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Anat Matar describes herself as a philosophy professor who “…was raised in a leftist family and was involved in the past in all sorts of political activities. For example, I was active in the movement ‘The 21st Year’ (1988 - 92), ‘Open Doors’ (later 90s, acting for the release of Palestinian administrative detainees) and now Taayush and The Campus is Not Silent.” Her particular efforts are devoted to attacking the IDF and discouraging Israeli youth from joining. Working with Yesh Gvul, Matar even got a UK law firm to file war crimes charges against Israeli Reserve General Doron Almog and other high ranking IDF officers. She proudly boasted how Almog was unable to disembark from his El Al plane in London for fear he would be arrested and needed to fly back to Israel for safety.

Apparently, Matar is good friends with and a working associate of Anat Biletzki, the former head of B’tselem and Israel’s Communist Party who also was the subject of an expose here at Isracampus.org with whom she co-wrote a book on Philosophy. There’s an old saying that great minds stink alike, as both women seek to mimic in Israel what the radical left on US campuses is doing these days to carbon copy the same thing in Israel’s universities. In particular, this includes trying to discourage young men from joining the Army to defend their country so as to weaken their own homeland’s national defense.

Matar says she was influenced by the Philosophers Wittgenstein, Collingwood and Dummit in formulating her ideas as a Philosophy instructor. Naturally, all three were admirers of Karl Marx. One, Wittgenstein, was said to be a staunch Stalinist.

But it could be said the only Marx that Anat Matar really emulates is Groucho.

It’s almost amusing that another of Anat Matar’s philosophic interests that she lists on her curriculum vitae is “Common sense,” as this radical leftist professor’s activities in discouraging Israeli youth from going into the IDF and her reasons why lack any common sense at all. With Israel surrounded by hostile Arab states whose charters call for the Jewish state‘s annihilation and the extermination of Jews, ceding no rights to the land at all, even land legally purchased by the Jewish Agency and set up by the United Nations, Anat Matar encourages not only her own two boys to refuse military service but works to encourage all Israeli youth to refuse to serve. This is not limited to just in the Territories either, she does not want them to serve in the IDF at all.

Reading more of her resume suggests this woman lives in her own little world in her head. She says she is involved in meta-philosophy (that she spells wrong)—which is the philosophy of philosophy (one conjures up the old scholars debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin) and she is also subscribes to Intuitionism.

Intuitionism can be defined as “the doctrine that in perception external objects are given immediately, without the intervention of a representative idea” and is based on Metaphysical (other worldly) ideas. Voltaire once said, “When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.” In other words, Anat Matar does not see the Universe as do the rest of us; i.e., there are no Arab terrorists, no anti-Semitism, no threat to the Children of Israel, because she does not accept that. In short, she, like most anti-Israel academic leftists in Israeli universities, believes only what she wants to believe and, first and foremost, she believes that Israelis should not serve in the IDF because this somehow oppresses the poor Arabs. It need not make any sense, you see, because as a taxpayer-supported professor at Tel Aviv U we should understand she is, uh, really, really, really smarter than the rest of us Israelis.

One has to wonder how Anat Matar’s convoluted philosophy would be received by the Israeli mother Bat-Shevea Untermann, 33, driving a Toyota last week on Jaffa Street who barely handed her five- month- old baby out the car window to a stranger to save the child just before Bat-Sheva herself was killed by a bulldozer driven by an Arab screaming “Allahu Akhbar”!

The Arab who drove the tractor stopped only after he was finally shot and killed by an off duty IDF soldier who had been refused admittance to his elite unit for two years due to a bad record as a youth, yet persevered and finally managed to get the IDF to admit him. The Arab killer, a convicted drug addict and convicted rapist of a Jewish woman, whose family members praised him as a shahid (martyr), killed two other Israelis and wounded many more. The IDF soldier saved many other lives that day but must now be anonymous for fear of being murdered by other Arabs. He had a philosophy himself too that day, one stated by Rabbi Hillel that says, "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?" That drove him to act and save his fellow Israelis.

Such philosophy does not apply in Anat Matar’s case, as she only concerns herself with the “oppressed” as defined by Israel’s Communist Party and the Arabs of the PLO and Hamas.

We can imagine how if only Anat Matar’s sons, Haggai and Oren, both draft resisters per their mommy, been present during the tractor attack how they might have philosophized on how Israeli oppression caused the desperate shahid and convicted rapist to act in such an assertive way. We have to wonder what their intuition might have been, as it is certainly not to protect the people of Israel.

Israel’s treatment of conscientious objectors has been a slap on the wrist in the past. In fact, one leftist organization even distributed leaflets to IDF soldiers at train stations offering to pay them salaries as they sat the three or four months in jail for draft dodging (IDF conscripts are not paid during their service). The simple truth is that IDF recruitment is down by 50% with many more young people faking reasons not to serve as the country is increasingly threatened.

Of course this is good news to Anat Matar who describes the Palestinian Arabs who support IDF draft desertion as her “allies” and describes service in the IDF as “immoral.” She advises to other mothers, “Don't buy easily the slogans about "security measures" which are "needed" and then actually take more lives, in America, Israel, Iraq, everywhere. Secondly, expose your children to those who suffer, to the pain inflicted on them, to what our government does - don't hide these facts, fearing that your sensitive kid won't sleep well.” In other words, suicide bombers and terrorists, Hizballah, Hamas and other terrorist groups on Israel’s frontiers are all figments of the imagination, and when the IDF stops them and kills them they are only “taking more lives,” not protecting the lives of Israelis.

If the rest of Israelis who pay her salary had her philosophy there would be many more dead Jews.

Apparently her philosophy is if security is threatened in America, Israel or Iraq, it needlessly takes lives when those countries defend against totalitarianism. Yet this silly “philosopher” would never live in any of the countries or entities that pose threats via terrorism or weapons of mass destruction to their own populations as well as the rest of the world. One has to wonder how Anat Matar would philosophize living under a Saddam Hussein or even a Machmoud Abbas. Point of fact, the people in such totalitarian societies she describes as “those who suffer” do so because their leadership is not democratic and takes advantage of them. This is why Israeli Arabs have no desire to live in a Palestinian state instead of Israel.

And here Anat Matar, the self-avowed deep thinker and philosopher, shows how she is neither. She states in an interview, “As for ending the occupation itself, I'm far from being optimistic. But of course, pressure on the U.S. government, boycotting Israel in all sorts of ways - in short, making manifest the similarity between Israel and Apartheid South Africa - all these could perhaps change something. I'm not sure about the short run. But slowly, slowly this should be understood by more and more people.” One wonders where is her concern for the 30% of Israeli children and the elderly who must eat in soup kitchens due to the Arab League Boycott she supports. The suffering of Israelis apparently means nothing to Anat Matar.

The Arabs in Arabic have made clear “occupation” means Israel as a Jewish state. That Anat Matar would make specious comparisons with Israel, the only pluralistic state in the Middle East that is not an apartheid state, and South Africa, that she also would parrot the Arab propaganda so promulgated by the Communist Party in Israel, reveals a groupthink mentality by this silly woman who would have us believe she is a sound investment for the Israeli taxpayers to pay to teach their children how to think and learn.

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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