Editorial Article
Ben Gurion University - Lee Kaplan Takes Neve Gordon
(Dept of Political Science) to Task; Provides Rebuttal to Gordon's
Attacks on Kaplan and the Haifa Court's Credibility
Gordon celebrates
Rachel Corrie's "martyrdom" as one unconsummated Human Shield for
Terrorists only can. Kaplan fills in the blanks about the
terrorist-accomplice Rachel Corrie that Gordon conveniently wishes
others to ignore. "The Nation" itself refused to run Lee Kaplan's
Rebuttal, showing that its one-time Stalinistic Tendencies are still
alive and well!
One
such victim of the demise of academic standards [in the Social
Science and Humanities, particularly in History and Political
Science and Communications Departments] was the young woman Rachel
Corrie, who died while trying to interfere with the work of an
Israeli army earth mover operating in Gaza…
…
Gordon recently wrote an Op-Ed piece in the extremist anti-Semitic
"The Nation," magazine, which celebrated the "martyrdom" of Rachel
Corrie and questioned my own journalistic integrity. This coming
from someone whose main venue for venting his opinions is the
Neo-Nazi "Counterpunch" web site and whose Bash-Israel diatribes are
also published on the site of Holocaust Denier Ernst Zundel.
Gordon specifically attacks me for submitting a photograph that
was cited in the 145 page transcript of the trial in which ISM
activists in the West Bank are shown waving terrorist-provided
machine guns in the presence of an Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorist
and a Palestinian policeman.
…
Gordon is supposed to be a college
professor so one might assume he knows how
to do research. Well, one would be
wrong. Gordon's academic record consists almost entirely of churning
out anti-Israel hate propaganda misrepresented as research. The
photos, he claims, attempted to impute guilt of the ISM by
association. My article
here names the people in the photos
and discusses the ISM at length…
Before I
parse the rest of Gordon's "article" in the Nation, let me show you
another photo, this one of Neve Gordon:

The above
photo was taken shortly after the Passover Massacre in Netanya,
Israel in 2002, where 31 people, some Holocaust survivors, were
murdered by a suicide bomber who was dispatched and paid by Yasser
Arafat himself. Gordon, in the photo, was acting as a human shield
for Arafat who was surrounded in the PLO's headquarters by the IDF.
Gordon entered Ramallah illegally, a bit like Rachel Corrie in Gaza, in order to interfere with Israeli army anti-terror operations.
The ISM was
founded by similar "human shields." You can see why Gordon embraces
them. In the photo, Gordon is clearly making a victory and
solidarity salute in support of Arafat.
…
What Neve Gordon conveniently left
out in his column in the Nation was that Rachel Corrie was recruited
and trained by the ISM. She was even
given a training manual, one that I
furnished to the Haifa court, showing that the organization prepares
all volunteers before going into combat zones to interfere violently
with the anti-terrorist activities of the IDF. Marxist Gordon tries
to suggest that Rachel Corrie may not have agreed with ISM teachings
about terrorism as "legitimate resistance," when she made
statements to the contrary. Actually, Rachel Corrie wrote home to
her mother in praise of the "martyrs" (suicide bombers) who were
fighting the Israelis and in support of "legitimate resistance" (ISM
Newspeak for terrorism). Gordon did not mention in his article in
The Nation that Rachel Corrie wrote copious emails home to her
mother, in which she described entering the weapons smuggling
tunnels dug by Hamas to bring out the dead bodies of terrorists
killed in them by the IDF.
…
"Professor" Gordon, like Rachel
Corrie, likes to pose in front of cameras with terrorists and to aid
international murderers, while claiming to be a peace activist. It
therefore comes as no surprise that he writes such an article in The
Nation, insisting justice was not done for the Corrie family. Since
the Corries were not jailed by Israel for their role in abetting
terrorism, in a sense we agree that justice was not done. The judge
even ordered the Israeli taxpayer to pay the state's cost for the
trial for another ISM propaganda stunt.
The Corries
are touring the world promoting the goals of the Hamas. The trial
was just another publicity stunt by them to damage Israel. Gordon
tries to beget countless other Rachel Corries in his lectures when
he calls upon his students to emulate this young woman who died for
the Hamas.
This Clown is a College professor?
How Little Neve Gordon's attacks against me reveal the sad state
of Social Science in Israel and the absence of Academic Standards at
Ben Gurion "University"
By Lee Kaplan,
www.Isracampus.org.il
6/9/2012
I've spent the last ten years of my
life working as a reporter and investigative journalist. A great
deal of
my work has been writing about college education in the
United States and Israel, and how indoctrination has replaced the
teaching of thinking in social science courses.
