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After decades in the Israel-bashing centers of Boston, Cambridge, Berkeley, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Irvine, ad nauseum, I decided to come to Israel so I could learn about how rational and intelligent educators react to the psychological and academic slander and falsification against this tiny country which has built world class scientific institutes and contributed so much to world health, agriculture, solar alternative energies, desalinization, integration of people from so many different cultures, successful kibbutzim socialization experiments, etc.

I was a bit idealistic and knew that the falsehoods being peddled around the world would have an effective counterbalancing with the help of the great minds here in the object of this unprecedented worldwide condemnation. The depth of my profound and stunned disappointment in the ignorant and falsified history being shoved down students' throats can hardly be digested. To say that I was shocked at the low level of scholarship and non-existent academic accountability would be a decided understatement. The level of primitive hatred is astounding. After hearing so many academics debase Israel with the misuse of psychological terminology, I realized it was my responsibility to at least analyze the distortion and psychological mechanisms involved in such a widespread and monolithic denial of reality and revision of history, to a near hallucinogenic fantasy world of self-hatred, self-contempt and vilification of one's own identity. As my old colleague, Erik Erikson would say (since he coined the term), Israeli academics were suffering from an "identity crisis."

All over the world it has become apparent that political and social collectivism, i.e. Socialism-Communism was an abject failure. Where implemented, such policies led to intractable poverty and misery economically; and unbelievable oppression and the crushing of the human spirit politically and morally. Multiculturalism and political correctness (PC) are two of the fundamental pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious tenets-- along with a third: radical environmentalism--that have been widely disseminated by intellectuals unable to abandon socialism even after its crushing failures in the 20th century. These tenets have been slowly, but relentlessly absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last decade or so--but primarily since the end of the Cold War. All three have been incorporated into most K-12 curricula and all other learning environments.

They have been at the forefront of attempts by leading academics and academic institutions to rewrite most of history and undo thousands of years of Western cultural advancement. And further, as the culture has been completely saturated with this toxic brew, any attempt to question the tenets' validity or to contest their value is met with hysterical accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, imperialism, bigotry, or--worse of all --intolerance or insensitivity.

The phenomenon of academic fraud was not an isolated occurrence. The more I researched the propaganda of Israel's enemies, the more I saw the names of academics who were being quoted and becoming "useful idiots" (Lenin's term) in the demonization, dehumanization, degradation and delegitimization of this miniscule country and its people. Everybody anointed themselves as "instant experts" on the Middle East and empowered their students to carry this charred torch. Those who would not dare publicly proclaim anything outside their field of expertise have been magically given license to pass themselves off as experts on the matter of "the Jewish problem." The Islamofascists gleefully utilize their "brothers and sisters in solidarity" to further their genocidal agenda while ridiculing these Extreme-Leftist dupes in private. As Sartre said, any Jew is "the Other" when push comes to shove. No amount of traitorous ingratiation helps any Jew when the killing starts. However, there is a lot of money in the business of lies. Many detractors of Israel are "pseudo-intellectual mercenaries" and get a great deal of gratification from "bonding" with those who ultimately hate them.

The mechanisms of "displacement" and "identification with the aggressor" seemed prevalent and the result of this pathology was to set the psychological stage for the justification for a continued "final solution" for the few remaining Jews in this age. Defense mechanisms that are more primitive are also operative and they could lead to much understanding of the ferocity of the self-hatred and heritage-hatred of the suicidal ideologists. Suffering from the illusion that one is speaking an unpopular truth when, in fact, it is a universal and packaged propaganda lie is a malady that is not amenable to treatment or introduction of actual facts.

This pathological fantasy world of hatred is a true prototype of inversion of reality. That is why Orwellian terminology is hijacked to assail Israel. (E.g., this publication is "McCarthyite", racist, fascist, libelous, ad nauseum; this, of course, is an example of the psychological mechanism of "projection" and "projective identification" where one’s true intentions are attributed to the 'Other').

Another important aspect of the pathological "displacement" endemic in Israeli academia is the internalization of guilt for centuries of European imperialism and colonialism in which the well-deserved rage for British, Belgian, Arab, Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish and other true colonial oppressors gets conveniently dumped on to Israel. Therefore, the age of colonialism gets filtered down and distilled to the hatred of Israel. Israel has become a "reservoir of hatred" into which anyone with any difficulty can conveniently and without risk dump that rage into this toxic reservoir. Another masterful psychological warfare victory as so many get off scot-free. In addition, anyone who calls attention to the irresponsible and traitorous actions of the haters is subject to lawsuits to silence them. So much for "freedom of speech." (See the Rachel Ehrenfeld case).

