IsraCampus.Org

Carlo Strenger is a professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University and one of the more extreme leftist Post-Zionists on a campus that is crawling with them. Strenger has a long track record of Israel bashing and leftist propagandizing (see examples:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/936471.html,
http://www.minfo.gov.ps/English/opinions/11-06-07b.htm,
http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=604_0_1_0_M).

He frequently appears on Palestinian terrorist web sites. He sits in the same department at Tel Aviv University where "The Psychology of the Occupation" is a course. (We have posted about that propaganda course earlier, after which the then-President of TAU, Itamar Rabinovich, wrote the heads of our own university demanding that we be silenced!).

This past week, Strenger outdid his anti-Israel leftist friends and took on not only Zionism but the Passover Haggada! You can see it, in http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/976908.html in Hebrew (not available in English). There Strenger explains how the Haggada is a backward archaic anti-democratic document. And in fact that is the whole problem with Israel . that it attempts to incorporate in its essence those primitive sentiments from the Bible and Haggada.

Strenger claims that the basic message in the Haggada is that Jews must "blindly obey" commandments they suppose come from God. He says that the Haggada justifies unjust killing of the first-born sons of the Egyptians, that we are obliged to go to the Temple Mount where Abraham supposedly bound Isaac, that Abraham was a bruit willing to allow both Isaac and Ishmael to die needlessly, and we are told to persecute Amalek unjustly. Needless to say, Amalek, Ishmael, Isaac, and Abraham are mentioned nowhere in the Haggada, nor even is Moses. But that is all enough for Strenger to proclaim that in his house, no one reads (is permitted to read?) the Passover Haggada.

Now what really bothers Strenger of course is that if people read the Haggada or the Bible they may get the foolish idea that Jews have the right to their own state and to Jerusalem, something Strenger no doubt wants us all to "question." Israel has squashed the "traditional Jewish tradition of critical thinking and irony," opines Strenger, meaning . I guess . that too many Israelis laugh at his own "ideas." He names Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg (and Spinoza, who is fashionable among the atheist clique) as non-religious Jews whom we in Israel should all take as our role models. He claims Maimonides himself abandoned Judaism for a while, although (to Strenger's disappointment?) returned to it. He denounces the Zionist movement and Ben Gurion for filling the minds of Israelis with such mythology and archaic nonsense, which then directly led to a group of simply awful people building settlements in Palestinian lands after 1967. He adds that the story of Masada is a fabrication and that the great archeologist Yigal Yadin knew it was fake but kept it hidden in a grand conspiracy because he was afraid of what revealing the fabrication would do to Israeli morale. All of which proves that Strenger's mind is about as deep as that of Barry Chamish and just as capable of inventing conspiracist nonsense.

The main conclusion of Strenger is that if we in Israel detach ourselves from "myths" about having a divine right to our land, then we will be forced to face the fact that we are oppressors who stole the land of another "people." Never mind that the "Palestinians" are a "people" in about the same sense as the members of United Airlines frequent flyer program are.

Meanwhile, his rant in Haaretz gives us a pretty good idea of what he washes the brains of his students in.