Our universities develop wonderful
things in technology and medicine to benefit mankind. But in social
science and humanities courses, particularly those in history and
political science and communications, "education" has morphed into
indoctrination in Marxism, "post-colonialism," Islamofascism, and
anti-Semitism. Radicals who want to impose their world view upon
vulnerable students "discover" pseudo-history and political
paradigms of "oppression." Serious research has been replaced in
much of academia by the expressing of opinions, especially those
vaguely focused upon "social justice." Pseudo-academic advocates
promote academic support for totalitarian regimes and terrorist
movements like Hamas.
One such victim of the demise of
academic standards was the young woman Rachel Corrie, who died while
trying to interfere with the work of an Israeli army earth mover
operating in
Gaza. There she plopped herself down as a human shield for Hamas
terrorists to assist the jihad. The army tractor was operating in a
live combat zone, where Hamas weapons smuggling tunnels were being
cleared out.
Along comes Neve Gordon of
Ben Gurion University in Israel, a great groupie of terrorist
groups and anti-Semitic propagandists, a columnist for the Iranian
state newspaper (which also promotes Holocaust Denial) and the
jihadist al-Jazeera. Gordon recently wrote an Op-Ed piece in the
extremist anti-Semitic "The Nation," magazine, which celebrated the
"martyrdom" of Rachel Corrie and questioned my own journalistic
integrity. This coming from someone whose main venue for venting his
opinions is the Neo-Nazi "Counterpunch" web site and whose
Bash-Israel diatribes are also published on the site of Holocaust
Denier Ernst Zundel.
Gordon is upset because
I flew to Israel last year and provided Israeli government lawyers
with evidence about the real Rachel Corrie and the real
International Solidarity Movement (ISM). This is the ISM of the
Terrorist-Flotilla fame, which also sent Corrie to her death in
Gaza. After she died, Rachel's parents filed a wrongful-death suit
against Israel in an Israeli court and demanded damages from the
state. Gordon claims in his article that the trial, which took place
over two and half years and involved mountains of testimony from all
sides, was a miscarriage of justice. This from the same Gordon best
known for filing fascist SLAPP suits against critics of his own
political opinions as an anti-democratic harassment tactic.
Gordon specifically attacks me for
submitting a photograph that was cited in the 145 page transcript of
the trial in which ISM activists in the
West Bank
are shown waving terrorist-provided machine guns in the presence of
an Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorist and a Palestinian policeman.
Here's the photo from my article, "The
ISM-Terror Connection."

There were actually more such photos
showing other ISM members brandishing guns in them that were
provided to the Court. In some of them the women were disguised as
Jewish settler women to infiltrate Jewish communities in the West
Bank and to aid terrorist groups like Hamas.
Rachel Corrie was in Gaza as a member of the ISM recruited from
Olympia, Washington.
Gordon then wrote:
"The two standing figures appear to be
foreigners, the person in uniform appears to be Palestinian, while
the face of the second person sitting is intentionally blurred (Why?
We are not told). The title of this photo and of another one next to
it (with several people posing in a similar manner, two with guns)
reads, 'Photographs of organization members holding guns, disclosed
by the American journalist Lee Kaplan.'
'Let's set aside the question of whether
the so-called journalist Lee Kaplan—whose claim to fame are articles
he writes for the academic monitoring website
IsraCampus—is trustworthy and think about what these images are
meant to prove.
'The fact is that we are not told where
and when the two additional photos were taken, who the people in the
photographs are, whether Corrie knew them or what their affiliation
is. Yet this uncertainty is obscured by the placement of these
suggestive photos adjacent to the one of Corrie. Through this crude
juxtaposition, the state attempted to impute guilt by association."
Gordon is
supposed to be a college professor so one might assume he knows how
to do research. Well, one would be
wrong. Gordon's academic record consists almost entirely of churning
out anti-Israel hate propaganda misrepresented as research. The
photos, he claims, attempted to impute guilt of the ISM by
association. My article
here names the people in the photos
and discusses the ISM at length. The face of one person is blocked
out because, after providing his undercover report to me, his life
was threatened. Incidentally, the uniformed man in the photo is a
Palestinian Authority policeman.
Before I
parse the rest of Gordon's "article" in the Nation, let me show you
another photo, this one of Neve Gordon:

It speaks for
itself.
The above
photo was taken shortly after the Passover Massacre in Netanya,
Israel in 2002, where 31 people, some Holocaust survivors, were
murdered by a suicide bomber who was dispatched and paid by Yasser
Arafat himself. Gordon, in the photo, was acting as a human shield
for Arafat who was surrounded in the PLO's headquarters by the IDF.
Gordon entered Ramallah illegally, a bit like Rachel Corrie in Gaza, in order to interfere with Israeli army anti-terror operations.
The ISM was
founded by similar "human shields." You can see why Gordon embraces
them. In the photo, Gordon is clearly making a victory and
solidarity salute in support of Arafat. Captured documents have
showed that Arafat personally signed off on the Netanya bombing and
many similar terror attacks. Gordon has been involved with the ISM
many times and frequently is an honored guest at their anti-Israel
pro-terror conclaves in the US.
