamar Yaron
tiyaron@hazorea.org.il
[ tiyaron AT hazorea.org.il ]


WE WOULD ALSO APPRECIATE RECEIVING NOTIFICATION IF THE ALARM WAS PUBLISHED IN ANY MEDIA AND/OR IF IT WAS SENT TO A GROUP DISTRIBUTION LIST.


Uri Davis, Sakhnin,

Ilan Pappe, Tiv'on,

Tamar Yaron, Kibbutz Hazorea,

Moshe Machover to the SWP

I think you are still missing the point. I am not concerned with GA: I have
given up on trying to talk some sense into his arrogant head. Whether he is
given "space to retreat" is irrelevant to the issue at hand. I am concerned
with the possible effect on the anti-Zionist campaign of the left.

The real point is the political blunder the SWP is making by promoting him.
This threatens to compromise the entire left-wing opposition to Zionism.

When established or bourgeois bookshops promote GA, it is regrettable, but
of no great concern to me, precisely because it doesn't compromise the left.
The left doesn't need to dissociate itself from those bookshops.

When Bookmarks promotes him, it is a different matter. It is indeed
regrettable that JAZ find themselves having to picket Bookmarks in company
with AWL. But Bookmarks has brought this about by their obstinate deafness.
JAZ has been virtually forced into this position because it must dissociate
itself from GA and from those misguided bodies on the left who promote him.
This is why I support the picket this evening (which unfortunately I shall
be unable to attend). As I understand it, this is not mainly a protest
against GA (he is hardly worth it) but a way of dissociating oneself from
the SWP/Bookmarks support for him.

If GA is allowed to hold forth in Bookmarks without any left protest, then
all of us may be tarred by the same brush -- thanks to SWP's blunder.

And, by the way, leaving aside GA's unsavoury views about Jews and
Jewishness, I cannot for the life of me understand why the SWP should
promote a person who is not a socialist and is philosophically very hostile
to Marxism.

ATB, Moshe'

Letter from America

"So the boycott campaign is over, or is it? The campaign will be revisited in future AUT conferences, many academics are instituting their own personal boycotts, and the notion that Israel is an apartheid state is now in front of many people as never before. As, an unintended consequence of, an Israel Insider headline has it "the stain remains."

Admit it. You guys lost this one bigtime. All you proved was that your policy of attempting brainwashing of British students couldn't stand the test of debate in a country that is more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis in a community that perhaps the most pro-Palestinian part of society.

The Guardian and the Independent have been publishing articles calling Israel an apartheid state for years. The AUT "boycott" didn't gain you any more supporters.

Buying off the settlers

by Uri Avnery,

Perhaps there are countries where drivers stuck in traffic jams don't get annoyed. They know they can do nothing about it, so they wait patiently. Think their own thoughts, listen to the radio or read until the jam disperses.

We Israelis are not like that. We are a nervous lot. We have no patience. When we are stuck in a jam, we curse the world and the government, demanding a solution, perhaps a dirt road by which we might escape.

This is why I find it so hard to understand the tactics of the settlers, who use the traffic jam as their main weapon. If they believe that by blocking major traffic arteries, burning tires and creating huge jams throughout the country they are going to win the sympathy of the public, they are even more divorced from reality than it seemed already.

Actually, the blocking of roads is a declaration of war against the Israeli public. It marks a clear front-line: the settlers and their adherents on one side and the majority of the population on the other.

That is, indeed, the real front-line. Their stupid tactics just confirm this. They sense that the great majority is against them and say, in effect: if you don't love us, at least fear us. If you don't submit to us, we shall turn your life into hell.

Even foreigners, who follow events on their television screens, can distinguish the creators of this mayhem from ordinary Israelis. Almost all the rioters are knitted-kippa-wearing religious youth, the products of the religious-messianic-nationalist-fanatical educational hothouses.

This is a minority, something between 15% and 25% of the population. But a well organized minority. Their hard core is concentrated in the settlements and the Yeshivot (religious seminaries) and is easy to mobilize. They have leaders with absolute authority, who stand effectively above the law. Their totalitarian discipline finds expression at election times, when 99% of the votes in religious neighborhoods go to the candidate chosen by their rabbis.

Such features lend this minority a power far beyond their numbers. Especially when faced with a weak-kneed, diffuse, apathetic, unorganized majority, without any coherent ideology. That is a classic situation, which has led in many countries to the establishment of fascist dictatorships on the ruins of a democracy that nobody was ready to stand up for.

In the superb German film "Der Untergang" (Downfall), which has reached Israel, too, one sees that even in the last hours of his life, Adolf Hitler expressed nothing but contempt for the "degenerate democracies". But the historic truth is that the "degenerate democracies" stood up to him. True, Britain and the United States would not have overcome him, 60 years ago, without the totalitarian Soviet Union on their side, but they proved that the democratic regime can be counted on at the moment of truth, can mobilize itself and fight even harder than the totalitarian states. The Third World War (the so-called "Cold War") has proved this again.

Is the Israeli democracy up to it?


An old Israeli joke tells of an Israeli captured by cannibals. They put him in a pot and start to light a fire under it, "Wait! Wait!" he shouts, "First of all hit me! Beat me!" When they do so, he jumps out of the pot, picks up his gun and shoots all of them.

"If you had a weapon, why didn't you use it before?" he is asked.

"I can only shoot when I am angry," he replies.

Perhaps that is true for all ordinary Israelis. In order to stand up to the settlers, they need to be angry. And the settlers, with the blindness typical of fanatics, are doing everything possible to make them angry. Their experience over the last 37 years has led them to believe that there is no limit to the cowardice, the indifference and the patience of the majority.

They have a lot of evidence for this belief, since all the media have turned themselves into willing propaganda organs for this dictatorial minority, which has declared war on the government, the Knesset and the entire democratic system.

We have already expounded on this amazing phenomenon: on every news program, in all TV networks, the settlers fill at least 50% of the time with an unending stream of tricks and gimmicks. In the absolute majority of cases, no contrary voice is heard at all, not even for the sake of "balance". The impression created is that this is a private war between the settlers and the Prime Minister (the "Successor of Hitler", as some graffiti have it), and does not concern the general public.

The height of absurdity is reached on State Television, which every citizen is compelled by law to support financially: the entire public pays for what is in practice an anti-State propaganda organ.

During the last years of the German Weimar republic, one of its remarkable traits was the tolerant attitude of the courts towards the Nazi hoodlums, who rioted, beat up passers-by who "looked Jewish", waged street battles with Communists, wounded and killed. They invariably got off with light sentences. The judges treated them as misguided good guys, real patriots who overdid it a bit. Anti-Nazis, on the other hand, when accused of the same behavior, were severely punished. Is something similar happening here?

Like judges, like policemen. That, too, reminds one of the situation here. When the police are faced with right-wing rioters they never use tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, salt bullets or water cannon - which are routinely used against Jewish peace demonstrators, not to mention Arab ones, who may be confronted with live rounds too.


All this is not too much for the ordinary Israeli, at least not up to now. But it is quite possible that money matters will be.

The settlers are playing a very sophisticated double game. Their leaders threaten civil war. On the walls there appear graffiti announcing "We have killed Rabin, we shall kill Sharon!" (Rabin's murderer did indeed come from this camp, but for years we were admonished not to mention this, because it might "split the nation".) Every day, spokespersons use the media to sketch blood-curdling scenarios: masses of sympathizers will march on Gush Katif, traffic throughout the country will come to a standstill, matters will "get out of hand", blood will be spilled.

At the same time, the representatives of the settlers negotiate the compensation they will be paid for their "uprooting". It starts at 400 thousand dollars and may reach several million for a family. They will also get a luxurious mobile home, worth half a million Shekels, for temporary accommodation, and it is theirs to keep even after the government builds them a permanent home. There are also plans to give the settlers a whole stretch of territory north of Ashkelon, where they will enjoy what amounts to de facto local autonomy. It is proposed to give them two dunums for one, the land to be taken from Kibbutzim and Moshavim. One settler lady boasted on television about her 35 hothouses, each worth 200 thousand dollars, for which she expects full compensation.

The fanatics declare that they will not take the money, that they will fight to the last drop of blood. But in practice, every threat just raises the price. The more extreme the language of the settlers, the more money the government is frightened into offering. Hundreds of thousands will march on Gush Katif? Fifty thousand dollars more per family. Thousands of soldiers will refuse orders? Another 100 thousand dollars. Blood will flow? Two hundred thousand more. The sky is the limit.

But we have seen this opera before. We remember the evacuation of the Yamit region in North Sinai in 1982. Settlers threatened suicide in a bunker, Tzahi Hanegbi (now a minister) and his comrades climbed a tall tower, zealots promised violent resistance. It ended with the farce of the white foam battles on the roofs. And what about the money? In the end, not one single settler - not one! - refused to accept the fat compensation on offer. Some of them settled in Gush Katif and will now receive compensation for the second time. If they are shrewd enough to move to a West Bank settlement, they could finish up as very rich people indeed.


