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Jewish World Review May 29, 2002 / 18 Sivan, 5762
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Critics Rev Up Antagonism Toward the Only Minority
It's Trendy to Denigrate, Warns Ruth Wisse
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
Earlier this month at San Francisco State University, a crowd of
Palestinians and their supporters threatened to kill Jewish student
demonstrators if they did not "go back to Russia." By these standards, the
petition drawn up by a group of professors from Harvard and MIT is a
paltry
thing.
The signatories merely call on the US government to halt military
aid and arms sales to Israel, and on their two universities to divest from
Israel and from US companies that sell arms to Israel until certain
conditions are met. Nary a threat of physical violence against the Jews or
(as yet) against the universities should they fail to accede to these
wishes. Brutality like so much else at these elite schools is gloved in
language of academic refinement.
Yet the divestment petition is corrupt and cowardly in ways that a mob
assault is not. Corrupt because it lays out its demands with the wiliness
of a fox stalking the hens. The petition requires that Israel comply with
certain resolutions of the United Nations-the terms of which it distorts
to say what those resolutions do not mean. The signatories declare themselves
"appalled by the human rights abuses against Palestinians at the hands of
the Israeli government," by Jewish "colonization" of Palestinian
territory, and by other putative Israeli abuses. They thereby co-opt the potent
language of justice and rights to accuse the Jews of precisely the crimes
committed against them by Arab despots.
How very clever to call upon Israel to obey this or that resolution of the
United Nations when Arabs states remain in perpetual defiance of the
entire UN Charter! The Charter is based on the principle of the sovereign
equality of all members; members are to practice tolerance and live
together in peace and settle their disputes by peaceful means. Yet when flouting
the UN voted the partition of Palestine in 1947 by a two-thirds majority of
the General Assembly, laying the ground for the establishment of Israel, the
Arabs attacked the new state, flouting the resolution--and therefore the
very basis of participation in the UN.
The preposterous demographic and
political asymmetry between the Arab-Muslim states and the sole Jewish
country has allowed the Arabs to wage against Israel the longest, most
lop-sided war in modern history. The failure of the UN to expel the Arab
countries until they accepted its basic principles turned the potential
Family of Nations into a Roman coliseum with Israel in the pit. Now comes
a
team of faculty from Harvard-MIT to join the circus, attempting to make
Israel pay, literally, for the aggression against it.
Boycott is one of many weapons that Arab leaders have used against Israel
in the past. The Harvard and MIT petitioners urging divestment from Israel
are merely trying to extend the Arab boycott to Cambridge, MA. Defamation
is another tactic that the Arabs use to excellent advantage. The UN
resolution of 1975 sponsored by the Arab and then- Communist blocs labeled
Zionism racist--when it was actually Arab racism that denied the Jews
their
homeland. Harvard and MIT petitioners use this same tactic of inversion to
blame Israel for the consequences of the perpetual Arab war against it.
The
enemies of Israel in the Middle East have acquired a new advance team on
the banks of the Charles.
In recognition of the petition's malice, a group of Harvard and MIT
faculty organized a counter petition (on website
http://harvardmitjustice.org) to oppose divestment and to condemn the
"one-sided attempt to delegitimize Israel":
We are appalled that, in response to the tragic situation in the Middle
East, our colleagues should choose to associate their names with a
distorted position that ignores the history of the last few years and
revives rhetoric long discredited by its use among extremists as code for
the destruction of the Jewish state.
The counter petition will no doubt garner many more names than the call
for
divestment and boycott. And this Friday, Lawrence Summers, President of
Harvard, announced that the university would not divest.
Yet the original signatories will have planted a seed of malevolence in
the expectation that it will sprout. In the climate of public opinion
since
9/11, the petition is cowardly as well as corrupt: its ideological basis
is
anti-Americanism, which is no longer quite accepted on campuses and must
therefore be prosecuted by other means. The most prominent signatories are
noted for their long-standing agitation against the so-called crimes of
American capitalism, against US "colonization" of third world countries,
against putative American abuse of human rights. Since the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon brought the highest civilian toll in
American history, America's ideological critics are still finding it tough
to promote Al Queda as effectively as they once did Fidel Castro or Ho Chi
Minh. Not that it isn't being tried.
Just the other day, in one of Harvard's
most elegant conference rooms I heard a Harvard alumna, now a professor
herself, mock America for misrepresenting the brave fighter Osama Bin
Laden
as a religious fanatic. Some professors routinely cite the misdeeds of
"the
world's self-proclaimed superpower" as the reason for Islamist "rage." Yet
as long as most Americans are still smarting from the blow against their
country, it is much safer to condemn imperfect democracy by prosecuting
Israel rather than the US administration.
So the internal critics of the United States rev up antagonism toward the
haven of the Jews, the only minority on campus it is trendy to denigrate.
They do this in the language of human rights, but on behalf of autocrats
and dictators whose political priorities for over half a century have been
the repression of their own people and the destruction of the Jewish
State.
Some members of the faculty of Harvard and MIT have used the great
privilege of free speech to form a "Campus Coalition for Tyranny." What an
unsightly feather in the cap of the Ivy League!
Ruth Wisse is a professor of Yiddish literature and comparative
literature at Harvard University.
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