Editorial Article
The real McCarthyism
is coming from those who accuse Isracampus and other campus watch
groups, but it’s…Charlie McCarthyism!   
By Lee Kaplan
www.IsraCampus.org.il
13/1/2010
We have come to the
conclusion here at IsraCampus that there is indeed a type of
McCarthyism going on in Israel’s taxpayer-supported academic
community, but it’s not the type suggested by the late Joseph
McCarthy or what our opponents are suggesting about us.
It is, in fact,
Charlie McCarthyism! For Israelis not familiar with him, Charlie was
a famous ventriloquist’s dummy who entertained Americans with his
wooden head.
Charlie McCarthy was very big on radio and spoke wisdoms to the
entire world. He was the dummy sitting on the lap of ventriloquist
Edgar Bergen’s voice. Israeli academic bashers of Israel remind me
of the wooden dummy. The academic fifth column in Israel’s
universities is also made up of dummies like Charlie McCarthy, whose
words are more often than not inspired and led (or paid for) by an
arm full of funding up the rear end.
A leftist
non-academic named Benjamin Pogrund recently writing in
Ha’Aretz about IsraCampus said, “Israeli
academics are being watched. Vigilantes check what they say or write
- and, if they are judged ‘anti-Israel,’ incite donors to the
universities and colleges where they teach to act against them.
Students are encouraged to spy on their teachers and to report what
they say.” Pogrund then quotes
Professor David Newman, a geographer pretending to be a
Political Scientist at
Ben-Gurion
University: “The academic McCarthyism of the right endangers Israeli
democracy and society. It threatens the very basis of freedom of
speech.”
Pogrund and Newman are incensed that IsraCampus and other campus watch
groups might expose to the public Israeli professors who promote the
academic boycott of
Israel’s
universities, or who work to support the dissolution of the Jewish
state. Pogrund quotes David Newman
in
an interview on an Arab website based in the EU:
“I have no hesitation in calling this a
McCarthyite campaign. What they are doing is very dangerous.”
The term “McCarthyism” according to the
dictionary is “the practice of making
accusations of disloyalty, especially of pro-Communist activity, in
many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or
irrelevant evidence.” Named after the late US
Senator Joseph McCarthy, it
refers to McCarthy’s use of innuendo and false accusations of
treason against his political enemies.
Joseph McCarthy
IsraCampus’ goal
is let the world know about how some of Israel’s academics use the
pretense of scholasticism and academic freedom to aid Israel’s
enemies in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state. We do this by
using what scholarship used to mean: the presentation of facts and
citations. Including the sources of funding for Israel’s academic
Fifth Column.
David Newman is hysterical and
concerned that students tell administrators what their professors
are saying in class, indoctrinating them with seditious
messages. He does not want the public to know about academic faculty
members who support Arab terror groups, often in class. After all,
today’s student is tomorrow’s college professor. Mathematician Koby
Snitz, for example, seems to have learned how to be an anarchist
when he studied at a Canadian university where anarchists were
active against the war in
Iraq. Today, back
in Israel, he is a leader in “Anarchists Against the Wall” and has
been arrested as a violent “human shield” for terrorism.
In the same
Ha’Aretz article, Pogrund continued, “Academics on
the left are the targets. They are vilified as ‘Israel's
academic fifth column’ and ‘our inner scourge.’ They are called
‘traitors’ and are accused of ‘treasonous betrayal’ and of wanting
‘to suck up to and be accepted by the enemy.’”
Of course, when these academics repeatedly support Hamas, while ignoring
its charter to annihilate world Jewry and destroy Israel, or when
they fabricate atrocities by IDF soldiers that didn’t occur, or when
they encourage boycotting Israel and Jews, just like the Nazis did,
or when they openly call for the killing of Israeli soldiers, just
what part of “treason” does Pogrund not understand?
Recently another
accusation of “McCarthyism” against IsraCampus was printed in a
German student newspaper. The Germans, of course, have earned
the moral right to criticize the Jews given their own track record
in fighting occupation in Europe. Anat Matar, a philosophy professor
at Tel Aviv University provided this paper with a quote, claiming
there that Israeli society “has become fascist” because groups like
Isracampus point out to the Israeli public the antics of people like
herself and Professor Newman. Matar also
just wrote in Ha’Aretz that Israel needs to release all
terrorist murderers in its jails.
In the past she was arrested for violently attacking Israeli
soldiers.
We at Isracampus think that the real
McCarthyists in Israeli academia are those who insist that sedition
must always be protected speech while criticism of sedition must be
suppressed. We think the real McCarthyists are the ones who insist
that groups like Isracampus and NGO-Monitor be silenced, and that
sanctions be imposed on those academics who work with such groups.
The real McCarthyists insist that no one should be allowed to call
traitors … traitors, and no one should be allowed to refer to people
who hate Jews … as anti-Semites.