The Case of a Damaging Extremist-Leftist ‘Educator’: Nurit Peled-Elhanan No valor here. This professional educator has turned to malicious indoctrination of a hateful ideology which she advocates to replace the liberal democratic tenets of Israeli culture. Israel has integrated people of all cultures and colors in an ongoing social experiment that has been remarkable given its mere 60 year tenure. Integration of over 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries has been a priority. No refugee camps purposely displayed so as to showcase their ‘victimhood.’

Yoav Peled is an avowed communist who teaches political science at Tel Aviv University. He made news in 1997 after his niece was murdered in a suicide bombing by Palestinians. Peled flamboyantly invited a PLO spokesperson to the girl's funeral and, at the funeral, explained how her death was all the fault of then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Peled pronounced this view to the world in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times. The Prime Minister was insisting on “reciprocity” and received “atrocity” instead.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, lecturer in Language Education at Hebrew University blamed Israel for the death of her daughter Smadar (z’l). Smadar (14 years old) was killed by an Arab suicide bomber on September 4, 1997. Did she blame the Arab murderer? No Way! "Neither Judaism nor Islam nor any religion for that matter are the cause for murder and terror. Racist education is. American imperialism is, and Israeli ruthless regime of occupation is....The people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. The people who are using the most sophisticated disastrous weapons to kill thousand of innocent civilians are not Muslim. They are Christian, and Jewish."

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the sister of Yoav Peled. At the funeral for her own murdered daughter, a spokesman for the PLO was invited to speak and tell everyone how the death of Smadar was all the fault of the Israeli government. Peled-Elhanan is active in the leftist extremist anti-Israel Gush Shalom organization which helps explain some her significant clinical psychopathology.

“And if my son Yigal really does want to participate in the military programs that they impose on high school students starting in grade 10, or God forbid, to enlist in the army of occupation and torment, I will see it as a dreadful educational failure. A terrible maternal failure. And if I do not do everything I can to prevent him from becoming a murderer or a corpse at age of 18 I will know that I betrayed him and my vocation as a mother.” Who else has she betrayed in her highly visible position? Not just tens of thousands of our children.

Only the technical psychological term misuse and misrepresentation used by the anti-Israel Israelis, BBC et al to pathologize any person who insisted on facing the actual reality (“paranoid”: unjustifiable fears?) rather than mindlessly escaping to the safety of academia with their hallucinations (including ‘negative’ hallucinations, i.e. not seeing what actually IS there) as well as ordinary hallucinations of a ‘commitment to peace and stopping terror by Abbas’, the success of leaving ‘land for peace’, the change in intergenerational transmission of Jew-hatred to children in the PA in their textbooks and TV programming, the glorification of the most heinous of crimes and cold-blooded random murder, etc. Of course BBC called us “paranoid” when we fear what has happened on an unimaginable scale since we left the Gaza-Egypt border.

Never a retraction or clarification or even an accounting of the fact that more weaponry and explosives have been smuggled into Gaza in the last 2 years than the previous 40 years. The pathology is …well, malignant and untreated as well as unamenable to treatment. As for me, despite my Civil Rights credentials and working with third World children and in academia for 35 years, I am suddenly pronounced a right wing Nazi for mentioning anything not anti-Israel. And Marx’ great contribution of historical materialism, i.e. facts are real and cannot be ignored or history and possibility for progressive change is undermined…this great boon to understanding is also ignored by the ‘new’ extremist-left.

“Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” Josי Ortega y Gasset (18831955), Spanish essayist, philosopher. The Revolt of the Masses, ch. 8 (1930).

The field of Education is littered with insidious self-haters who ignore the blatant and horrific “intergenerational transmission of hatred” of Jews to all Palestinian children. This is not a racial argument as ‘nature or nurture’ amounts to the nurturing of the most hateful prejudice [See Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 1954] and distortions about the Jewish people with a denial of the legitimacy to live as a human being or as a country. That someone like the ignominious Peled-Elhanan would make a career out of castigating ISRAELI textbooks and trumpeting the illegitimacy of Israel, the racist state, is truly reprehensible as her flowing misrepresentations and apologist distortions masquerade as truth wherever she is invited. It is an insult to my children and all Israeli children that their education is so twisted by this supposed “Educator.”