All this is happening while thousands of teachers are being dismissed for lack of funds, vital welfare institutions are being closed, cancer patients and others are being condemned to death because their medicines fall outside the "health basket" that qualifies for government subsidy.

And that may, in the end, arouse even the apathetic majority. The moment will come when it will get up and say: Enough! If one looks carefully, one may already discern signs of a rising tide of anger, the "I am not a sucker!" syndrome.

That may be the most positive outcome of what is happening now around the "disengagement plan": The abyss between the settlers and the general public is growing ever wider. The settlers themselves, in their unlimited avarice and hooliganism, are helping to bring this about. Nothing symbolizes this better than the blocking of the roads.

This Tuesday Israel's most popular TV network (Channel 2) launches a five-chapter series with Israel's most popular anchorman, Haim Yavin, a veritable "Mr. Consensus", depicting the settlers as "a fanatical, crazy, racist, disgusting, violent and dangerous sect", in the words of a prominent critic.

Could the consensus be changing?

Haifa University and the “Demographic Problem”
Report by Avraham Oz
Published: 22/05/05

comment from Moshe Machover:

Dear Friend,

The following message from Prof Oz of Haifa University is long, but well worth reading. In my opinion it provides ample evidence justifying the AUT institutional boycott against Haifa U.

On this point, I disagree with Oz’s judgement. He is right in pointing out that Israel’s reaction to the boycott is a reinforcement of the persecution complex: “The whole world is against us...”. This is only to be expected. Israeli-Zionist ideology has always used the self-righteous victimhood complex as a pretext for oppressing its own victims. In this it is by no means unique (cf. the ideology of Serb chauvinism).

But this doesn’t mean that the boycott cannot achieve useful results: wait until it really bites. And, in any case, why should the world pander to Zionist ideological psychopathology?

ATB, M Machover

comment from Greg Dropkin:

In exposing the racist conference at his university, Avraham Oz points out “Needless to say, no Arab speaker: after all, are the patients taking part in medical conferences?”. By the same logic, is it sufficient to examine how Israeli academics and the State of Israel are reacting to the boycott, as Prof. Oz does, or should the voices of Palestinian academics be heard as well? They continue - quite strongly - to call for a boycott. Trade unionists in Britain can respond to their call and prioritise their viewpoint in solidarity, even whilst knowing that some honourable Israelis, like Prof. Oz, disagree with the tactic. It's Palestinians who are on the receiving end of the Occupation and institutional racism.

Dear friends,

First, a warning, derived from TV news reports I watched with the years: those with weak stomachs, please refrain from reading this update.

What would you say if in a university, say, in New York, would hold an academic conference called “The Demographic Problem in New York”, and, perusing the list of presentations you will realize that the “problem” dealt with refers exclusively to the scary proliferation of Jews in New York?

Unimaginable, right?

Well, please note the date of this update. In my (currently boycotted by the AUT) university, a conference was held today, entitled “The Demographic Problem and the Demographic Policy of Israel,” organized by the Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, The Reuven Hecht Estate, and the Chair for Geo-Strategy. In my update from April 12th, I have provided some links as to the identity of the carefully selective list of speakers in that conference:

Professor Yoav Gelber, Head of the Herzl Institute, University of Haifa
(Please look up the following:
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/mar05/gelber.php
http://list.haifa.ac.il/pipermail/alef/2004-January/000172.html)

Professor Arnon Sofer
(Please look up the following:
http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/020628_galili.html
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/10/18/181802.shtml
http://www.palestinetimes.net/issue122/articles.html)

Mr Harry Zesler, representative of the Hecht Estate
(Please look up the following:
http://www.iruim.net/bnaibrith/page.htm)

Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi, Rector, University of Haifa
(Please look up the following:
http://stop-us-military-aid-to-israel.net/b2/index.php?p=74&more=1)

General (res.) Uzi Dayan, Head of the Zionist Council, initiator of the “Apartheid Wall”
(Please look up the following:
http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/
http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-rappaport100703.htm>)

General (res.) Herzl Gedge, Head of the Population Administration, Ministry of the Interior:
(Please look up the following:
http://www.kavlaoved.org.il/katava_main.asp?news_id=1023&sivug_id=4)

Dr Yitzhak Ravid
(Please look up the following:
http://www.dontknowitfromadam.com/Blog_Archives/000109.html)

Professor Sergio della Pergola, Head of Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
(Please look up the following:
http://www.jafi.org.il/papers/2004/june/june24hz.htm
www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/The_Real_Threat_to_Europes_Jews.asp)

Dr Yuval Steinitz, Head of Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee (Likud), one of Likud MKs who opposed Sharon’s “disengagement” plan.
(Please look up the following:
http://www.isracast.com/Transcripts/240504c_trans.htm
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/sep01/steinitz.htm
http://info.jpost.com/C002/Supplements/Intifada/str_04.html)

Needless to say, no speaker who might express a contrary view.

Needless to say, no Arab speaker: after all, are the patients taking part in medical conferences? Read again the title of the conference: they are “the problem!” When a reporter of an Israeli TV news channel reported the event (which developed into a major scandal, as you will read below), interviewed on the spot my colleague Professor Arnon Sofer, the chief organizer of the conference, what would he do to a Bedouine who has ten children, he answered on record, facing the camera: “If it were up to me, I would have arrested him, for he is a criminal.” He did not refer to an ultra-religious Jew, who in many cases is bound to have a similar number of children, or sometimes more. After they are all Jewish, and thus, do not constitute “a problem.”

Since I try to set some limits to the degree of stomach convulsion my job description at the University of Haifa obliges me to contract, I did not volunteer to show up on campus on a day where my attendance is not required for performing my teaching duties. But several of my friends, colleagues and students, went there, to protest. The event is described below, in an Ha’aretz report, and a more detailed account provided by my colleague Dr Ilan Pappe of the despicable event, which represents the way my university interprets academic freedom. Yes, I said my university, not a few right wing extremists who happen to be employed or invited by the university. The guest of honour at the conference was the Rector of the University, Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi, who thought it wise to confer a prestigious prize under the auspices of that conference. This, then, is not a marginal conference tolerated by the university in the name of academic freedom: the well advertised attendance of the highest academic figure of the university (no matter who occupies that capacity at this time) voids any future claim by the university (when their PR consultants will advise them to do so) that it had no part in organizing it.

But before you move to the reports, a few words about the boycott. Some of you would say all this justifies it even further. Two major pretexts advanced by the initiators and supporters of the move were that it may prove effective: perhaps change some minds in Israel, and definitely make noise to bring the Palestinian issue to the forefront. Now, almost a month since it was launched, as an experimental balloon (and before it may well be retracted next week), let’s account for its effectiveness according to those parameters: Indeed the boycott decision made a lot of noise in my university, as well as in Israel and the world. During this month, some atrocities were made by the Israeli security forces, a Palestinian teenager shot by the security forces died in a Palestinian ambulance rushing him to hospital when the ambulance was detained for 15 critical minutes by an IDF watch barrier; Injuring demonstrators against the construction of the evil wall; Allegations of anti-semitism were flaunted to each direction.; Pappe was attacked by the Mini-stress of Education at her speech at the ceremony awarding the Israel prize to scientists, academics and artists; The Israeli cabinet voted 13-7 to confer university status on Judea and Samaria College in the West Bank settlement Ariel (a political move, since the Ariel College is rated one of the lowest ranking in quality among the Israeli colleges, and no academic criterion justifies such a promotion).

My university’s administration had a lively activity during these weeks: do you think that following the boycott they have reconsidered the refusal to put signs in Arabic, in addition to Hebrew and English, on campus? to employ some Arab students in the library or elsewhere at the university? Reconsider the closure of the University theatre closed for mounting plays in Arabic? Reconsider forbidding a Christmas tree installed in Christmas a the university’s main building, the same place were a Jewish Menora was put during Hannuka? Did they raise a voice of protest against the incessant undermining by the Israeli security forces of Palestinian higher education in the Occupied Territories? No, none of these. Instead, they were busy defaming Ilan Pappe; spread officially (via the university’s official spokesperson, a misleading account of the disqualifying, by an alleged anonymous committee, of Teddy Katz’s formerly cum-laude-approved MA theasis; hired a British lawyer to send a letter to the AUT threatening them that if the boycott was not revoked, the university will file a libel suit at a British court; and passing in the Senate a regulation empowering the University use the Appointments and Promotions committee (headed by the Rector) to appoint adjunct lecturers, suggested by members of faculty and endorsed by the Deans, as a declarative statement of support (a colleague of mine suggested parodically Sue Blackwell, the initiator of the boycott, as such an adjunct, and Sue, with a good sense of humour, wrote she would accept the offer once the boycott was revoked, but expressed her doubts whether the Israeli authorities will let her into Israel, or deny her entry, as it did to a group of women having come last week from the UK to support the Palestinians on the West Bank).

