Meet Zalman Amit. Amit is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is an Israeli expatriate who specializes in human behavior. But Zalman Amit’s own behavior toward Israel might be something worthy of its own psychological study.

Whereas, some people say those who study psychology do so because they cannot face their own psychological demons, an analysis of Amit’s activities on behalf of the Palestinians would certainly suggest this is so for him. He is one of the most virulent anti-Israel activists abroad and particularly so in his adoptive country of Canada. It’s not so much a case of his being with a “peace” camp, although he has been active in supporting Gush Shalom, but Amit rubberstamps and verifies any untruthful piece of Palestinian Arab propaganda out there as long as it damns Israel, and as a Canadian he seeks to get his fellow Canadians to reject and boycott Israel both through his writings and his personal activities.

A contributor to Occupation Magazine, a glossy tract set up by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to frame Israel as an “occupier” of Arab land, Amit even wrote an article where he broke down to his best ability every penny going to Israel from Canadian donations, commenting that … “we come to the conclusion that the total amount of money transferred annually to Israel with the blessing of the Canadian tax authorities is around one hundred million dollars. The current scandal threatening to topple the Canadian Government known as the “Sponsorship Scandal”, involves misappropriation of a hundred and fifty to a hundred and eighty million dollars. This is considered national crises of unprecedented proportions. The fact that every year Canadian tax payers fork out two thirds of that amount to another country for purposes over which Canadians don’t have any control and indeed may be destined for purposes not approved of by the majority of Canadians is a rather sobering thought.”

The “Sponsorship Scandal” in Canada involved corruption of the use of Canadian taxpayer funds being given to a French Quebec separatist movement and has no comparison to money, a major part of which is donated by private Canadian citizens, given to Israel. Yet in a magazine whose central goal is the replacement of Israel with an Arab dominated Palestinian state, a magazine Zalman Amit regularly contributes to, he would have us believe Canadian aid to Israel, both public and private, is almost enough of a similar scandal to topple the Canadian government!

This comes as no surprise since Concordia U., his locus in Canada, has been a hotbed of activity by the International Solidarity Movement and various PLO groups. Tadamon, another ISM offshoot, works actively there to get the Canadian government to remove Hizballah from its terrorist list. Concordia’s pro-Palestinian population has even been violent from time to time, such as when they prevented Binyamin Netanyahu from speaking on campus by smashing the windows of the student union building. Not too far away, York University, also in Canada, has also done a lot with the ISM campaign, even getting the Jewish campus group Hillel removed from student clubs in the past. Canada has been actively pursued by anti-Israel groups and has even managed to get the national workers unions to boycott Israel. All of this supposedly has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, you see, it’s just because Israel is a Jewish state that “occupies” Arab/Muslim land. Zalman Amit, as an Israeli ex-pat, only helps to reinforce this deceptive notion for a Canadian audience, as well as on the WorldWideWeb.

It is because Canada is such a hotbed of anti-Israel activity that Zalman Amit has found his niche as another one of those Israeli academic who works as a mouthpiece for Arab interests that seek to dismantle the Jewish state by any means necessary. Whereas one might expect a professor of psychology would have some grasp on reality, Amit would have us believe he only belongs to the “peace” camp that involves constantly embracing Israel’s enemies in anyway possible. But his validations of whatever anti-Israel diatribes the Arabs and certain Jewish academic quislings concoct to further the Palestinian revolution tell us otherwise.

Amit’s never-say-die approach toward bashing Israel has even earned him the title of “righteous Jew” from a Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi Daniel MacGowan. We’re still waiting to hear a renunciation by Amit for such an award, but are not holding our breath. After all, Amit feels it is all part of “academic freedom,” something he also maintains is threatened in Israel. Never mind that the false veneer of academic freedom as a cover for propagating lies against a Jewish state is still working quite nicely among Israel’s in- house leftist intelligentsia on the nation’s own campuses. Sadly, if that were that not the case, there would be nothing here to fill the pages at Isracampus.org.

So, what exactly has Zalman Amit been up to?

Well, for starters, he hosted a forum with the likes of Uri Avnery and Ilan Pappe, both advocates for divestments and boycotts against Israel. The Forum was deceptively billed as a debate, but there was really only one side presented, and that was the side against Israel. The forum appeared online and was part of an E-Zine run by Beate Silversmidt and Adam Keller, two activists who work closely with the ISM with part of its leadership in the San Francisco Bay Area, and offices at the Alternative Information Center on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem in cooperation with Gush Shalom. The Forum used the typical buzz words of the “peace” movement, accusing Israel of “apartheid”, “genocide,” and only making a distinction between if Israel should be dismantled to create “Palestine” (Pappe) or be part of a two state solution while ignoring unending Arab proclamations that such a state would be only a stepping stone to taking all of Israel (Avnery). Arab terrorism is completely ignored, as usual, and history leaves out pertinent details such as that the Arabs started the wars against Israel and massacred Jews for centuries. Readers here can read the results of the Forum at the link above, but hopefully are better versed in Jewish history than both Avnery and Pappe while doing so.

Here was one choice remark by Pappe, who would have his audience assume he is just a peace maven who was graciously hosted that day by fellow peacenik Zalman Amit:

“The idea of longing for Zion as a national union begins in 1882.”

