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Jewish World Review March 10, 2009 / 14 Adar 5769 Proud to be a leftist? By Caroline B. Glick
Last week Finklestein was the keynote speaker at both Emory University and
Fordham University during their weeklong annual anti-Israel hate festivals.
Speaking to a cheering crowd at a packed auditorium on Emory's Atlanta
campus, Finklestein claimed that Israel conducted its recent Operation Cast
Lead in Gaza for two reasons. These did not include Hamas's deliberate
targeting of Israeli civilians, Hamas's alliance with Iran, its charter that
calls for the physical eradication of the Jewish people, its illegal
imprisonment of Israeli hostage Gilad Schalit, or its decision to renew its
attacks against Israel after a six month period of relative restraint.
In Finklestein's view, the first reason Israel launched Operation Cast Lead
was because Hamas had begun expressing interest in peace. In his words,
"Hamas were being too moderate, too reasonable. They wanted a diplomatic
settlement to the conflict. To Israel, this is a recurring nightmare."
The second reason that Finklestein alleged that Israel launched its
offensive was because, well, Israel is just plain mean. As he put it, the
operation was Israel's way of "reminding the Arabs who were [sic.] in
charge." It was an attempt to "restore the Arab world's fear of Israel."
Finklestein cited an unnamed "chief military analyst" to support his claim
that Israel conducted a "massacre" in Gaza and did so with malice of
forethought.
According to Emory's student paper, for his libelous, wholly fallacious
remarks, Finklestein received a prolonged standing ovation.
In 40 university campuses throughout the US and Canada as well as in Europe
and South America, last week students marked what Palestinian terror
apologists have dubbed "Israel Apartheid Week." This was the seventh such
week in the US, and the fifth in Canada.
In the lead up to this annual Israel vilification week, pro-Israel students
were physically assaulted at San Francisco State University and at York
University in Canada by their anti-Israel counterparts. In both cases,
university officials opened disciplinary proceedings against the pro-Israel
students.
At SFSU, two students were arrested by police for assaulting college
Republicans who held an anti-Hamas rally. The two — from the campus's
Palestinian student club and its Socialist union — now insist not only that
the charges against them be dropped, but that the university re-educate its
students to ensure that they understand that criticizing Hamas and other
genocidal terror groups is a form of prohibited hate-speech.
THE LIBELOUS assertion that Israel — the only free, pluralistic, liberal
democracy in the Middle East — is analogous to apartheid South Africa first
took hold at the 2001 UN-sponsored anti-Jewish diplomatic pogrom at Durban,
South Africa. In the action plan approved by the various non-governmental
organizations that participated in the conference, activists were called on
to bring about the international demonization of Israel as a racist state,
and of Zionism — the Jewish national liberation movement — as a form of
racism.
When Israel Apartheid Week was launched the next year, many local Jewish
student and community activists in the US and Canada demanded that
university authorities ban the clearly bigoted event from their campuses. To
their chagrin, university presidents and administrators would do no such
thing. Claiming that doing so would restrict academic freedom, the
propaganda war against the Jewish state went forward and grew. And, in its
wake, the freedom of pro-Israel students on college campuses throughout the
West has become increasingly constricted and threatened.
Both through formal speech codes barring criticism of anti-Israel propaganda
and violence, and through academic and physical intimidation of pro-Israel
students by an increasingly vocal and aggressive coalition of
pro-Palestinian professors, Muslim and leftist students, Israel's supporters
on university campuses find themselves under assault. Today, seven years
after the Durban Conference, Israel Apartheid Week has become a mainstay on
the academic calendar, nearly as taken for granted as Homecoming Week and
mid-terms.
The use of the term "apartheid" to describe Israel was a deliberate move on
the part of Israel's enemies. It was aimed at neutralizing the capacity of
Israel's supporters to defend the Jewish state and attack its enemies. Case
in point is the campus debate which preceded Israel Apartheid Week at the
University of Toronto. The student paper published two topical opinion
pieces on the upcoming events. One asserted that Israel is an apartheid
regime. The other argued that Israel isn't an apartheid regime.
On the surface, this seems fair enough. But it is nothing of the sort.
Israel is the only free country and free society in the region. Pinning its
defenders down by confining discussion of the region to the pros and cons of
a complete lie serves to only obfuscate the depravity of Israel's enemies,
not to enlighten the public about Israel.
While Israel provides the full rights of citizenship to its Arab minority,
Jews are denied the rights of citizenship in every Arab League member state,
and the Palestinians' fundamental demand is that no Jew be permitted to live
in a future Palestinian state.
Then too, while Israeli women enjoy full equality under the law, women and
girls in the Arab and Muslim world are systematically subjugated and
enslaved. Muslim men who wantonly murder their wives, sisters, mothers and
daughters can expect to receive little to no punishment for their crimes.
