[justify][large]Uncomfortable truths[/large]
The historian Tony Judt has changed our view of postwar Europe, challenged liberal America and provoked controversy with his criticism of Israel
Paul Laity
The Guardian, Saturday 17 May 2008
Tony Judt has never fought shy of questioning long-cherished ideas. Postwar, his panoramic study of Europe after 1945, was loudly acclaimed in part because it dealt so bracingly with the lies and cover-ups on which the rebuilding of the continent depended ? the number of Nazis and collaborators who retained positions of power, for instance, and the myths surrounding wartime resistance. Detail after striking detail documented how nations are never honest about their pasts, and how quickly inconvenient truths are buried.
Judt, who teaches at New York University, is known as a combative writer and reviewer, and this reputation is confirmed by his new collection of pieces, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, which opens with the trouncing of a recent biographer of Koestler for being, among other things, priggishly obsessed with his subject?s sex life. Over the years, Judt has been notable, in particular, for his acid dismissals of ?romantic? communists and their fellow travellers. Many of his targets have been French intellectuals ? he has ripped into Sartre numerous times ? but in Reappraisals he also, from his own position on the left, accuses Eric Hobsbawm of being a ?mandarin? and calls the much loved EP Thompson a ?sanctimonious, priggish Little Englander?.
Since September 2001, however, Judt?s articulate polemicism has taken a new direction ? one that has transformed his life. Uneasy about the political reaction to 9/11 in the US, he soon began to publish a series of condemnations of Bush?s international policies. But whereas his anti-communism sat comfortably with mainstream liberal opinion in America, his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks. Judt, who was born and has spent most of his life in Britain, began to feel more aware of being European ? and different.
He raised hackles by labelling liberal commentators in America ? including New Yorker editor David Remnick, Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman ? Bush?s ?useful idiots?. But by far the biggest tumults Judt has caused have followed an essay he published five years ago, entitled ?Israel: The Alternative?, which opened with the notion that ?the president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist?s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line?, and went on to contend that the time had come to ?think the unthinkable? ? the bringing to an end of Israel as a Jewish state, and the establishment in its place of a binational state of Israelis and Palestinians.
The essay was written for the New York Review of Books, and within a week of its publication, Judt had received a thousand messages of protest. From that time, Judt, who lost close friends over the article, has been regarded as nefarious by a large section of American Jewry.*
Judt?s political instincts can be traced, perhaps too easily, back to his upbringing. He was born 60 years ago into the Jewish community in London?s East End. All his grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe; his parents were ?unapologetically Jewish, but secular, and not really Zionist. They were leftwing, even Marxist, but strongly against communism?. On his 12th or 13th birthday, Judt remembers, he was given a copy of Isaac Deutscher?s masterly biography of Trotsky: ?Failed communists were acceptable ? Deutscher, Trotsky ? it was the successful ones who weren?t liked.?
The other books on his shelves at home (the Judt family moved around London, but settled in Putney) were Left Book Club monthly choices and Penguin Specials ? hallmarks of ?the autodidacticism of the left?. There were memoirs of the Jewish East End, too, but Judt stresses that his parents? sense of being Jewish ? even during the 1950s and 60s, when Zionism had much greater purchase than before the war ? was ?divorced from anything that people in New York now think of as Jewish identity?.
His own relationship to Zionism is more complicated. ?The thing that changed everything for me, at least for a while, was that my parents, despairing of my social life ? thinking me too solitary ? encouraged me to join Dror, the Zionist youth organisation. Which I did, at exactly the point in a teenager?s life when it?s possible to convince them that they have discovered the way the universe works. From the age of 15 until 19 or 20, I was a gung-ho, utterly committed, leftwing Zionist, which was plausible if you went straight from your bedroom to a kibbutz.? From 1965 to 1967, he was Dror?s national secretary.
Having taken his first set of exams at Cambridge, Judt left again for the kibbutz Machanaim with the six-day war pending and, in response to a call for volunteers from the Israeli army, became a driver and then a translator, joining the forces based on the Golan Heights: ?I was 19 and romantic,? he recalls.
But his views on Israel soon began to change. ?I started to hear things, in the attitude of young officers above all, that I had never heard before, expressions of nationalism, anti-Arab xenophobia, land hunger ? ?why didn?t we go all the way to Damascus??, ?the only good Arab is a dead Arab? ? that sort of thing.? The ?conquistador attitude in Israeli officers?, Judt says, ?gave the lie to the idea that there was something special about this war, this occupation, this army ? myths that many Israelis still believe in ? By the time I went back to Cambridge at the end of the summer, I was already pretty critical of Israel: it was clear in my mind that the huge acquisition of land and people as a result of the war wasn?t going to work. What kind of Jewish state was this??
