UNM Israel Alliance

Khaled Abu Toameh – Hudson New York

During a recent visit to several university campuses in the U.S., I discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah.

Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber.

I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel’s “apartheid system” is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.

I was also told that top Fatah operative Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life terms in prison for masterminding terror attacks against Israeli civilians, was thrown behind bars simply because he was trying to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Furthermore, I was told that all the talk about financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority was “Zionist propaganda” and that Yasser Arafat had done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of schools, hospitals and universities.

The good news is that these remarks were made only by a minority of people on the campuses who describe themselves as “pro-Palestinian,” although the overwhelming majority of them are not Palestinians or even Arabs or Muslims.

The bad news is that these groups of hard-line activists/thugs are trying to intimidate anyone who dares to say something that they don’t like to hear.

When the self-designated “pro-Palestinian” lobbyists are unable to challenge the facts presented by a speaker, they resort to verbal abuse.

On one campus, for example, I was condemned as an “idiot” because I said that a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas in the January 2006 election because they were fed up with financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

On another campus, I was dubbed as a “mouthpiece for the Zionists” because I said that Israel has a free media. There was another campus where someone told me that I was a ‘liar” because I said that Barghouti was sentenced to five life terms because of his role in terrorism.

And then there was the campus (in Chicago) where I was “greeted” with swastikas that were painted over posters promoting my talk. The perpetrators, of course, never showed up at my event because they would not be able to challenge someone who has been working in the field for nearly 30 years.

What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to “resist the occupation” even if that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.

I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.

Ironically, many of the Arabs and Muslims I met on the campuses were much more understanding and even welcomed my “even-handed analysis” of the Israeli-Arab conflict. After all, the views I voiced were not much different than those made by the leaderships both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. These views include support for the two-state solution and the idea of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in this part of the world.

The so-called pro-Palestinian “junta” on the campuses has nothing to offer other than hatred and de-legitimization of Israel. If these folks really cared about the Palestinians, they would be campaigning for good government and for the promotion of values of democracy and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians over the past few years.

The majority of these activists openly admit that they have never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories. They don’t know -and don’t want to know – that Jews and Arabs here are still doing business together and studying together and meeting with each other on a daily basis because they are destined to live together in this part of the world. They don’t want to hear that despite all the problems life continues and that ordinary Arab and Jewish parents who wake up in the morning just want to send their children to school and go to work before returning home safely and happily.

What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the “occupation” as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel.

Many of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas officials I talk to in the context of my work as a journalist sound much more pragmatic than most of the anti-Israel, “pro-Palestinian” folks on the campuses.

Over the past 15 years, much has been written and said about the fact that Palestinian school textbooks don’t promote peace and coexistence and that the Palestinian media often publishes anti-Israel material.

While this may be true, there is no ignoring the fact that the anti-Israel campaign on U.S. campuses is not less dangerous. What is happening on these campuses is not in the frame of freedom of speech. Instead, it is the freedom to disseminate hatred and violence. As such, we should not be surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university campuses across the U.S.

Aren’t we glad we don’t have that problem here at UNM? But still, we should be aware of the trends at the larger universities…

The Washington Times
August 4, 2008
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/5433
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/04/in-academia-hiring-token-jews/
[This version is slightly longer than the Washington Times version.]

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict long ago spilled over into America’s departments of Middle East studies. In an attempt to appear balanced in the face of charges of anti-Israel biases, some departments or programs of Middle East studies have added Israeli scholars to their ranks—a move that at first glance appears welcome.

Yet many of these Israeli academics have built their reputation on scholarship that is harshly critical not only of Israeli policy, but of Israel’s very existence. Anti-Israel scholars who hail from Israel are cited favorably by the entire range of Israel’s critics, from pro-Palestinian groups like PSM, the Committee to Stop Demolition of Houses in Palestine, the Committee to Stop Torture, and Breaking the Silence to Jewish anti-Zionist groups like the American Council for Judaism, from neo-Nazis to Islamists.
The international standing of such scholars received a boost in the mid-1980s with the rise of the so-called “new historians” in Israeli universities. These scholars sought to debunk what they claim is a distorted “Zionist narrative” in Israeli historiography. In practice, they twisted the history of Israel’s rebirth by, among other tricks, dismissing the efforts of the Arab states to destroy the new-born Jewish state as a Zionist myth, and claiming that Israel is built on ethnic cleansing and brutality towards the Palestinians.