Fascinating, especially for all those Jews who have recited “next year in Jerusalem” for the last 2,000 years every Passover and Chanukah as part of their services. Amit hosted these two “experts” as they talked of the dispossession of the “indigenous” population of the region. Of course, Jews are not indigenous to Israel but interlopers, Amit and his buddies would have us all believe. Amit’s ISM Forum is just one part of his personal public relations campaign against the Jewish state for the disinformation of people abroad who might otherwise support Israel, a democracy constantly under attack by Arabs that have only one true goal: the Jewish state’s annihilation. Needless to say, Amit will do anything to promote boycotts and divestment against Israel to help his Arab friends. This is one psychologist who sees no shades of gray.

But wait, there’s more on Zalman Amit than just the company he keeps and promotes. As mentioned, he feels that academic freedom in Israel has been threatened (no doubt by the likes of Isracampus.org) because false Arab inspired propaganda tales of Jews massacring Arabs en masse need to be accepted in the University sphere even when they did not happen. The case in point here is Amit’s defense of the PhD thesis fabricated by Teddy Katz, a history student at Haifa University, of a massacre of Arabs by Jews in 1948 in the nearby village of Tantura. Katz already testified on the stand when sued by Israeli war veterans for libel and defamation that he fabricated the deliberate killings. Further evidence revealed he’d been paid thousands of dollars by the PLO. But for Zalman Amit, it’s never-say-die as he tries to twist an abuse of academic freedom in the academy into a denial of academic freedom. What is particularly irksome is the forum by which he chose to do it, the radical Internet magazine, Counterpunch. Counterpunch, run by Alexander Cockburn, the scion of a former English Stalinist, out of the US Pacific Northwest is particularly known for its anti-Semitic rants by every crackpot who types a keyboard, even Holocaust deniers.

That Amit wants “peace” and is willing to overlook terrorism against Israelis in discussing it is one thing, but using a forum by some of the biggest Jew haters in the world to advance his theories on academic freedom indicates a psychological imbalance in the equation. Despite denials by Cockburn that anti-Semitism never exists in any of the writings of his website (he has ridiculed any accusations of anti-Semitism as just a red herring to deflect from the brilliant insights into Jewish world dominance, the Israel lobby and false Jewish genocide of innocent Arabs on a daily basis), Counterpunch is frequently used and sighted by the most malevolent Jew haters of Hamas and the PLO on a regular basis. As Cockburn has said in one of his books, “Let’s have fun with anti-Semitism,” because, you see, it just doesn’t exist among the radical Left and thanks to Jews like Zalman Amit that he can point to as an example, he can claim he is right. Zalman Amit, of course, reacted with horror and complained when Daniel Pipe’s Campus Watch website first began exposing academics such as himself for what they do and where they do it. Needless to say, his complaints about Pipes were featured (where else?) on a communist party website.

According to the organization in Canada, Mothers Against Sexual Abuse (MASA), Zalman Amit was paid $25,000 by a wealthy father accused of sexually molesting his 9 year-old daughter to testify on behalf of the father. According to the MASA, Amit “took a $25,000.00 bribe from Andrew Porter in return for making false statements in his favor. He declared that Andrew Porter was not a child molester- because ‘this happens only in lower social classes,’ and after meeting once with the child's mother for only 20 minutes, he shamelessly declared that she was psychotic and unfit mother because of her political stance in favor of the Palestinians’ cause. Zalman Amit recommended that the family court grant the custody of the abused child to her incestuous father. This unprofessional psychologist who screamed from the top of his lungs in the Court that he was a Zionist, that the mother was unfit because of her anti-Zionist stance, today pretends to be himself against Zionism and has joined a certain Palestine Solidarity Campaign.” [Palestine Solidarity is the alternate name for the ISM].

Just like in Alice in Wonderland, things get “curiouser and curiouser” about the personal psychology of psychologist Zalman Amit as regards Israel and the Jews. If the MASA allegations are true, did Amit adjust his opinions about Israel and Palestine for whatever personal gain he could get, whether financial, emotional or egotistical? Does this explain his cozying up to the likes of the Stalinists at Counterpunch and Arab irredentists who practice terrorism against his fellow Israelis? Zalman Amit has even joined the chorus of PLO and Hamas supporters who try to compare the Israelis to Nazis. He even criticizes the different license plates Palestinians use in the West Bank than Israelis have as a means of subjugating the Arabs. Of course, he never mentions the different license plates were something the PLO demanded as a sign of sovereignty at the beginning of the Oslo Accords.

In any case, Zalman Amit is now jumping on the pro-Hamas bandwagon of the ISM in crying about the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza and signing a petition to get his fellow Canadians to support the new Hamastan, this despite the fact that Israel provides enough food and supplies to keep Gaza functioning (at the same time the Arabs shoot missiles at Sderot and Ashkelon).

If only this psychologist would heal himself rather than inflict himself on Israel, Canadian Jewry and the rest of the world, maybe one day a real peace settlement with a secure Israel would be possible rather than an unending war to try and get international support to dismantle the Jewish state. In semi-retirement as an Emeritus Professor, Amit has begun handcrafting bowls from wood to sell on the Internet. Perhaps in doing this he has found his true calling, as his use of the educational academy to aid anti-Semites in trying to destroy Israel is just wasted effort and more indicative of a deranged mind—something not suited to a psychologist. Or perhaps making bowls is just good therapy for someone whose own inner consciousness needs a good cleaning.

========================================

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