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If anyone wonders while reading up on Israeli academics that support Israel’s enemies on the Israeli taxpayer’s dime as they are profiled here at Isracampus if we are overzealous or not recognizing academic freedom and free speech, no better example of the need for this website exists than Professor Yuli Tamir, who is currently Israel’s Minister of Education.

College professors and the universities that employ them are the ultimate source for future generations in any society. But when academics, like Tamir, due to myriad reasons of narcissism, payoffs, political groupthink, mental illness or just plain stupidity use their positions to indoctrinate students to their own personal views, views based not on academic facts or solid research but on a political agenda that may promote the dissolution of the country, then our educational foundation becomes a source of destruction rather than progress.

While Israel enjoys great advancements in scientific and medical research, the teaching of humanities courses in her universities has become infested with political elites, many of them coffeehouse communists and wannabe revolutionaries. The same situation exists in US universities as well because Israeli universities strive to maintain a constant flow of ideas and cooperation with what takes place in America and, to a lesser extent, in the UK. Marxism is big on US campuses in the humanities and Marxists ensure their type of groupthink continues by only hiring peers that agree with their particular philosophy. Tenure and other perks make this a self-perpetuating system in academia in the US and as goes US academia, so follows the same in Israel’s universities.

While in Israel things are no different, the fact is that Israel, a Jewish state and a democracy, is surrounded by 250 million Arabs and their totalitarian states sworn to her destruction while the US has no such immediate external threat. Subversives within our universities, assisted by fools, can only enable the downfall of the Jewish state from within given this situation.

The best example of how that threat can become very real is that Yuli Tamir is the Education Minister of Israel.

Yuli Tamair received her BA in Biology (too bad she did not stick with science) and an MA in Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received a PhD in Political Philosophy from Oxford. During 1989-1999, she was a philosophy lecturer in Tel Aviv University and a research fellow in the Hartman Institute of Jerusalem, Princeton and Harvard universities where philosophers can philosophize about terrorism and Jew-killing as being part of "resistance" instead of just simply serial murder.

Tamir was appointed a Professor of Education in the Education Department at Tel Aviv University even though her field was Philosophy. In short, she was another starry-eyed philosopher posing as an educator before a political appointment to the Ministry of Education.

One of the telling things about her resume, is that Tamir, like many philosophers, lives on a higher intellectual plain that only she understands. While the average Israeli family lives on about $18,000 a year and has to worry about their kids getting blown up on a school bus, college professors like Tamir work in a cloistered atmosphere, with high salaries and tenure, surrounded by people who can reaffirm the same groupthink. The Israeli family undergoes anxiety at the threat of terrorist attacks and being overdrawn at the bank. But, as Goethe once said, “Stupidity is without anxiety”; Yuli Tamir has the philosophy of “I’m OK, you’re OK" when it comes to the very real possibility of Pan Arabists and Muslims killing 200,000 Jews in the next major war. In fact, she has no anxiety at all because she narcissistically thinks she’s going to prevent any such possibiity of war by continually undermining Israel’s self-defense through education by convincing the Arabs that she hears their pain and accepts their fabricated narrative. As a co-founder of Shalom Acshav (Peace Now) she’s going to make peace with the Arabs despite what they continually say about wiping Israel off the map as their ultimate goal. You see, Tamir is a philosopher and former college professor, so she’s just plain smarter than the average Israeli, and nobody understands this better than herself.

Yuli Tamir as Education Minister on July 22, 2007 approved a school text for Israeli children describing the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as a 'Nakba', or catastrophe, for use in Israeli Arab schools. Asked her reasoning, Tamir replied on Israel Radio that "The Arab public deserves to be allowed to express its feelings.”

Its feelings? Only a pie-in-the-sky philosopher like Tamir could come up with such reasoning. What the average Israeli who pays Tamir’s salary and puts her in charge of his children’s education does not understand is this is an educational philosophy of self-esteem above everything, including facts, that is being disseminated in educational programs and departments of philosophy dealing with education throughout America, where Yuli Tamir cut her academic teeth. Some might call this Israeli monkey see, monkey do of American educational philosophy, a philosophy that philosopher Yuli Tamir likes, but one that Israel can't afford the same luxury of indulging as do Americans. Given Yuli Tamir’s lending legitimacy to the feelings of certain holders of viewpoints with no validity, should Israel also teach the "narrative" of Germans who feel that Germans were mistreated by the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s also be taught to Israeli children for balance?

Simply put, the Nakba is a myth perpetuated by the education ministries of the totalitarian Arab world to justify taking back Israel from the Jews. Rest assured, that had the Jews lost in 1948 and been relegated to mostly refugee status, there would be no Arab state where Israel is today that would teach Arab children about the Jewish “Nakba,” but rather a celebration of victory. The Arabs also perpetuated the myth of a Palestinian nationality and freely admitted to doing so in the early 1970s so people would think they were justified in displacing the Jews by mimicking the Jewish national experience.