She educates propaganda while ignoring the terror and its ‘root causes’ in learned spoon-fed hatred from cradle to grave by the Palestinians. “…Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the Jew.” Mark Twain Peled-Elhanan’s recent speech on November 6, 2007 marking ’40 years of the Occupation’ (and 10 years of hate-filled diatribes) at Gush Shalom provides us with a typical inversion of reality and falsification of what our dear Israeli children are taught according to the twisted viciousness of this well-rewarded and decorated desecrator of the dead and the living, this ‘educator’ goes on and on and on (after more than 10 years after her daughter’s murder and 10 years of the same immutable Jew-bashing language and action):

“…Forty years in which Palestinian children are born and raised as prisoners in their homes that the Occupation [see Marx, ibid. on reification] converted into a prison, deprived at the outset of all the rights that human beings are entitled to because they are human. Forty years during which Israeli children are educated in racism of the type that has been unknown in the civilized world for decades…” [ad nauseum; on and on and on to her adoring audiences].

“…Today racism [See Joel Kovel, White Racism, 1977] rules in the Jewish state, tramples people’s dignity underfoot and deprives them of liberty, condemns all of us to lives of hell. For forty years now the Jewish head has unceasingly been bowed in worship of racism while the Jewish mind is devising the most creative ways to devastate and demolish and destroy this country. That is what remains of the Jewish genius, which has become Israeli. Jewish compassion, Jewish mercy, Jewish cosmopolitan-ness, love of humanity and respect for the other [See Sartre, ibid. on the Jew as the eternal Other] have been long forgotten. Their place was claimed by racism…”

“…This racism has erected for itself a monument in its own image the monument of an ugly, rigid, menacing and invasive concrete wall. A monument that proclaims to the whole world the banishment of shame from this country. This wall is our wall of shame, it is testimony to the fact that we have turned from being a light unto the nations to “an object of disgrace to the nations and a mockery to all the countries” (2).[See, George Orwell, 1984; esp. doublespeak]

And this evening we must ask where we take our shame? How will we remove the disgrace? But first and foremost, how is it that the shame does not keep us from sleeping at night? How do we consent to have half our salaries be used for the execution of crimes against humanity? [See Lichtman and Katz on ‘inversion’]

The language that was invented to describe the unspeakable crimes against the Jewish people are cynically perverted to characterize Jewish self-defense: “crimes against humanity”, “our wall of shame”, “object of disgrace to the nations and a mockery to all other countries”, “racism rules the Jewish State…as we bow “in worship of racism”, praise of Arab ‘resistance’……. Peled-Elhanan’s rhetoric has not changed one iota from 1997 to 2008; this is amazing rigidity and insulation from reality, as she lives her quite comfortable “…life in hell.” Ten years is not long enough to penetrate her wall of hatred and rage. Ten years of the same speech. Talk about milking a cash cow. Shameless self-promotion and terror-promotion.

Even at the height of the terror war, when massacres of Israeli civilians were a regular occurrence, Israeli academics continued to vilify Israel and endorse Palestinian claims.

But our academics, at the very moment their own and their loved ones’ lives were being saved, only saw fit to slander the defense effort as “Israeli violence.”

These and so many other nauseating toxic perversions could be reported to The Ministry of Education and Child Welfare Services as child abuse and defamation and contributing to the psychological assault against our children and blatant child endangerment by a so-called professional Educator who does everything she can to set the stage for the slandering and targeting for death of our precious children. The chilling genocidal death cult indoctrination of Palestinian textbooks and children’s T.V. becomes a negative hallucination for this award-winning ‘peace activist.’ [All this is backed up by Orwellian (Orwell,1984) distortion as the horrific terror is never mentioned. (denial, etc.- see above).]; this well-documented filth of transmission of hate and justified murder and suicide bombings to the youngest of children simply ceases to exist in the cynical, hateful world of this “radical” leftist apologist. The educational internalization of the Palestinian culture of death and pre-glorified worship of killers is unprecedented in educational history.

Yet Peled-Elhanan has had 10 years and thousands of Jews blown to bits or maimed and that is not enough time for her to even consider the twisted logic and enabling of genocide; and her brother Yoav still refuses to recognize the abject failure and collapse of Communism and only perverts it for his own self-hating and self-aggrandizing interests. Where is the sanctity of facts and reality which is the central core of Marx’s “historical materialism.” It disappears only when Israel is concerned. This is a great achievement for the propaganda machine of anti-Semitism.

I shall conclude by referring to the sources that best describe the loss of critical and progressive humane thought and actions of the comfortable extremist-left. Groupthink (Orwell, 1984) is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During Groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking.