Gordon, the
Israeli Norman Finkelstein, is still working as a Professor at Ben
Gurion University (in contrast with Norman Finkelstein, who was
fired by DePaul University for being the Chicago Neve Gordon!). From
BGU's ivory halls Gordon continues to call for the dismantling of
the Jewish state.
In his Nation
article attacking me and the Haifa court's credibility, Gordon
further states:
"Underlying the state's reasoning is an
Aristotelian syllogism, bolstered by photographs, graphic figures
and authoritative references. The claim is straightforward:
1) the ISM is an anti-Israeli organization
that supports violence and terrorism
2) Rachel Corrie was an ISM member, therefore:
3) Rachel Corrie supported violence and terrorism
The second argument was similar:
1) during the period in question, Rafah
was a war zone and a closed military area
2) Rachel Corrie chose to be an activist in Rafah, therefore:
3) Rachel Corrie willfully (and illegally) subjected herself to the
rules of engagement that apply in a war zone
If one accepts these conclusions and is
convinced by the claim that the Caterpillar driver did not see
Corrie despite the fact that she wore a brightly colored reflective
vest, then it can indeed be inferred that she carries the blame for
her own death."
Absolutely,
"Professor" Gordon. You got one thing correct. She was
responsible for her own death. The idea she was protecting a
Palestinian home, by the way, is an ISM fabrication, accepted at
face value by the "professor."
What Neve
Gordon conveniently left out in his column in the Nation was that
Rachel Corrie was recruited and trained by the ISM. She was even
given a training manual, one that I
furnished to the Haifa court, showing that the organization prepares
all volunteers before going into combat zones to interfere violently
with the anti-terrorist activities of the IDF. Marxist Gordon tries
to suggest that Rachel Corrie may not have agreed with ISM teachings
about terrorism as "legitimate resistance," when she made
statements to the contrary. Actually, Rachel Corrie wrote home to
her mother in praise of the "martyrs" (suicide bombers) who were
fighting the Israelis and in support of "legitimate resistance" (ISM
Newspeak for terrorism). Gordon did not mention in his article in
The Nation that Rachel Corrie wrote copious emails home to her
mother, in which she described entering the weapons smuggling
tunnels dug by Hamas to bring out the dead bodies of terrorists
killed in them by the IDF. Rachel did this under the directions of
her terrorist handler named Mohammed Qishta, who was mentioned in
her emails home to her mother and in other ISM communiques.
Testimony in
the trial by ISM activists proved she was not protecting any "home"
when she was killed. That was a fictional scenario
concocted later by ISM member Joseph
Carr, who
doctored photos to make it look like Corrie was protecting a house
when she was run over. Yes, the ISM
has discovered the propaganda potential of Photoshop!
I submitted
to the Haifa Court a tape-recorded interview by phone that I did
with Joseph Carr just before the trial. In it, Carr told me how he
and Rachel Corrie had retrieved the body of a dead terrorist in an
open field right in front of noses of the IDF, after being tasked to
do so by Qishta. When I asked Carr whether he was afraid he'd be
arrested by the IDF, he replied, "No, because we knew the Arab
snipers would shoot them (if they emerged)."
Thomas
Saffold, an ISM leader present that same day in Rafah, admitted that
Rachel had gone off on her own and was in a place she should not
have been; a place where the IDF was not expecting any of the
"protesters" to be. She was not protecting any house but was sitting
in front of a bulldozer to stop it from clearing brush in front of a
weapons smuggling tunnel. She did this because she felt secure that
the tractor driver would not emerge from his vehicle for fear that
Arab snipers would shoot him.
That is why
Rachel Corrie did what she did. And it was to assist Hamas
terrorists in a known combat zone. Her death was not formally a
suicide and the Court never said that it was. Her death, however,
was the result of her own unremitting stupidity in playing a game of
chicken with a bulldozer whose driver could not see her.
"Professor"
Gordon, like Rachel Corrie, likes to pose in front of cameras with
terrorists and to aid international murderers, while claiming to be
a peace activist. It therefore comes as no surprise that he writes
such an article in The Nation (or should we call it Das Volk?),
insisting justice was not done for the Corrie family. Since the
Corries were not jailed by Israel for their role in abetting
terrorism, in a sense we agree that justice was not done. The judge
even ordered the Israeli taxpayer to pay the state's cost for the
trial for another ISM propaganda stunt.
The Corries
are touring the world promoting the goals of the Hamas. The trial
was just another publicity stunt by them to damage Israel. Gordon
tries to beget countless other Rachel Corries in his lectures when
he calls upon his students to emulate this young woman who died for
the Hamas.
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