In short, the boycott indeed made noise, but not about the Palestinian issue, but... about the boycott. I would advise our International colleagues to learn this lesson and reconsider their decision: if you wish to put pressure on Israel, do it where it hurts, not where it serves just to enhance the feeling of persecution by most Israelis - including those who oppose the occupation. Protest against the persons directly asking for reproach. Or, better still, do something positive about helping and supporting the Palestinians in every way possible.

For better days,

A. Oz
Professor Avraham Oz
Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of Haifa
2105 Eshkol Tower, Mount Carmel, 31905 Haifa, Israel
Office Tel +972-4-8240672 Office Fax +972-4-8249713
Home Tel +972-3-5609627 Home Fax +972-1533-5609627
Mobile +972-50-7220783 Email: avitaloz@research.haifa.ac.il

1. Ha’aretz, 17 May 2005:
Haifa University students protest against ‘racist’ conference on demography

By David Ratner, Haaretz Correspondent

Last Update: 17/05/2005 16:31

Several dozen Jewish and Arab students protested Tuesday morning at Haifa University against an academic conference titled “The Demographic Problem and Israel’s Demographic Policies” that they described as racist.

The students, prevented by campus security personnel from entering the auditorium where the conference was being held, sat down outside and refused to be evacuated.

Conference participants are slated to discuss the forecasts that Arabs will constitute the majority of Israel’s population with several decades.

The student protestors maintain the conference is racist and anti-Arab. They attempted to distributed to conference participants certificates reading “licensed racist” and “the bearer of this certificate completed with honors an advanced course in racism at Haifa University.”

Conference participants include demographic experts Professor Sergio della Pergola of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Professor Arnon Sofer of Haifa University.

2. From Ilan Pappe, this evening:

This morning a group of Palestinian and Jewish students demonstrated outside the hall of the conference in the university of Haifa titled ‘The demographic problem and the Demographic policy of Israel’ - the euphemism used for talking about the Arab Demographic threat and the need to encounter it; by transfer even, if need be. The posters against the conference were brutally torn and taken away by the security guards of the university, bruising and beating some of the students on the way. The students were unable to go into the hall as a wall - what else - of tables and chairs blocked their way into the seats. Cameras were working overtime, taking photos of the Arab students, so that they could be charged with violating public order and brought in front of a disciplinary committee.

My student, L. H., a fragile young Palestine woman, succeeded in getting in: “they thought I was Jewish”, she told me later. She managed to stay calm when one demographer elaborated on the dangers of losing a Jewish majority, and even when Professor Arnon Sofer, claimed that it was me who sent the students to demonstrate as part of my alliance with ‘contemptible’ Europe and ‘despicable’ Britain. She even sat through when he explained that he will not allow Tel-Aviv to become Cairo. The kind of rhetoric one hears in the meetings of the national fronts meetings across Europe and in the neo-Nazi rallies in Berlin. Here it was in an academic conference sponsored and honoured by the Rector.

But she had enough when Yoav Gleber claimed that any numbers of Palestinians living before 1948 were fabricated for political reasons, and in any case if he had to choose between a Jewish State and a Democracy, he prefers the former. She stood up and condemned him and was silenced by the crowd as being stupid and later ushered out of the meeting by the security people.

L. H. is afraid to go into classes today if this is the university she studies in. But she will overcome her fear and continue to demand what is hers by right and virtue. The important question what does it tell us of the University of Haifa. The speakers in the conference came from among its top professors, but also the demonstrators came from that university. The former threw out the latter: oppressed and silenced them. Another question is how best can we help the Palestinian and Jewish students who demonstrated bravely and will be probably charged? I have answered these questions in the past and suggested that only outside pressure can help, but far more important is the question of what will happen if nothing is done? Can you, like me, conjecture the titles of next year’s conferences: ‘The Meaning and Objective of Transfer’; ‘Encouraging Abortion Among Palestinian Women’ etc. Sometimes you feel that the authorities of this university deserve every bit of the trouble that came its way recently.

Conclusion:

So far Ilan Pappe. And now, a comic relief: In accordance with the somewhat hysterical behaviour of my university’s administration, an official - this time Dean of Students Professor Ron Robin - was sent to express the official view of the administration. After bashing Ilan Pappe as a liar, a common practice of my university’s official publications since the AUT boycott was announced, Ron wrote on the university email circuit:

There was no confrontation of any kind, and the sheer nonsense reported by Ilan does not deserve a response. But for the benefit of those interested in the facts: no violence of any kind, no ripping of posters, and as for the bruising of participants, please... I expect a bit more imagination!! But please don’t believe me: Turn on your TV news this evening (all channels were represented at this demonstration). Or better still: why don’t you ask some of the members of Forum Smul who were present (David Blanc, Kobi Pertrozil, Micha Leshem and others). [Forum Smol is the tiny gathering of Left-wing faculty at the University of Haifa, founded by Ilan, myself, and a handful of others about six years ago - A. O. ].

This came about 15 minutes BEFORE the 8pm news came on our screens. Come the news, and lo and behold, as another member of faculty reported to the circuit:

“Ron, Just now on channel 10 they showed ripping of posters by security guards and plenty of shoving. Perhaps your message was premature.”

And a bit later, two of the left-wing “witnesses” referred to by the Dean of Students to corroborate his defamation of Ilan’s account, responded indeed:

Dear Ron,

Sorry to disagree, you should have checked with the security people first.

In the first few minutes of the demonstration, before you arrived (as you recall you were not there from the start), there was indeed some heavy pushing and shoving by the security people (one in particular stands in mind). Some posters were indeed torn, and at least one student was slightly bruised, as far as I could see. He was very shaken by the whole thing and had to be calmed down. It is true that very soon after that, someone was wise enough to instruct Security to calm down and there was no violence, as far as I could see, by the time you arrived and from then on. I am sure that the security will confirm that.

Kobi

I came after teaching at 11h. A line of security guards were stopping the students from getting in. I asked Micha Rav (our Head of Security) why they were not allowing the students in. He told me they had made trouble, and if he let them in they would make trouble inside. I asked how he knew which had made trouble and which had not - he told me they had all of them on tape. So I suggested, and he concurred, that any students who had not made trouble would be allowed in - and I told that to the students. In the meantime the guards had made a barrier of tables, as Ilan reported. Then I went and had a pee. Then I went into the hall, and listened to Prof. Yoav Gelber. Yoav was telling us that the numbers of refugees were overestimates by UNRWA and Arabs, but there were some fair Israeli estimates. For example only 80 were killed in Tantura, and only 40% of the Ezel figure were killed in Dir Yassin. From the number of those that “ran away” (that was the term he repeatedly used. He did not use the term “expelled” even once), we need to deduct 15, 000 that were killed, 80, 000 who weren’t even Palestinians, many who weren’t refugees, eg in Tulkarm they were receiving UNRWA aid although they had run away, but their land, and therefore income, had been taken away. Yoav was quite a Hevreman - he used his military experience to make the point that as Company Commander he too inflated figures to obtain more food rations for his company, and deflated the figures to reduce their guard rota. The audience thought this was an amusing analogy, and laughed.

Toward the end of his presentation, when I could take no more, we had gotten down from 700, 000 plus who “ran away” to ~520, 000 who “ran away”. I found this quite difficult to hear, and left before having to listen to Prof. Sofer. I am sorry I left before Ilan’s student LH spoke out, I would at least have been able to give her some support that might also have restored some of my self respect. The audience were rapt, and clapped at the end of the talks. I can report to you that it was not a pleasant experience. The videos will be on the Herzl Center website in a few weeks time.

Micah

PS in no way am I writing this to corroborate what Ilan wrote. It is none of my business what he wrote, and I do not understand why if Ilan writes something, someone else needs to corroborate it. I find that quite offensive.

I have never lied, says defiant Blair Apr 28 2005
By Jon Smith Daily Post Correspondent

TONY BLAIR last night defiantly insisted: "I have never told a lie" as the Tories continued to target his character in an election campaign onslaught.

Mr Blair accused the Conservatives of shying away from the issues and preferring to attack him personally.

His comments came as Tory leader Michael Howard continued to insist the Prime Minister's integrity was a key issue in the fight for votes on May 5.

"The message I think people should send to Mr Blair is 'we have had enough of your broken promises, we have had enough of your talk, we have had enough of you'," said Mr Howard.

"Mr Blair doesn't like being held accountable, but I think it's very important he should be held accountable.

"I think that's what general elections should be about."

And, speaking in Edinburgh, he told the public: "May 5 is your chance to tell Mr Blair where to get off."