Yes, Peled-Elhanan is a self-appointed ‘mindguard’ (self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information)whose educational mission is to nurture and protect the hateful and homicidal pathology of Arab children and further their horrific indoctrination, without thinking, without regard to her own daughter’s memory, and with pernicious intent to cause harm to all Jewish children and Jews everywhere. She has had over 10 years to process the grief, rage, denial and all the other stages of the Kubler-Ross cycle of mourning. She has chosen instead to instill her unresolved hatred into yet another generation of Arabs and projecting that cowardly legacy onto my children and all Israeli children. She continues with impunity and the entitled sense of and exhilaration of invulnerability. Even since the start of the Arab dismemberment and killing spree starting about three years after her daughter’s death, she refused to look at the reality. The thousand plus dead and thousands more maimed or scarred for life in the most bestial, savage and cold-blooded ways has no bearing on the callous rigidified code of the extremist-left. It’s simply an ongoing proactive justification for the orgiastic Culture of Death orchestrated with the assistance of the “useful idiot” extremist-left.

Peled-Elhanan escalates her transparent psychopathology with her latest stupefying public ritualistic degradation of the Jewish State and the Jewish People with quotes so clinically insane and out-of-control (total absence of impulse control or superego constraints) that they speak for themselves and cannot be dignified by further analysis, as she has already gratuitously received about $10,000 of free psycho-analytic dialectical psychotherapy (which treatment she would never seek out nor is she amenable to or capable of utilizing) in this paper alone. The following filth is from her latest contribution to peace in our time:

"The Israeli mother as she exists today embodies a motherhood that is distorted, lost, confused and sick." [sic]

"…the murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olives and poisoners of wells are none other than their own … sons and daughters, their children who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. "

Nurit Peled-Elhanan has finally displayed for all to see her devolution, degeneration and public clinical decompensation which will seal her fate in her obsessive-compulsive descent to the shrill pathetic frenzied hell of the madness of her own machinations and to the malignant irrelevance she has so richly cultivated. She should be ordered to take a leave of absence, receive proper psychiatric treatment and then conclusively demonstrate that she is not unfit to teach or continue to abuse academic freedom, students, and the public. This has become a public health and safety issue.

Endnotes

1) [1][See Karl Marx, The 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, for the best account of the psychology of Capitalism, the definitive leftist work on how individuals get damaged by false psychology, devoid of social context; see also Prof. Richard Lichtman, The Production of Desire, 1983, Yale University, The Wright Institute, for the best and definitive Marx-Freud integration and the dangers of mis-education and misrepresentation and cult-think, by one of the pre-eminent thinkers and educators of our time.]

2) Post-Orwellian Distortions: Planned Obsolescence of Facts and Truth As I have said earlier (Leshem…) the extremist-left in Israel is a case study in inversion of truth and reality, where paranoid lies masquerade as true representations of their neat, easy false reality. While pretending to be ‘progressive’ voices they, in fact, demand rigid conformity and disdain critical thinking. Actual facts and truth are relegated to obsolete “relative” concepts that have no meaning in the mean-spirited world of the terror apologists and enablers.

Terrorist Enablers

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Edmund Burke

As you can see, there are many Terrorism Enablers around. Some of these people truly don't have a clue that their behavior is not all sweetness and light and that it encourages the exact opposite of what they think it does (e.g., some of the innocent groups--like the Episcopal Church--who are members of "United for Peace and Justice"). These "Do-gooders" are usually completely deluded about the nature of the terrorist and often cry that we must "try to understand" why the terrorists are angry at us and want to kill us. They believe that with enough soul-searching we can discover how to change ourselves and the terrorism will then cease. They are the same "useful idiots" who said the same things about communism and socialism in the last century as communist and socialist regimes murdered millions and enslaved even more. They are the pacificists and the genuinely good people who continue to maintain a denial so intense that they cannot see that they are supporting Evil.

A second kind of Terrorist Enabler is an individual or group engaging in enabling behaviors for manipulative reasons and for personal gain--primarily because it is financially or politically beneficial for them in the short run. They are deluding themselves as they appease the terrorists or the regimes that support terrorism so that they can earn a few more bucks from them; or politically benefit from opposing efforts to stop terrorists. In truth, they cynically doubt that the terrorist are really "all that bad", and believe that by befriending them, they can have the best of both worlds.

And then there is the third kind of Terrorist Enabler. This kind is as morally reprehensible as the terrorists themselves because their motivation is one with the terrorist. They do their enabling because they gain sadistic pleasure from the acts of death and destruction that terrorism involves, yet since they don't directly participate in these actions, they consider themselves not responsible. They know that they are supporting terrorism and terrorist regimes, and that is why they behave the way they do. They hate freedom and individuality; they hate their own country and desperately wish for its destruction. For them I have no sympathy and I feel nothing but the same contempt and revulsion that the subhuman terrorists engender within me. These are the extremist-left that we are cursed to have in Israel.

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Op-Ed articles appearing on IsraCampus.org are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the opinion of IsraCampus.org