Given this hostility to Israel’s very existence, Middle East studies departments in the United States are tempted to hire anti-Israeli Israelis: they inoculate the employer against charges of anti-Semitism while seemingly legitimizing their claims of ideological balance gained through presenting an Israeli viewpoint. All this is achieved without changing the radical, anti-Israel, Arabist prejudices of their departments.

This problem is noted by leading Middle East historian Efraim Karsh, who in his book Fabricating Israeli History observes that propaganda in the field of Middle East Studies has become the accepted norm. In other disciplines, this would have created a serious crisis of credibility. Yet, Karsh notes:
Not so in contemporary Middle East Studies. For such is the politicization of this field that the New Historiography’s partisanship has been its entry ticket to the Arabist club and its attendant access to academic journals, respected publishing houses, and the mass media.

Today, these “new historians” teach at many North American and European universities. In practice, it ensures that students are taught an ahistorical, one-sided interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Some recent examples illustrate the problem:

• Ilan Pappe formally of Haifa University and now with the University of Exeter in England, was one of the driving forces behind the academic boycott movement against Israeli academics that began in the United Kingdom. Pappe believes that Zionism is a genocidal, racialist movement. Here he describes the founding years of the Jewish state:

The number of Jews coming into the country increased by the day—although even at that point, during the 1930s, the Jews were just a quarter of the population, possessing 4 percent of the land. As resistance to colonialism strengthened, the Zionist leadership became convinced that only through a total expulsion of the Palestinians would they be able to create a state of their own. From its early inception and up to the 1930s, Zionist thinkers propagated the need to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population of Palestine if the dream of a Jewish state were to come true.

• Neve Gordon of Ben Gurion University of the Negev was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan this academic year. He has been described by Alan Dershowitz as, “One of the world’s most extreme anti-Israel academics, [Gordon] belongs to the class of rabidly anti-Israel far-left professors whose trademark is the delight they take in comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.” Gordon believes that:

Israel is not a democracy. One-third of the demos does not enjoy a series of basic rights which make up the pillars of liberal democracies. The state of Israel has existed for 55 years and has controlled the Palestinian population in the occupied territories without giving them political rights for two-thirds of this period. Accordingly, the notion that the occupation is provisional or temporary should, by now, be considered an illusion concealing the reality on the ground.

• Oren Yiftachel, a geography professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a Diller Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, states that:

The failed Oslo process, the violent intifada and—most acutely—Israel’s renewed aggression and brutality toward the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, have cast a dark shadow over the joint future of the state’s Palestinian and Jewish citizens …The actual existence of an Israeli state (and hence citizenship) can be viewed as an illusion. Israel has ruptured, by its own actions, the geography of statehood, and maintained a caste-like system of ethnic-religious-class stratification.

Sanford and Helen Diller endowed Yiftachel’s position at Berkeley. Helen Diller admits that she was motivated by the pro-Palestinian activism on campus: “With the protesting and this and that, we need to get a real strong Jewish studies program in there…. Hopefully, it will be enlightening to have a visiting professor and it’ll calm down over there more.” Her comments, though well-intentioned, illustrate the core assumption that the presence of an Israeli scholar guarantees ideological balance in a department.

Sanford Diller has noted the risks involved in trusting the university to fulfill his and his wife’s wishes, and stated that it was never their foundation’s intent to supply a platform at Berkeley for someone of Yiftachel’s views, to which he and his wife are strongly in disagreement.

In Middle East studies, politicized writing and teaching have displaced scholarship, and academic freedom has been redefined as the liberty to dispense with academic standards. Hence, Middle East departments at Columbia, University of Michigan, Georgetown, and elsewhere are populated or even run by individuals like Rashid Khalidi, Juan Cole, and John Esposito. Hiring token Israeli Jews who share their views eliminates debate while providing the illusion of balance.

Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct scholar for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, and manager of Israel & Middle East Affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

Editorial by Lynn Provencio

UNM’s current vision statement does not contain the left-wing buzzwords cited in the article below, but “social justice” teaching is a strong undertow in several UNM departments. Each year there are several courses across the campus that give credit for “community organizing” and “social justice” of various flavors.