The same holds for men who abuse their female relations. For their part,
women in the Muslim world have either no legal rights to citizenship and
civil rights or those rights are severely limited.
Gays, blacks, migrant workers, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists are
systematically persecuted for their sexual preferences, their skin color and
their religious beliefs. Even dogs feel the wrath of these societies where,
since they are considered "unclean," children and adults alike routinely
engage in their torture and killing.
But under the full protection of self-described liberal university
professors, administrators and presidents, and due to the indifference of
groups like the World Council of Churches, the American Civil Liberties
Union, the National Organization of Women, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and
Defenders, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, anti-Israel
propagandists have been allowed to co-opt the language of liberty to advance
the political fortunes of terrorists who aim to destroy liberty.
THE ACTIVE and passive support conferred on anti-Israel leftists and Muslims
by these officials and groups has provided them with the ideological cover
to take their activism to the next level: anti-Jewish violence aimed at
intimidating states, universities, businesses and private organizations into
cutting off all ties to Israel. Evidence of the success of this campaign is
rife throughout Europe today.
In just one notable instance, for the past week Israeli tennis players, Amir
Haddad and Andy Ram have been suffering the consequences of the Left's
collusion with these anti-Jewish groups in Sweden. Haddad and Ram competed
in the Davis Cup tennis championships in Malmo, Sweden.
In an article in Yediot Ahronot on Sunday, Ram wrote, "In my entire
athletic career, I have never before experienced such hatred and such a
mixing of sports with politics."
In spite of repeated entreaties by Israel, Swedish authorities refused to
move the games from Malmo to Stockholm. With its enormous Muslim population,
in recent years Malmo has been the site of some of the worst Islamic
violence against non-Muslims - and particularly Jews, women and girls - in
the Western world.
Due to threats of violence against Ram and Haddad, Swedish authorities
barred fans from attending their tennis matches. As they played their
opening match in an empty stadium on Saturday, thousands of violent Muslims
and leftists rioted against police and attempted to break down the barriers
protecting the stadium with the stated aim of killing Ram and Haddad.
The protesters claim that their desire to murder Israeli tennis players is
due to Operation Cast Lead. But this is pure propaganda. Their desire to
murder Ram and Haddad stems not from Israel's military actions to defend its
citizens from murder, but from the protesters' hatred of the Jewish state.
And that hatred stems from the same source as their misogyny, their hatred
of the US and their support for the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
A 2005 Swedish government report indicated that in 2004, incidents of rape
had increased 50 percent throughout the country. A Malmo police report noted
that 68 percent of the rapists were minorities. As Islamic scholar Robert
Spencer has noted, Islamic teaching views rape as a legitimate act against
women and girls who behave in "non-Islamic" ways. In much of Scandinavia as
well as in Muslim neighborhoods in France, women have begun wearing veils in
order to protect themselves against roving gangs of Muslim young men.
The defilement of women and girls, like gay bashing, has nothing to do with
IDF operations in Gaza. It has to do with the pathological nature of the
cultures that condone and encourage the violence, and the Western
governments and intellectuals who make excuses for it.
ALL OF THIS is hidden away from the public thanks to Western liberals'
willingness to accept the legitimacy of events like Israel Apartheid Week.
Due to the complicity of leftist authorities, the international discourse
about the Arab and Islamic world and the cultures they have produced is
diverted to false allegations against Israel.
Any attempt to point out that Hamas is genocidal; that Iran stones women to
death, and systematically executes homosexuals; that Saudi Arabia is the
most repressive society on the planet; that Egypt permits and indeed
encourages female genital mutilation; that Jordan does not prosecute
fathers, sons, husbands and uncles who murder their female relatives; is
attacked and delegitimized. Those who raise these issues are accused of
hating Muslims and of being secret Zionist agents.
So too, Islamic violence in the West is swept under the rug. For example, to
date, few mainstream US media organs gave significant attention that in Buffalo, New York
Muzzamil Hassan decapitated his wife Aasiya on February 12 after he stabbed
her to death. Just a few years earlier that same mainstream media had
embraced this murderer as a paragon of Islamic moderation after he
established Bridges TV network, which was supposed to show the American
public how moderate Islam is.
For some reason, the same media don't consider it noteworthy that their
moderate Muslim poster boy chopped off his wife's head a week after she
filed for divorce. Certainly, no connection can be drawn between her ritual
slaughter and Islam.
Sunday was International Women's Day. Throughout the West, feminists spent
the day congratulating themselves for their great sacrifices for women's
rights.
Last Wednesday Saudi authorities arrested a woman for driving. Her arrest
drew no protest from her Western sisters. Obviously, they were too busy
defending Finklestein's freedom to disseminate lies about Israeli women to
ignorant college kids to care.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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