Asked whether he had ever lied to the public, Mr Howard replied: "I'm not aware of any occasion when I have deliberately or knowingly misled people and that's the charge I make against Mr Blair."

Mr Blair hit back in an interview for Adam Boulton of Sky News: "I have never told a lie. No. I don't intend to go telling lies to people. I did not lie over Iraq."

And he added: "In the end you can play the ball or play the man and if they play the man that's probably because they don't dare play the ball."

In separate comments to ITV news' Ballot Box Jury programme Mr Blair said voters would have a valid reason to reject him if they thought he had misled them over the Iraq war.

"You've got to make up your minds about this. If you believe that I stood up there and told a whole lot of lies then that is a reason for not voting for me," he said..

"But I actually took the decision on the evidence I had and I took it honestly believing it was the right thing for the country to do."

The increasingly bitter personal tussle took place as Mr Blair sought to bring the campaign focus back on to education, as did the Liberal Democrats.

Mr Howard was last night spelling out his party's plans on law and order.

But it was the feud between the Tory and Labour leaders which dominated the day.

In his speech in Bolton, Mr Blair said the Tories had an "inept" economic plan and had campaigned on immigration "in a profoundly unpleasant way".

He went on: "Finally, when that fails, they turn to personal attacks on me. My response? I will carry on talking about the issues that matter to the hard-working families of this country: the economy, the NHS, our schools, law and order.

"I don't care in the least about the Tory attacks on my character. I do care about the future of this country.

"I will continue to expose the choice this nation faces on May 5.

"I will talk about policy. I will talk about values."

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said the Tories had "concluded they are losing this election", causing them to mount "the most negative form of personalised campaign".

Last night, the Conservatives unveiled their latest poster campaign, accusing Mr Blair of being "prepared to lie" to win the election,, just as he had over the Iraq war.

And Mr Howard repeated the charge again, saying he supported the war against Iraq but adding: "You could have gone to war and told the truth. That's what Mr Blair didn't do." Mr Kennedy predicted that the Conservative tactics would fail: "They are the losing team in this election."

Both Mr Howard and Mr Blair fell foul of bad weather as they flew in their campaign planes back to London, as there were lightning flashes near both aircraft.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith last night said he stood by his opinion that it was legal for Britain to go to war in Iraq.

Lord Goldsmith's comments came after the broadcast by Channel 4 News of details from his confidential advice to Tony Blair on the legality of the war. The extracts showed that the Attorney General warned Mr Blair that it was "unclear" whether the United Nations Security Council resolution 1441 gave authorisation for military action without a further resolution.

But Lord Goldsmith insisted that the release of the document "stood up" the Government's case that he had not changed his opinion between giving Mr Blair his private advice on March 7, 2003, and giving a statement to Parliament summarising his views ten days later.

Lord Goldsmith said that the document showed how he had gone through the complex arguments over the legality of military action before concluding that, in his judgment, it would be lawful.

The statement read: "The document so far from standing up the case of the Government's critics, stands up the case the Government has been making all along.

"Contrary to the allegations that have persistently been made, it does not say the war was unlawful but confirms the conclusion I reached was that a sufficient basis for the use of force was established without a second resolution."

Israel Honors 9 Egyptian Spies
By: Reuters News Service

Comment by David Shasha of Sephardic Heritage Update

For those of you not familiar with the so-called Lavon Affair - one of the most egregious scandals in the history of Israel - the recent honors accorded to its participants should force us to look back at the matter. The Lavon Affair was concocted by a person named Benyamin Givli in the Israeli Defense Department which was led by Pinchas Lavon. The basic idea was to compromise Egypt by bombing public locations such as movie theaters in order to create the suspicion that Nasser was seeking to harm Westerners. The affair was botched and the spies found out and brought to trial. The Lavon Affair, along with the Mas'ouda Shemtov Synagogue bombings in Iraq, have long been used as proof that the Israelis were intent on using subterfuge in the Arab world to compromise the Arabs and to force out the Jews who lived in those countries. It is unfortunate that these covert operations are not known to Western Jews. In our own Sephardic communities such matters are completely ignored. The two standard sources on the events are Ian Black and Benny Morris' Israel's Secret Wars and Shabtai Teveth's Ben Gurion's Spy. A more controversial and contested approach has been taken in Naeim Giladi's Ben Gurion's Scandals.

---

After half a century of reticence and recrimination, Israel on Wednesday honored nine Egyptian Jews recruited as agents-provocateur in what became one of the worst intelligence bungles in the country's history.

Israel was at war with Egypt when it hatched a plan in 1954 to ruin its rapprochement with the United States and Britain by firebombing sites frequented by foreigners in Cairo and Alexandria.

But Israeli hopes that the attacks, which caused no casualties, would be blamed on local insurgents collapsed when the young Zionist bombers were caught and confessed at public trials. Two were hanged. The rest served jail terms and emigrated to Israel.

Embarrassed before the West, Israel long denied involvement. It kept mum even after its 1979 peace deal with Egypt, fearing memories of the debacle could sour ties.
"Although it is still a sensitive situation, we decided now to express our respect for these heroes," President Moshe Katsav said after presenting the three surviving members of the bomber ring with certificates of appreciation at a Jerusalem ceremony.
What went wrong in the "Lavon Affair" - after Pinhas Lavon, Israel's defence minister when the plot came to light - remains a matter of debate in a country more used to tales of espionage coups.

The Egyptian agents were ignored. The Egyptian Jews were recruited by a fringe unit of Military Intelligence rather than the premier Israeli spy agency Mossad .
The situation recurred in 1985, when U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for passing military secrets to Israel's scientific liaison office.

"As with Pollard, this (Lavon Affair) was a rogue operation," David Kimche, a former Mossad deputy chief, said. "We knew never to go down that road again."

There is a twist to the Egyptian case - the now widespread belief that the bombers were betrayed to the authorities by their Israeli handler, who turned double-agent.
"The general feeling is that he was the one who caused it all," Kimche said.
Under a veil of secrecy, the handler was tried for contacts with Egyptian intelligence and jailed for 10 years. Meanwhile, the agents locked up in Egypt were ignored, excluded from several prisoner exchanges with Israel after the wars of 1956 and 1967.

Now that they have been officially recognised in Israel, the former agents are campaigning for a full account of their operation to be included in the high-school syllabus.

"This is a great day for all of us, those who were hanged and those who died," Marcelle Ninio, the only female member of the cell, said. "We are happy we've got our honor back."

From Yediot Aharonot, March 30, 2005

Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People
Winston Churchill

From Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920.

Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.

And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.

The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honourable and successful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia's economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organisations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain.

International Jews
In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Terrorist Jews
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.

The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

"Protector of the Jews"
Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people. Wherever General Denikin's authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews. The Misses Healy, nieces of Mr. Tim Healy, relating their personal experiences in Kieff, have declared that to their knowledge on more than one occasion officers who committed offences against Jews were reduced to the ranks and sent out of the city to the front. But the hordes of brigands by whom the whole vast expanse of the Russian Empire is becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expense of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs. The brigand Makhno, the hordes of Petlura and of Gregorieff, who signalised their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupefied, half-infuriated population an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms. The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated.

A Home for the Jews
Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism.

Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.

High alert amid warnings of Temple Mount attack
By Amos Harel and Jonathan Lis, Haaretz Correspondents

The Shin Bet security service has raised the level of alert in Jerusalem amid indications that extremist Jews are planning to carry out an attack on the mosques of the Temple Mount, and on the basis of new intelligence has beefed up police and security around the site in the heart of the Old City.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Movement's northern branch, which has made protection of the Al-Aqsa mosque the centerpiece of its activities, has called on Israeli Arab Muslims to flock to the Old City site to protect it from Jewish extremists.

Police on Wednesday announced plans to close the Temple Mount compound to Jews on Sunday, when a right-wing extremist group called Revava was planning to hold a mass rally there. Police fear the activists could clash with Muslim worshipers.

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Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra and Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi have approved an operational plan meant to prevent Revava activists from holding the event. Police will prevent Jews from ascending to the mount Sunday, and will work to prevent any friction between Jews and Muslims in the Old City's alleys.

Jerusalem's police chief, Ilan Franco, announced several days ago that Revava activists would not be allowed to enter the Temple Mount compound. The statement came after reports in the Arab media expressed dismay at Israeli authorities' intentions to grant the right-wing activists permission to approach the compound, revered as holy by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.

Channel One reported Wednesday night that these security concerns have been made known to the political echelon. The radical rightists apparently aim to attack the mosques in the hope that they will disrupt the implementation of the disengagement plan.

The secret service created a ranking from 1-10 with 10 being the highest security risk. Three months ago, the Shin Bet was ranking the security threat at 7, meaning that "there are signs of planning for an attack," and that there are activists "talking about what to do and as soon as possible." Now, however, the ranking has moved to an 8 - and it is based on much more solid information.