Is any credit given for right wing organizing? Has anybody ever gotten course credits for campaigning for Republicans, spending the weekend volunteering with the Minute Men, attending an AIPAC conference or lobbying for offshore drilling? Why not? Chances are the very thought made you laugh. But seriously, objectively, analytically: In what way is it better to go to Central America and teach local people how to be political activists than it is to show local young women practical alternatives to abortion for unwanted pregancies, for example? Is campaigning for the Democratic candidate more academically desirable than campaigning for the Republican candidate? What if a UNM climatologist wrote a professional paper showing that global warming, as described by the UN and Al Gore, were not true? What would be the results for his career at UNM? Good, bad, no effect?

Social Justice at face value is a good thing, of course, and true social justice is an aim for every decent human. But in academic and political parlance it is one of the main codewords for furthering a far left wing social and political agenda. This agenda involves communist ideology, liberation theology and so on, and has a very slanted sense of justice, which is to say practically none.

However, while this left wing current is very strong in many parts of UNM, we can be glad that those of us who disagree with the left wing viewpoint and aims do in fact have the ability to speak up, present our views and work toward our goals in a matter fitting for a public university, the same as our left wing colleagues do.

Whatever “minority” political/social viewpoint you might hold, even political or religious conservatism or Zionism, or some uncommon mix of right and left, you will not be mobbed or harassed for speaking. It only takes the courage to speak up and go against the flow, and you may be surprised at the positive results you see.

More importantly, if those who hold these minority political/social viewpoints do not speak up and give their views and celebrate their causes, it will become increasingly difficult to do so. People who agree, but are less bold will be afraid to speak up alone. Those in the opposing camp, having no opposition, will become bolder in presenting their political/social agenda as truth, and students who do not have strong views will begin to assume the most commonly stated view is the truth, since they hear no other side.

Do your fellow students, staff and faculty a favor, and speak your views out loud with courage and good reasoning, whenever you find something you feel is wrong, unjust or otherwise objectionable.
Don’t be afraid of the bad grade, the bad graduate recommendation or the passed over promotion for holding unpopular views. Nobody ever improved a society, a government or a campus by keeping silent.

When “peace”, “social justice”, “international justice”, “family values”, “choice”, “life”, “grassroots”, “democracy”, etc, become buzzwords at the service of any particular agenda, they have become meaningless sounds, and the ideals that may once have been behind them are not advancing.

The following article concerns Brandeis University in particular and large American universities in general.

Posted by Students for Academic Freedom

Brandeis University is now officially committed to social justice. The university’s “Diversity Statement” says that the university considers social justice central to its mission. Is this controversial? Absolutely, says George Mason law professor David Bernstein, blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy. Universities shouldn’t be in the social justice business, according to Bernstein, a Brandeis alum who thinks the formal commitment is an attempt to attract donations from left-liberal alumni and other like-minded sources.

Citing a brochure used in a class to stress the important of social justice, Bernstein says, “At best this is just p.r. talk and has no effect on academic freedom in the university, and is merely embarrassing. At worst, Brandeis in fact institutionally favors certain ideological views over others, has no claim to be a university devoted to the pursuit of truth regardless of ideological implications.”

But isn’t justice an obvious goal for people of good will across the political spectrum? In theory, yes. In practice, “social justice,” sometimes used synonymously with “social action,” is a campus buzzword that refers rather clearly to the agenda of the left. Bernstein quotes a Brandeis administrator hoping that the university will turn out operators of “socially responsible” businesses and politicians who “head progressive national governments.”

“Social justice” bureaucrats make an effort to keep the language neutral, but commitment to the left shines through. The term often refers to plans for government-sponsored redistribution of income. Other social goals include more anti-discrimination laws, environmentalism, resistance to “oppression” and support for gay marriage and adoption. Columbia Teachers College, perhaps the most vehemently ideological of the “social justice” schools, says education is a “political act” and educators “must recognize ways in which taken-for-granted notions regarding the legitimacy of the social order are flawed.”

The policy makes clear that any would-be teachers who believe in merit and individual responsibility would be better off not showing up at Teachers College: “social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated through systematic discrimination and justified by societal ideology of merit, social mobility and individual responsibility.”

So Bernstein is probably wrong to see the Brandeis commitment to social justice as an attempt to attract financing from the left. More likely it is simply another example of the spread of a partisan codeword and the ideological pressure behind it.