Israeli Academic Extremism
Isi Leibler, retired
Senior Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, asserts its time
to “expose” and “marginalize” tenured Anti-Israel Academics
It is thus surely time to stop ignoring the self-loathing Jews
and Israelis who now occupy key roles in the campaigns to
delegitimize and demonize our people. Freedom of expression enables
them to continue articulating their vile attacks on their own
people, but it is high time that they be exposed and marginalized
from mainstream Jewish life. It is an absolute scandal that some of
the worst culprits, including those calling for boycotts of their
own country, retain tenure in Israeli universities funded by Israeli
taxpayers and Diaspora Zionist philanthropists.
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/Leibler/entry/the_goldstone_report_and_the
Candidly Speaking:
Israel has to stop apologizing and take the offensive
Posted by Isi Leibler
Sunday Sep 27, 2009
The non-Jewish seer Balaam is quoted in the Torah describing Jews
as the "the people that dwells apart and is not reckoned amongst the
nations." Recent events, climaxing with the UN Goldstone report,
have certainly borne this out.
The maliciously biased report alleged that the
Israelis deliberately targeted civilians and accused them of crimes
against humanity. We should not have been surprised. It was a
logical extension from the anti-Israeli NGO reports which have been
publishing similar "findings" over the past year.
Besides, what could one expect from a committee created by the
ineptly titled UN Human Rights Council, which is dominated by rogue
regimes like Iran, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Cuba and Liberia? Some of
the leaders of the member-states would qualify as candidates for
prosecution as war criminals. The council's principal common
denominator remains an obsessive hatred of Israel, which they
condemn more frequently than all the other 191 member-states
combined.
In fact, since its inception in 2006, 26 of the 32 resolutions
condemning human rights violations passed by the council were
directed against Israel. It should also be noted that this UN "human
rights" body declined to investigate the monstrous brutalities
inflicted on civilian populations in Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Sudan.
Indeed it went so far as to bizarrely thank the Sudanese government,
the perpetrators of the Darfur massacres, for its "cooperation."
Likewise, the far more numerous civilian casualties in Iraq and
Afghanistan never appeared on the council's agenda. When the
commission was being created, even Mary Robinson, the former head of
the UN Durban hate fest, declined an invitation to head the inquiry
because it was too "one-sided."
The UN Human Rights Council machers then recruited Richard
Goldstone, a vain South African Jewish judge, who despite being
aware from the outset of the biased composition of the panel,
permitted himself to be used as a fig leaf to provide credibility to
the Israel-bashers. He did not even have second thoughts after one
of his panelists, Christine Chinkin, refused to disqualify herself
after having previously denied that Hamas rockets provided Israel
justification for invading Gaza and condemned Israel for "prima
facie war crimes."
The depths to which Goldstone, who purports to be a long-standing
"Zionist," totally identified himself with this crude anti-Israeli
exercise, was exemplified in his recent New York Times
op-ed, in which he had the gall to compare Israel's defense against
Hamas to the atrocities committed in Darfur, where millions were
displaced and over 200,000 civilians were raped and butchered.
The report could have been drafted by Hamas operatives. It
represents a lengthy compendium of lies primarily appropriated from
Hamas-orchestrated Arab testimony and anti-Israeli NGOs. On the
basis of "evidence" from these rabidly hostile sources, the
tribunal defamed as war criminals the nation which undoubtedly
displays greater concern over civilian casualties than any other
country in the world.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is now urging the United States and
other democratic countries to speak up and condemn the abominable
report, which effectively challenges the right of nations to defend
their civilian population centers from global terrorist onslaughts.
The response will be a litmus test for the Obama administration,
which so far has been disappointingly tepid in its reaction. We
should certainly not be holding our breath over the European
response. Their track record of appeasing Arab extremists is
appalling. One can also predict an escalation in anti-Israeli libels
at forthcoming sessions of the UN General Assembly, which will now
be presided over by a new president, Ali Treki, the former foreign
minister of that bastion of human rights, Libya.
It is thus essential that we now get our act together. We must
pay more attention to the threat from within. Today, self-loathing
Jews (including Israelis) are at the forefront of almost every
campaign to denigrate and defame Israel and the Jewish people. Such
"Jews" are not a new phenomenon. They maintain the tradition of
their predecessors during the Middle Ages who allowed themselves to
be used as instruments of the most venomous Christian anti-Semitic
campaigns, and more recently of the Jewish communists who applauded
the murderous policies of Stalin and justified Soviet
state-sponsored anti-Semitism.
There is no doubt that the vile rumors concerning supposed IDF
atrocities initiated some months ago by Israelis which were
subsequently proven to be utterly false, published by the daily
Ha'aretz and emblazoned on the front pages of the world media,
added fuel to the climate of hostility against Israel that gave
birth to the Goldstone report.
That was followed by blood libels and the greatest global
manifestations of anti-Semitism seen since the Nazi era, with Israel
assuming the traditional role of Jews, once again accused of
representing the source of all the woes and plagues of mankind.
It is thus surely time to stop ignoring the self-loathing Jews
and Israelis who now occupy key roles in the campaigns to
delegitimize and demonize our people. Freedom of expression enables
them to continue articulating their vile attacks on their own
people, but it is high time that they be exposed and marginalized
from mainstream Jewish life. It is an absolute scandal that some of
the worst culprits, including those calling for boycotts of their
own country, retain tenure in Israeli universities funded by Israeli
taxpayers and Diaspora Zionist philanthropists.
We must also provide our children, both in Israel and in the
Diaspora, with greater awareness of the hypocrisy, double standards
and extreme bias which are being applied against their people. We
must ensure that despite the global campaign to defame and demonize
Israel and the Jewish people, our youth retain pride and dignity and
are conscious that when it comes to respecting the sanctity of life
and upholding human rights, the Jewish state, despite all its faults
and weaknesses, remains a role model in this area.
They must understand that the tiny State of Israel is being
demonized because it will not stand by with folded arms and enable
the barbarians at their gates to spill innocent Jewish blood. We
must stop continuously explaining or apologizing, and take the
offensive.
These past few months we should have been concentrating on
exposing the evil nature and crude bias of the Human Rights Council
before it released its "findings." We should have more vigorously
exposed the prejudice and double standards of the despicable NGO
human rights bodies that have adopted Israel-bashing as a vocation.
At the cost of being unkind, I would also strongly recommend our
government replace our current UN ambassador with a more charismatic
personality along the lines of our previous envoy, Dan Gillerman.
The government should also immediately create an international
task force of the best Israeli and Diaspora jurists to confront this
new effort to undermine our legitimacy.
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