Security sources confirmed that there is information about several groups of extremists, though it is not certain to what extent they are in contact with one another. Lately there has been some progress made in the inquiry, but a gag order has been slapped on its details.

A senior security source said recently that the mosques of the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram el Sharif, have become a "hot topic" among radicals, on the assumption that an attack on the mosques would shock the Muslim world, drag Israel into a new war and prevent the disengagement. The source defined the chances of the threat against the mount being actualized as greater than the threat to the prime minister's life, where the security risk remains stable at 6, largely because of the difficulty of protecting the mount.

In response to the Revava plans, the Al-Aqsa Association of the Islamic Movement's northern branch has called on its followers several times in the past few days to remain at the mosque around the clock. The association said that in light of the threats to the mosque by Jewish extremists, it calls on Muslims in Israel to go to the Haram el Sharif and hold all five daily Muslim prayers there and stay there. And it called on East Jerusalem Muslims to go to Al-Aqsa instead of their neighborhood mosques. The association said Wednesday that it is sending buses full of believers daily to Jerusalem and that it intends to pick up the pace ahead of Sunday.

MK Abdel Malik Dehamshe, of the United Arab List, wrote to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon this week asking him to do whatever is necessary to protect the mosques. "I emphasize that in light of the tangible danger to the mosques in Jerusalem, unusual steps must be taken," the MK wrote.

The northern branch of the Islamic Movement has been very active over the past several years in dealing with the Al-Aqsa mosque. Israeli Arabs have much more freedom of movement than West Bankers and Gazans, which enables them to pray in large numbers on the mount every Friday and Saturday. In the announcement issued Wednesday, the association emphasized that people were being called upon to only hold prayers on the mount.

White power: Study of prime-time TV programming reveals secular, veteran Israeli men of European descent rule the screen

By Raz Shechnik

We hear much about how the racism that propelled the founders of Israel has become a thing of the past.  Guess again.

Israel is home to multiple ethnicities and religions, but you would never know it by watching local television shows. A recent study paints a bleak picture of deep-seated bias in the depiction of minorities on the small screen. 

Jewish, secular men of Ashkenazi (European) descent dominate prime-time programming, according to the study. Meanwhile, Jews of Middle Eastern origin are likelier to be associated with crime, violence, and poverty than Ashkenazi Jews. 

Professors Eli Avraham of University of Haifa and Anat First of Netanya College analyzed various programs, including newscasts, talk shows, game shows and dramas for about a year for the study, commissioned by Israel’s Second Broadcasting Authority. 

Their conclusion is that Israel’s minority groups, namely Arabs, Ultra-Orthodox, and new immigrants, have become virtually extinct when it comes to TV appearances. 

Women mostly appear in cooking, lifestyle shows

Meanwhile, women and Israelis of Middle Eastern origin did appear on television occasionally, but to a much lesser extent than their percentage in the population warrants. 

On another front, women tended to be featured in cooking, fashion and lifestyle shows. Settlers were also largely absent from the local television scene, with the exception of news programs.

The study found new immigrants played a central role in only 21 news items during the year, while 1,626 items focused on veteran Israelis. Ethiopian immigrants fared particularly poorly, with only three items focused on them. 

This trend was also seen on talk shows, with guests likely to be veteran, secular Israeli Jews, mostly of European descent. The same pattern held true for game show participants. 

When it came to dramas, 99 percent of characters were Jewish. The only non-Jew to make an appearance on one of the shows was a foreign worker. 

Meanwhile, 20 percent of the Arabs appearing on news shows were presented as holding provocative views, compared to only 5 percent of the Jews.

Moreover, while most newscasters and hosts tended to be Ashkenazi males, minority group members were often cast in the role of “the man on the street.”

‘Things would have to change’

Second Broadcasting Authority Director-General Moti Sklar said he does not intend to ignore the study’s findings. He likened the situation to an owner of a major road who decides to only allow brand new vehicles to travel on it. 

Sklar said the study confirmed an already present gut feeling. 

“Television stations only give expression to a very particular segment within Israeli society,” he said, and added things would have to change. 

“You cannot create a democracy, particularly in a country with so many schisms, when principal groups are not part of the discourse,” he said.

From Ynet News, March 13, 2005

Jewish Community of Armenia Pleads Recognition of Armenian Genocide in Turkey
by Yitzhak Levinson
published at: 2005-03-19, 16:34
last updated at: 2005-03-19, 16:39

(YEREVAN) - . The Jewish community of Armenia appealed last week to the Jewish organizations all over the world to express their civil positions on the issue of recognizing Armenian Genocide in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey.

The report about the appeal was passed by The Armenian news agency - ARMINFO. In 5 weeks more a memorial assembly of the Armenian Holocaust will take place in the Armenian patriarchy in Jerusalem.


The appeal stresses that Ottoman Turkey perpetrated monstrous crime against citizens of its country, inflicted reprisals, and annihilated 1.5 million Armenians. Those facts were consigned to oblivion for decades and were not condemned by the mankind, they claim. "Perhaps", claims the Jewish community leaders in Armenia, "Holocaust would not occur if the world, in proper time, stood together against that atrocity, as it stands on the fight against terrorism". In addition, the Armenian Jewry leaders wrote: "No political or economical interests should prevent recognizing tragedies, common to all mankind".


In opinion of appeal's authors, the issue of recognizing Armenian Genocide in no way directed against Turkish people, and quite the contrary, it will raise the country in opinion of civilization, as it was in case of Germany acknowledged the fact of extirpation of 6 million Jews by the Nazi state. "On the eve of the Memorial Day of Genocide victims April 24 we appeal to those who are not indifferent to the acknowledgment of historical truth, and ask to bow down before the memory of these victims", the appeal says.

The Mess at Columbia University: The Zionist McCarthyites and an Orgy of Hate

 Conference Review: The Middle East and Academic Integrity on the American Campus, Columbia University, March 6, 2005

The legacy of Edward Said, a Palestinian academic who was perhaps the first Anglophone intellectual of any public standing who sought to articulate the hitherto silent voice of the Palestinian Arabs, has become more than a trifling matter among latter-day Zionists.  The recent flap over Jewish student accusations of intimidation by MEALAC professors, MEALAC being the Middle Eastern Studies department at ColumbiaUniversity, perhaps the most prestigious college in New York City, has caused an outbreak of hate and derision the likes of which we rarely see in the seemingly benign world of the modern academy.  Columbia was host to the March 6^th conference which was meant to address the issues arising from the MEALAC controversy. 

 The conference was sponsored by Jewish and pro-Israel groups on the Columbia Campus and largely by The David Project, a recently-formed advocacy project that has made a number of media splashes – most prominently through the work of Rachel Fish, a former Harvard Divinity School student, who created a furor over the donation of $2.5 million to the school by an Arab potentate from the United Arab Emirates – a check that was returned by Harvard in August 2004, a year and a half after Fish’s initial campaign.

Edward Said’s sadly truncated life was contested while he was still living. In 1999, Commentary magazine printed an article which attempted to prove that Said was not a Palestinian.  The writer of the article, a hitherto unknown figure named Justus Weiner, had worked for quite a while seeking to expose Said as a hypocrite and fake. In the style of such exposes, Weiner cut and paste a good deal of sketchy material that was almost immediately discredited by most legitimate sources and nothing was heard from Weiner again – a promised book on Said never materialized.

But what is most important to note in the Weiner episode was the pressing need to find a way to discredit Said.  Such an expose spoke to the power that, by 1999, Said had accrued in both the academic world and in the general media.  With his seminal work Orientalism first published in 1978 by Random House, Said articulated a bold and controversial understanding of the Arab world at a time when that world had been subjected to a persistent demonization of its morality and character.  It should be remembered that the Iranian Revolution was causing all sorts of paroxysms in the American mind and the recent 1973 War in Israel was fresh in the minds of Jews who saw a new vulnerability exposed.  The trip by Anwar Sadat, the late Egyptian dictator, to Jerusalem was a startling moment in the history of the Middle East conflict.

Orientalism was a massive scholarly work that marked the ideology behind Western Imperialism.  While the history of Western Imperialism had been examined in many popular and academic works, Said, a professor of Comparative Literature, went back to the flotsam and jetsam of the Western literary tradition and found a pattern that emerged: From the paintings of Eugene Delacroix to the political pronouncements of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Cromer, Said traced a line of racism and stereotyping that permeated the Imperial project.

This ideological prejudice provided a rational footing to the conquest of what were then thought of as INFERIOR PEOPLES.  The rationalization allowed the “civilized” Europeans to make sense of their enterprise.  In hyper-Darwinian fashion, the 19^th century Imperialists thought that they carried with them an entitlement to subjugate their inferiors. 
And this was one of the most startling developments in Said’s study: The mass of material that he presented showed that the creation of Modern civilization was predicated on the backs of the exploited and the dispossessed. 
While the Americans had begun to look inward at the role of slavery in their own culture, the Europeans – and the Americans – continued to practice a malignant form of racism when it came to Third World nations.