As just one example, we presented Bar-Ilan
University Professor of History
Ariel Toaff, who wrote a book where he claims the Blood
Libel stories of the Middle Ages in Italy are true. Judaism forbids
the use of blood, but Toaff wrote that Jews actually did use the
blood of gentiles in rituals. His proof? There were Jews who
confessed to this under torture, so it must have been
true. Only later did we find that Toaff’s book and website were
being paid for and promoted by a pro-jihad Muslim web organization
in the UK that calls for Israel’s demise. After this became known,
Toaff
recanted a bit, but not enough to sever support from the
financial source in the EU behind promoting his career and book.
Then we have Tel Aviv University Law Professors
Kenneth Mann and Sari Baschi who co-run the
pro-Palestinian NGO, Gisha, funded by an American NGO that gets its
money from Saudi Arabia.
Along comes Tel Aviv University History
Professor
Shlomo Sand touted for his pseudo-history claiming that
the Jewish people is an “invention,” a hoax. This hard-core
communist insists that a Jewish people does not exist, and such a
people is a 19th century fabrication designed to take
land from the Palestinian Arabs (who, it goes without saying, ARE a
real people!). Sand is now touring universities worldwide saying
that Israel’s founding was “rape.” His historical “research,” and we
use that term here very loosely, is fantasy, leaving out things like
historical facts about Jewish history. Sand has been a lifelong
member of Israel’s communist party since the age of 16. Yeah, yeah,
we know, it is McCarthyist on our part to mention this little bit of
trivia.
Political science professor
Menachem Klein is from Bar-Ilan University. He spoke
recently in Washington at a forum of the
Council for the National Interest. This long-time
anti-Semitic organization, founded by the openly anti-Semitic,
ex-Senator James Abourezk, is funded also by Saudi Arabia. Yet Klein
spoke before them in large part in order to support their propaganda
activities against any “exclusively Jewish” state. 22 exclusively
Arab states are not enough for them.
There is no shortage of Israeli “academics” in
bed with various communist parties. Professor
Moshe Machover in London
is so ardently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel that he even takes the
breath away of the Trotskyites there, who believe there’s
room in a communist society even for the Jews.
Ilan Pappe, another pseudo-scholar and former member of Israel’s
communist party, was involved in the fabrication of a PhD thesis
that invented a massacre of Arabs in 1948 that never happened.
For some of them, stoking anti-Semitism is a
way to ingratiate themselves as much as possible with the oil backed
Arab movement against Israel. Why else would a
Neve Gordon, political science department head at Ben
Gurion University, be a personal human shield for the late butcher
of Jews, Yasser Arafat, serve as a sycophant marketer of Neo-Nazi
Norman Finkelstein, or make
a career of supporting the worst of Israel’s enemies?
There is fame and money even in infamy.
Is it really “McCarthyism” to expose professors
who are helping the enemies of Israel? Advocating for peace or
negotiations is one thing, even in foolish and naïve ways; but
issuing calls for the end of the Jewish state or for students to
refuse to do military service is quite another. When they do this
then they are little more than propagandists and subversives,
working against their own country. “Academic freedom” should not be
a ruse for totalitarian movements to destroy a democratic state.
According to the American Association of
University Professors in their
1940 statement on academic freedom, the term “academic
freedom” has three important ideas behind it:
-
Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the
publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of
their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return
should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the
institution.
-
Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing
their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into
their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their
subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or
other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing
at the time of the appointment.
-
College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned
profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they
speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional
censorship or discipline, but their special position in the
community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational
officers, they should remember that the public may judge their
profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they
should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate
restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and
should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking
for the institution.
The members of Israel’s academic Fifth Column
are involved in none of the above. They are involved in brainwashing
in the classroom and in political activism disguised as scholarship.
They pass off their hate propaganda as research and scholarship.
Any academic who rationalizes this
pseudo-scholarship is undercutting academic freedom and academic
standards. Consider that award given at Hebrew University for a
sociology
PhD dissertation setting out to prove that IDF soldiers
never rape Arab women because they are such anti-Arab racists. Some
things are so stupid that only academics can invent them!
Anat Biletzki, as a leader of B’Tselem, declared the late
Hamas founder and chief Ahmad Yassin, who had ordered the deaths of
over 350 Israelis, to be a “civilian” who was “murdered” by the
Israeli government. When she declares to her students that they
should not serve in the IDF, then that is perversion of academic
freedom. Why should Israeli taxpayers have to pay for such hate
speech?.
When Ilan Pappe and a
doctoral student under him
received $6,000 from the PLO to fabricate that phony massacre in
Tantura in 1948, when Ariel Toaff gets free personal worldwide
publicity for medieval blood libels, when Shlomo Sand travels
to proclaim before crowds that the Jewish
people do not exist, when the
European or the Saudis fund anti-Israel “research” or pay salaries
to IDF deserters to bring them to campuses, then “academic freedom”
is being murdered.
There is indeed a
type of McCarthyism going on in Israel’s taxpayer-supported academic
community. It is in the form of a McCarthyist pseudo-academic
assault against Israel and against critics of fanatical
anti-Zionists.
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Op-Ed articles appearing on IsraCampus.Org.il are those of the writer and
do not necessarily represent the opinion of IsraCampus.Org.il
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