Yuli Tamir either is oblivious to or ignores the simple fact that in a March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. ... For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."

And then, on the same day in 1993 when Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn, he spoke the following words on Jordanian television:

"Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."

As Israel’s education minister, Yuli Tamir could teach Arab Israeli children that they are the beneficiaires of democracy and that their fellow Arabs now live in totalitarian societies not founded on law and democracy like Israel. In the interests of real peace Arab Israelis should try to educate their Arab bretheren to this important fact and they should feel good about living in a free society and democracy. Yuli Tamir’s predecessor in the Ministry of Education, Limor Livnat commented on her idea to teach the Nakba to Arab Israeli schoolchildren as being

"miserable," adding that "once the Arab pupils are taught that the establishment of Israel was a disaster, they might infer that they should be fighting against us… our very own educational system may be raising a fifth column."

Smart man that Livnat…

What Tamir does in encouraging Arab irredentism and intolerance among Israeli Arab youth by perpetuating the Nakba myth benefits nobody, neither Israeli Jew or Israeli Arab. Here it is easy to see how Tamir’s philosophy also knows no bounds beyond what she personally wants to believe, much like her fellow members of Shalom Acshav.

The communists in the PLO, the PFLP, always try to persuade the West that they are not anti-Semitic. Yes, they want Israel destroyed to become Palestine, but as a secular non-Jewish state in its place they claim. They even throw in the sweetener of saying it will be a democratic state also.

Meanwhile, many of Israel’s academic intelligentsia like to keep blinders on and not notice how the actions of the Arab world and its umma openly show such a utopian world will not exist once the Jews in Israel capitulate to Arab demands. Even the Gaza Disengagement and resulting missile attacks weren't enough proof for such people like Yuli Tamir, for you see she lives with a different kind of faith than most Israelis, her fellow Jews. No doubt she goes through life believing in the goodness of the world, taking the attitude that the Arab call to annihilate the Jews is really just a misunderstanding of someone who thinks differently and that such a person can always be converted or "educated" to her way of thinking.

Just as with much of the radical Left in Israel, Tamir seems to have a disrespect for the religious Jews inside Israel. It’s not hard to imagine this in a woman who would make Arab mythology part of the educational program of Israeli Arabs to make them "feel good” instead of teaching them the difference between pluralistic democratic societies like Israel and the totalitarian cesspool of the Pan Arab Nation. Tamir wants a secular instead of Jewish state, for a Jewish state hurts the Arabs within Israel’s borders "feelings."

In keeping with such a philosophy, Tamir slashed the budgets of the religious schools in the country to save money while she could find funds to print books about the Nakba nonsense. Ergo, Ms. Tamir could not understand the anger of students at Merkav Haraz Yeshiva in Jerusalem when she recently paid them a condolence call for the eight students murdered there by a Palestinian Arab terrorist a week earlier. Tamir complained how she felt she was inexplicably kicked, spat on and shouted at by a group of students who called her a "murderer" and ordered her to "get out of here" as she left the building.

Apparently for Yuli Tamir, self-esteem in education is only applicable to Arabs and the enemies of Israel they might wish to support. Religious Jewish Israelis are not worth the same consideration, since those Yeshiva students were infuriated by an administration that employs Tamir at the same time it gives guns to Arab terrorists. In both cases, it’s the Israeli taxpayer taking it on the chin. Her passions for excusing the Arabs for their behavior as part of multiculturalism, no matter what it preaches, even has extended to defending the clitorectomies of Arab and Muslim girls as a cultural practice that should be respected. According to a history of Tamir’s background, she wrote an article in the “Boston Review,” a left-leaning political and literary quarterly that ‘anarchists’ read. In the summer 1996 issue Tamir wrote an article titled, "Hands Off Clitorectomy." The article’s theme was that all those Westerners expressing revulsion at the practice of slicing up female genitalia in certain parts of the world are themselves evil insensitive chauvinistic, philistine racists. According to Tamir, Westerners should stop criticizing and allow the Third World to carry on with its enlightened multicultural practice of clitorectomy.

Only a self-absorbed egghead who lives in her own head and works in a cloistered university atmosphere could excuse blatant genital mutilation of other young women. Clearly, Yuli Tamir’s thought processes are disgraceful and sick.

What the readers of Isracampus must understand is that Yuli Tamir is only one Israeli academic of many who support Israel's enemies and their goals of de-legitimizing the creation of the Jewish-Zionist state. Even if this woman leaves her position, there are many others of her ilk who can fill the ranks of the education ministry that is responsible for succeeding generations of children in Israeli schools, and that is a scary thought. Her tenure in the ministry of education only serves as proof of the dangers and damage that can be done when leftist academics are put into positions of power via political appointments.

This is why Isracampus.org is needed.

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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