In Orientalism Said fixated on the relationship between Europe and the Middle East in the wake of the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. 
He showed a pattern of abuse that was not merely physical in nature. 
The Western powers, especially Britain and France, loaded up their intellectual baggage with representations of the Orientals that showed them as indolent, lazy, morally suspect and intellectually deficient. 
(We should note that such representations were applied to Arab Jews as well.)

Said was hailed within the academic community for his breakthroughs. 
In a time of post-modern ferment, his ability to make use of literary matter normally considered marginal to political and historical study was a huge advance.   The conservative forces were utterly startled by this work as they were by the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan a decade earlier.  In fact, Said made extensive use of the ideas of Foucault and applied them to what was at the time one of the most pressing political issues of the day.

A year after the publication of Orientalism Said used his literary and academic capital to begin a series of works on Palestine and the perception of Arabs in the media.  If Orientalism had scared the pants off the more timid, The Question of Palestine created a huge uproar among the Zionists and their supporters.  For the first time in recent memory a capable intellectual wrote in the style and manner of a Western-trained academic. 
It must be remembered that from Chaim Weizmann to Abba Eban to Henry Kissinger, the Zionists had many able spokesmen for their cause; spokesmen who could articulate their ideas in proper English that was sensitive to the nuanced understanding of the Western intellectuals and political establishment. 
Since the publication of George Antonius’ The Arab Awakening in 1946, a book that got lost in the sands of time, and was wisely resurrected by Said himself, there was no voice to present the case of those dispossessed by Zionism and by the Imperialism of the West.

The Question of Palestine marked Edward Said as PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE of the Jewish people. 
Threats were made by the JDL against his life, his office at Columbia University was firebombed and his home was guarded by NYPD officers for years after. 

It was clear that a movement was being formed to ensure that Arabs were not to open their mouths in the face of Westernsuperiority.  It must be remembered that Zionist HASBARAH had been a prominent feature in American life for decades. 
Leon Uris’ 1958 novel Exodus was turned into a major Hollywood film in 1960 thus cementing the standard Zionist version of the conflict and etching that version into the American and Western psyche with great force.  It could be shown from the work of Edward Said that Uris and Otto Preminger, the director of the film of the book, were tapping into the hoary myths of Orientalism to construct a demonized portrait of the Arabs. 

But the free market of ideas in the 1950s and 60s did not provide for any articulation of Arab voices.  It must also be recalled that the work of the British-born Jewish Orientalist Bernard Lewis was being used by the political insiders in both Great Britain and the US.  Lewis played a major role in the Cold War and the emerging analysis of the Arab Question in the wake of Zionism and the suppression offreedom and democracy in the Arab world by a West that now saw its energy reserves linked to the promotion of autocratic regimes in the region; regimes that would ensure a free flow of the oil reserves to a West increasingly dependent on that form of energy to fuel its economic engine.

In essence, Leon Uris’ Exodus provided the standard template by which all understanding of the Jewish cause in Zion would be formed: The straggling refugees of Hitler’s barbarity limped their way to Palestine only to find themselves attacked by RED-FACED Arabs and suppressed by the British.  The story of the American ship the St. Louis being sent back from its Palestinian destination back to Nazi Europe was seen as emblematic of the Zionist cause. 
Little known were the insights that Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, would provide decades later in his book The Seventh Million: Israel and the Holocaust and Idith Zertal’s book From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, books that would have been impossible to imagine without the prior work of Edward Said.

In point of fact, the work of Edward Said spurred on a new cadre of professional Israeli historians who sought to rethink the ways in which Zionist history was written.  With the publication of Simha Flapan’s The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities in 1987, followed by Benny Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the same year and Avi Shlaim’s Collusion Across the Jordan in 1988, a new interpretation of Zionist history was offered to the interested reader. 
While Palestinian authors such as Walid Khalidi had been doing studies for some years on the subject, it was not until these Israeli historians published their books that the situation changed – a situation that was brought about because of the work of Edward Said – a body of work that was deeply influential for a whole generation of students in Europe and America.

Said’s reach even extended into the realm of Sephardic studies. 
With the publication of Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History in 1987, the field of medieval study of Arabic culture was transformed in profound ways that highlighted the role of Sepharad/Andalus in the construction of Western modernity.  The emergence of Sephardic Jewish scholars like Ella Shohat and Ammiel Alcalay with their incisive critiques of the way in which Sephardic Jews had too been affected by Orientalism, completely redrew the map of Sephardic self-perception. 
Shohat published an article called “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims” that adapted a title of one of the chapters from Said’s A Question of Palestine.  Shohat’s 1989 book Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation and Alcalay’s 1993 After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture were also works unimaginable without Edward Said’s insights.

Said’s influence both transformed and transcended the field of Middle Eastern studies. 
Hitherto a deeply conservative and even reactionary field of study that was linked to issues of national security and governmental policy, Middle Eastern studies was in the firm control of the Cold Warriors like Bernard Lewis who were welcome in the corridors of power. The view of scholars like Lewis and his acolytes was seen as determinative for foreign policy assessments of the executive branch of the US government.  With the emergence of Said into the field – and it must be recalled that Said was not a Middle East scholar – he was a scholar of Western literature – there was a tremendous uproar.

The field went on the attack and tried to excise the Said factor. 
But many of the individual practitioners in the field were native Middle Easterners who found themselves freed from the old Imperialist paradigms and foci; free to look to native ways of understanding their own histories.

In a book like Timothy Mitchell’s masterpiece Colonising Egypt a new paradigm was brilliantly formulated: Texts by Arabs would be given as much weight as those by those colonialists who sought to enframe the Arabs within foreign paradigms and ways of seeing.  The Arabs would retroactively be given voice to critique and reassess what was being done to them.  Rather than remaining OBJECTIFIED, the Arabs in Mitchell’s study were given AGENCY to tell us what they were actually thinking and how they were affected by what was happening to them.  Focus was taken off of the standard racist ways of appropriating Arab history in the modern period and placed on the ways in which the East and West dealt with one another. 
In the penultimate portions of Colonising Egypt Mitchell presents a dazzling analysis on Husayn al-Marsafi’s book Eight Words which reflects the classical mode of Arabic literary interpretation that was common to the civilized culture that was shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians in the East.

When I first read Colonising Egypt I could not help thinking of the Jewish scholars Susan Handelman and Jose Faur and their attempts to reassert the classical Jewish glossolalia of the rabbinic traditions. 
And here I found a deep commonality in the Jewish and Islamic traditions that brought together the work of Said, Faur and Mitchell into a synthesis that had been articulated in Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs.

Further, Edward Said’s influence reached into the study of the very volatile issues that were retarding the growth and progress of Arab modernity. 
A number of vitally important books on the status of women in the Arab world were published in the wake of Said: Fedwa Malti-Douglas’ Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arab-Islamic Writing (1991), Leila Ahmed’s brilliant Women and Gender in Islam (1992), Beth Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt (1994) and Cynthia Nelson’s Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist (1996) were all works that followed the model of Orientalism
and affirmed the value and power of the humanist critique of religious and nationalist fundamentalisms that Said had pioneered.

I realize that I have spent a good deal of time to provide background on Edward Said and the school of scholarship that he developed, but I think it vital for the reader to understand completely what is at stake in what is going on at Columbia University.  The recent flap over MEALAC is part of the ongoing attempt to attack Edward Said and the Saidian legacy.  This attack has been fought by students and followers of Bernard Lewis, that old Said nemesis, and by groups such as Campus Watch which has focused on the Middle East scholars who are of the Said mold.

At the outset it must be clearly stated that the events at Columbia University have at their core the charges of a number of Jewish students that must be taken seriously.  Whatever the particular ideology of the student or professor might be, the freedom to articulate ideas and opinions is a sacrosanct one that must NEVER BE VIOLATED BY ANY PERSON. 
This having been said, it is common knowledge that professors at universities present their scholarly work and their teachings in a very forceful manner.  But we must accept that the acrimony over an interpretation of Beowulf or The Federalist Papers does not have the same volatility as does views of current political and military conflicts.

I can recall that as an NYU undergrad I was advised against taking any courses in Jewish Studies.  One of the prominent teachers in the department, Baruch Levine, was (in)famous for ripping apart believing Jews in his Bible classes. 
A student articulating religious views of Biblical authorship, I was told on good authority, would be chastised and humiliated in front of the class.

Such tales are legion in the university.  I myself got into a great deal of trouble as a Cornell grad student for not paying obeisance to the aforementioned Bernard Lewis who was, I thought and continue to think, a sworn enemy of the Sephardim. 

The idea that the university is a place where freedom reigns is something of a myth. 
Professors use bullying tactics on a regular basis in their teaching and in their use of grades and recommendation letters. 
In many ways the whole thing is a game of cat and mouse; the ability of a professor to abuse his or her position is in proportion to their own power and the power of their department.

In the case of MEALAC, the department has been buoyed by the legacy of the late Edward Said whose name now adorns a chair in the department. 
The link between Edward Said and MEALAC is determinative in what has been going on.  A number of Jewish students, frustrated at the treatment they were receiving from professors in the department, found an avenue to vent their grievances – not through the university which they claim would not listen to them, even though not one filed a formal grievance with the university – but through the avenue of the aforementioned Rachel Fish and The David Project.

The David Project is a Zionist-oriented organization that presents itself as a human rights watchdog.  One of their campaigns is called “The Forgotten Refugees”; a project to acknowledge "the ethnic cleansing of one million Jews from Arab civilization and Iran." 
We have in our newsletter addressed this problem of nomenclature previously in the case of Iraq and have asserted categorically that there is not one single shred of evidence that formal expulsions of Jews took place in the Arab world.  The matter has become an issue to match the Zionist treatment of the Palestinians against a similar treatment of Jews by the Arabs. 
The evidence of Zionist interference with the Jews of the Arab world – as in the case of The Lavon Affair in Egypt or the Mas’uda Shemtob Synagogue bombing in Iraq – is thus elided and ignored. 
In the spirit of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, we as Sephardim find it COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE that non-Sephardim should be allowed to speak for us.  I think of the famous scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” – the "bring out yer dead" scene – where one of the ostensible dead on the cart shouts out "I’m not quite dead yet!"  Sephardim do not wish to have The David Project speaking in their names.

The David Project produced a filmed record of the accusations of the students against various MEALAC professors.  Professors are accused of various forms of verbal abuse and psychological intimidation. 
As I have said previously, such intimidation is a regular feature of campus life.  This does not make it acceptable or correct and I make no apologies for the professors named in the film.  But problems arise in the course of the film: Only one of the students appears to have attended the classes of the professor under attack, Joseph Massad. 
The film carefully interweaves decontextualized accusations without any evidentiary procedures.  "Columbia Unbecoming" is a classic work of political propaganda: There is no footage of the professors to confront their accusers according to the procedures of due process; there is a fixation on MEALAC with no mention of possible issues in other departments; and the predominant voice in the film is Hillel Director Emeritus Rabbi Charles Sheer who has never attended any of the classes or lectures in question.  Rabbi Sheer seems to be a nice man, but he is presented as an expert witness in the "trial" constructed by the film, and yet his presence is rhetorically measured rather than providing real evidence that might "convict" these professors.

The accusations are very serious and the means to adjudicate them are also in dispute.  The university has standard procedures for the filing of grievances which the students did not follow.  The argument of the students was that the procedures were thought ineffective and useless so no one filled out a form.  Instead, the students hooked-up with a partisan group that is fixated on Jewish and Israeli issues.  This is fine for the group as an advocacy institution, but it serves to undermine the authority and the recognized procedures of the university which has a professional and public responsibility to deal with this matter with integrity. 
The David Project in this case, unlike the matter of Rachel Fish’s advocacy at Harvard, did not respect the boundaries of the university and provide the university with the opportunity to adjudicate the matter in the normal manner.  Rather than attempting to determine whether these abuses were limited to MEALAC, the entry of The David Project and now a seemingly endless number of Jewish and non-Jewish advocacy groups from the ADL to the Zionist Organization of America to Nat Hentoff and Natan Sharansky, the New York City Council, the Israeli Knesset and US Congress have all served to turn this into a media circus.

It seems clear that there are a number of things going on here: There is the matter of the Said-ization of Middle Eastern studies and the takeover by Said disciples of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA), the professional organization of the field that was once in the hands of Bernard Lewis and his followers. 
Two professors at the March 6^th event, Martin Kramer and Ephraim Karsh, from the Lewis school, bemoaned the nefarious influence of Edward Said and his students and followers, stating in very clear terms that MEALAC has been hijacked by the Saidians.  Kramer’s essay on MEALAC “Bir Zeit on the Hudson” (distributed in the conference packet) typifies the arrogance and the prejudice that characterizes this school. 

With the help of Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch and David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine, the views of these pro-Israel partisans have become a big deal. 
The Campus Watch website archives a dossier on each and every US academic (a sister website has just been created in Israel, where Said’s legacy in the country’s universities is perhaps even more pronounced than it is in the US) measuring them according to the strict standards of Pipes’ own Right Wing Zionism.  Campus Watch has fed into the so-called S.H.I.T. list promulgated on the masada2000 website which targets Jewish figures critical of Israel.  Campus Watch attempts not merely to "identify" Jewish "traitors" like Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, A.B. Yehoshua and Avraham Burg as masada2000’s list does, but to burrow into every nook and cranny of the US academic system and use reports from students that it solicits on its website to identify anti-Israel comments by professors.

If all this smacks of McCarthyism, perhaps we need to be reminded of what academic freedom actually means today.

While the sort of bullying that Massad and the others at Columbia are accused of goes on at every university in the world every day, the issue of targeting professors who Campus Watch judges to be "anti-Israel"  is a manifestation, on more than ample display at the March 6^th program, of the subterfuge known as HASBARAH. 

While nearly every single speaker at the conference whined on and on about TRUTH and ACADEMIC INTEGRITY, there was little doubt that by TRUTH the speakers – including civil libertarian hypocrites like Alan Dershowitz and Nat Hentoff – meant THE TRUTH AS THE ZIONISTS UNDERSTAND IT. 

A quote from the handout provided by the organizers from the Zionist Organization of America, a reactionary fringe group that is at this point closer to the ideals of Meir Kahane than it is to the ideals of Stephen Wise (who was lambasted in this orgy of hate for his silence on the Holocaust) who was its founder, says it clearly: "That curricula, textbooks, and other educational materials be free of distortion and prejudice from one side, just as students may be required to read and study Mein Kampf and Edward Said as part of their class, they should be required to read Bernard Lewis and Bat Ye’or."

This last statement sets the entire stage for the bloodfest that I felt obliged to sit through:  Edward Said equated with Adolf Hitler.  Such is the stuff of Bill O’Reilly and his equation of Mein Kampf and the Qur’an.

The program was an Arab bloodletting with Edward Said as its poster boy. 
Rather than debating the issues of what Joseph Massad and George Saliba actually DID or DID NOT DO, each speaker presented a worldwide conspiracy designed to attack Jews at each and every turn. 

From ex-liberals and progressives like Charles Jacobs of The David Project, the feminist pioneer Phyllis Chesler, Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University and Mort Klein of the ZOA and the aforementioned Dershowitz and Hentoff who expressed their own internal angst over their radical past(s) and their current sense of alienation from the manner in which Anti-Semitism has come from the Radical Left, to true reactionary Conservatives like Martin Kramer, Ephraim Karsh and the crusading lawyer Debbie Schlussel who has specialized in her activism against Arabs and Muslims, the various speakers painted an ominously frightening picture of a world of new Nazis coming after the JEWS – as if we were not sitting on Morningside Heights but were in the Warsaw Ghetto. 
And we were never too far from some mention of the Holocaust in many of the speeches.

The program fixated on the legal mechanisms that are in place to get at these Arab barbarians.  There was no mention of the sort of intimidation that regularly takes place in and from the Jewish community against Arabs and those who seek justice for ALL PEOPLE. 
In other words, academic integrity and fairness when it comes to the Middle East conflict is only seen as fairness for Zionists and their supporters. 
We were regaled with tale after tale of the horrors of Arabs and their civilization.  This all came to a head in three speeches, one from Phyllis Chesler on the treatment of women in the Arab world; another from Brigitte Gabriel, a former Lebanese TV anchorwoman who moved to Israel and now lives in the US and has determined that she will tell the truth about Arab racism and hate; and finally the presentation of four African victims of Arab cruelty by Charles Jacobs of The David Project in a shameless display of exploitation – much in the manner that The David Project has sought to "use" the Arab Jewish issue to its advantage.

In each of these cases, the speakers began from a completely fair and unobjectionable premise: Ms. Chesler correctly identified the brutality towards women in the Arab world; Ms. Gabriel presented the hate that is taught in Arab schools; and Mr. Jacobs permitted the African men – all victims of Arab racist persecution – to tell their important stories. 
I would not even question the importance of raising these issues. 
What I do question however is the one-sided approach to the issue. 
A legal case was being made in a partisan manner against Arab civilization.  There were no analogues presented from any other context – as if such abuses were unique to Arab culture and Arab culture alone. 

I have previously mentioned the seminal studies of Leila Ahmed, Beth Baron, Fedwa Malti-Douglas and Cynthia Nelson on the issue of feminism in the Arab world. 
Such scholars depended on the critique of Orientalism that was formulated by Edward Said – the bete noire of the conference – andwhich has been continued in the work of MEALAC and the other entities being demonized by the Jewish partisans.

There is no question that since the redress of the imbalance of power in Middle Eastern studies that the scholars in the field like Joseph Massad and George Saliba and the many Arab and Palestinian advocacy groups that have sprung up in the wake of the 2000 Intifada which has led to so much misery for all concerned in the region, have committed excesses that have been correctly and properly identified by the many speakers at the Columbia conference. 
The problem is that the presentations were so filled with hate and bile any salient impact they might have had was blunted by the sheer violence that was inherent in the way in which the unashamed and completely unrestrained Zionist partisanship took place.

The day was replete with many thinly veiled and some not so thinly veiled threats against Arabs in and out of the academy.  The speakers all made it manifestly clear to my ears that they were all filled with the sort of hatred and racism that they have identified on the other side and that they are ostensibly seeking to outlaw and punish. 
We were regaled to the Zionist myths, intimidations and hammers that led Edward Said to break out of his shell as a professor of literature and passionately articulate the voice of the silent. 
The sort of rhetorical violence from the various speakers often took on ominous tones; the edge of the speeches had a shrillness that served to reinforce the idea that these people were not much better than those they had come to criticize.

This became clear when three of the students from the "Columbia Unbecoming" film stepped forward to make some comments on the film and take a few questions. 
Ariel Beery stepped forward to say that he was unhappy with the tone of many of the speakers at the event and that he and the other students were fighting simply to be heard in a fair manner and not to suppress the right of Arab professors to their speech.  Audience members were visibly upset that the very protagonists of the drama were not on board with the orgy of bloodletting that had been taking place in the auditorium that morning.  One even rudely and with great intimidation demanded Beery to provide evidence of bias on the part of the speakers.  When Beery provided that evidence you could see the visible anger on the part of the audience members.  Beery was not following the script: His presentation of the themes of fairness and equity were not really what this conference was all about: The point of the event was to bash MEALAC and the Columbia administration into submission.

The underlying theme of nearly all of the speakers was that the Arabs were evil and that Jews would have to fight with bare knuckles to do what was needed to "protect" Jews from this virulent and primal Anti-Semitism.

Endless examples were given about how the Arabs have rained terror on the world and how that terror is deeply connected to the Arabs who teach in universities such as Columbia.  The Title VI program – a program that funds academic programs that teach foreign cultures and histories – and various sources of funding were mentioned repeatedly among the not so thinly veiled threats that were marked by the presentation of Rachel Fish which laid out the manner in which lawyers, activists, journalists and politicians should deal with the transfer of money from the Arab world into the American university.  We did not hear of any other attempt to look at sources of funding – other than the ARAB. 
The basic idea is that if certain types of funding can be strangled that Arab studies can be reconfigured to a more Zionist-friendly variant. 
Again, the idea is not to hold ALL FUNDING up to scrutiny, but to strangle Arab studies in its current variant which is perceived to be anti-Israel.

The straw man of fairness in academia that was the veneer at the conference is a mere bugaboo.  What is behind all this is a massive dose of HASBARAH that means to advocate on behalf of the state of Israel.  This, of course, is the same point that is being made to attack the Arab advocates. 
And I fully agree that any advocacy or suppression of free debate – ON ANY SIDE – is wrong and must be eliminated, swiftly and without prejudice. 
It is the height of hypocrisy to examine one side and not another. 
We should be able to freely discuss the issue of violence and injustice in the Arab world. 

The following is a fair articulation of the point:

Where is the vision, where are the values guiding the investment of this great national treasure of ours, which will not last forever? 
How many castles in England, how many Cadillacs, how many Lockheed jets need to be bought before we can turn to other things? 
For this Right Wing I have been describing is not finally interested in its own preservation so much as it is interested in having a good time; no ruling class in history is so unintelligent as this one. 
If it does not have faith in its people, it has no faith in any other values either.  The universities languish.  The student population increases – which is good – yet the curriculum is as antiquated as anything can be.  We must face the fact that there are no achievements to speak of in modern Arab science or most intellectual effort, at least none that have come out of our universities…  We are living through a period in the Arab world of unparalleled economic prosperity on the one hand, and of unparalleled political and social and intellectual poverty on the other hand. 
In what Arab capital is it possible to write and publish what one wishes, to say the truth, to stem the tide repressive state authority, intolerant of everything except its own fantasies and appetites? 
Most of our best writers and intellects have either been co-opted or jailed into silence.

Bernard Lewis?

Daniel Pipes? 

Martin Kramer?

No.

 Edward Said from his 1979 essay "The Arab Right Wing."

One can scour Said’s writings and find the same strident militancy against the forces of Arab anti-Semitism and anti-feminism and racism that we heard from many of the speakers at the Columbia anti-Said festa.  And here is the value and the beauty of free speech – we can be political enemies and continue to discuss and dialogue with one another by finding COMMON GROUND.

The idea that there is only one version of the TRUTH is as spurious a concept on the Zionist side as it is on the Arab side.  So when we hear from Mort Klein of the ZOA, a group that never met a peace it did not like, that we need to have TRUTH – perhaps he needs to look within andfind out the lies that HE is telling.  Perhaps The David Project should contact members of the Sephardic community who are active in preserving and protecting the rights of that community and not simply trying to adapt to the Ashkenazi model that has led to the tragedy of our people.

I am in complete agreement that the Arab world is corrupt and must be reformed so it will stop being a danger to itself and to others. 

 Edward Said was one of the lone voices in the American academy unafraid to speak of such things. 

But he would not stop with a critique of the corrupt Arab regimes – he was defiant in the face of Zionist intimidation and HASBARAH which saw a need to eliminate his voice from the debate.  If it is completely clear that professors at Columbia University’s MEALAC department committed violations of the academic code, they all need to be disciplined according to the rules of the university.  Wemust also call for a full and complete investigation of ALL such threats of intimidation and presentations of spurious scholarship – like calling the end of Arab Jewish life in their host countries "ethnic cleansing" while turning a blind eye to Meron Benvenisiti’s presenting a dossier of evidence on what happened to the Palestinians at JEWISH HANDS by the same name. 
If there are orders to expel Jews from the Arab world please let us have them or do not use such a charged phrase.

History is a contested thing.  There are arguments among historians over nearly everything.  This does not mean that we should simply sit here and languish while injustice takes place.  In the 1960s Columbia University was the site of many rallies and sit-ins – and even a university shut-down by a Jewish-dominated group called The Weathermen – that protested against US intervention in Vietnam and on behalf of minorities.  Today we see many of those same radical activists taking the side of the establishment against those who, like them when they were students, are taking to the campus with their banners and placards protesting oppression and racism. 
As in the 60s’ protests there is some excess and unacceptable behavior that needs to be addressed.  But such excess must not be permitted to turn into a McCarthyite witch-hunt of administrators and professors who are doing what they can to balance the need for free academic expression with the need for scholarly accuracy and rigor.

We need to have a greater tolerance for complexity and diversity of opinion. 
Imbalances are frequently redressed by certain extreme measures to bring the minority up to speed with the majority. 
The current attempt to turn back the clock on Middle Eastern studies to a pre-Edward Said era – a time when Arabs had NO VOICE in the discourse and no way to redress the matter of their own suppressed existence – in the name of academic freedom is a chilling statement of the intent of Jewish and Zionist groups in this country. 

Neither Jews nor Arabs should have a monopoly on anything; all groups must have their right to speech. 

The fears that were raised at the Columbia conference were whether one monolithic "truth" would be able to force out any other forms of advocacy. 
It is unacceptable that Jewish advocates of Israel are made to feel unsafe and at risk by Arab students and professors just as it is wrong for Jewish groups to target professors for their beliefs and opinions. 
So much of scholarship is interpretive that there is no single way to see anything and it is often not possible to present all the various viewpoints on a number of matters in a single forum.  As uncomfortable as I felt sitting at the conference, it was necessary to have the conference take place.  What was maddening and unacceptable to me were the repeated threats – veiled or not – to decimate a school of thought and its practitioners.

Two wrongs, as they say, do not make a right.

I will give the last words to Edward Said himself, from his final book Humanism and Democratic Practice which lends to this discussion a precise formulation and may serve as a proper credo for the real job of the university:

There can be no true humanism whose scope is limited to extolling patriotically the virtues of our culture, our language, our monuments.  Humanism is the exertion of one’s faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages, and other histories.  In my understanding of its relevance today, humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what "we" have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties, including those contained in the masterpieces herded under the rubric of "the classics."  Our intellectual and cultural world is now scarcely a simple, self-evident collection of expert discourses: it is rather a seething discordance of unresolved notations, to use Raymond Williams’ fine word for the endlessly ramifying and elaborated articulations of culture.

David
Shasha