Judt instead turned his attention to France, and began graduate research in Cambridge on the history of French Marxism. In 1970, he enrolled for a year at the École Normale Supérieure. ?That was a gas ? a whole bunch of intellectuals coming down to breakfast in their dressing gowns, sipping coffee and eating croissants. They really were intensely smart in a way you don?t find in England, where people tend to camouflage their smartness, for all the obvious cultural reasons. At the École, you had to come up to scratch in every conversation, and it was exhilarating.?
In Paris, he dismissed at first hand the abstruse structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser (?listening to him, at a crowded and sycophantic seminar, I was utterly bemused?) and was strongly influenced by Annie Kriegel, the charismatic resistance heroine and leading (former Stalinist) historian of French communism.
Judt taught at Cambridge, Berkeley ? where he bought himself a Ford Mustang and drove up and down Highway One ? and Oxford. ?I remained an obscure academic well into early middle age,? he says. The first step towards a fuller engagement in contemporary politics came in the early 80s: ?I decided I had lived an insufficiently cosmopolitan life until then, so I taught myself Czech and became involved as a walk-on player in the organisation that was smuggling books in and manuscripts out of Czechoslovakia.? Soon Judt was writing about Václav Havel and the underground. As recounted in Postwar, he was a witness to the velvet revolution, having set off for Prague at the first sign that the state system was crumbling.
?After 1989,? he has written, ?nothing ? not the future, not the present and above all not the past ? would ever be the same.? Judt, who had moved to NYU in the mid-80s, worked hard to bring together eastern European and American intellectuals, and in 1995 founded the university?s Remarque Institute ? he is still its director ? to promote the study and discussion of Europe in America. It was during a two-year stint in Vienna in the middle of the decade that Postwar began to take shape. In writing it, he was increasingly conscious that a chapter in the history of Europe ? an era that a good proportion of its current population had lived through ? had come to an end. ?As soon as you realise how good it is, this book will frighten you,? commented Neal Ascherson in one review: ?This is not just a history. It is a highly intrusive biography ? ?postwar Europe? is us.?
The ?problem of memory? tackled in Postwar ? of a past easily set aside ? is also a theme of Reappraisals. Judt was alarmed on discovering that, for the first time, not a single student taking one of his classes had read Darkness at Noon (Koestler is one of his heroes). ?This set me thinking that we have moved on very fast, not only from people who are seen to no longer matter, but from a set of issues too.? Since 1989, he proposes, public intellectuals have mattered less and less. What?s more, it is still generally and complacently assumed that America ?won? the cold war in that monumental year.
Postwar, which came out in 2005, suggested that ?what binds Europeans together ? is what it has become conventional to call ? in disjunctive contrast with ?the American way of life? ? the ?European social model?.? Judt is outspoken in his advocacy of north European-style social democracy, and stresses the need to remember why European welfare systems came about in the first place: ?We are so busy remembering all the things that active states do badly, we have forgotten what they do well ? The Anglo-American model with its cult of privatisation is not only ethically dysfunctional, but will soon be seen to be economically dysfunctional.?
He points out that it would never have occurred to him to write the 2003 essay on Israel had he been living in Europe. But he was frustrated ?with the remarkably unbalanced coverage of the Middle East in the States? and was conscious of the cultural prohibition unique to America, whereby ?all Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought antisemitic?; the result is that ?there is no conversation on the subject?. This is especially regrettable because any resolution of the Israel/Palestine question depends on a change of attitude on the part of the US. At the moment, Israel is like an ?adolescent?, he argues in Reappraisals: it ?is convinced that it can do as it wishes ? that it is immortal?.
Judt?s views on the Middle East became headline news in the autumn of 2006 following the cancellation ? an hour before it was due to start ? of a public lecture he was to give, entitled ?The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy?, at the Polish consulate in New York. The Polish consul, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, later acknowledged that he had been contacted by a number of Jewish groups ? including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, who were concerned about the subject of Judt?s address. ?The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,? Kasprzyk said.
When news of the cancellation broke, and accusations began to fly, the incident developed into the ?Judt affair?. The New York Review published an open letter to Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, signed by 114 intellectuals who felt that Judt?s right to free speech had been abrogated. Numerous articles on both sides appeared in the press and the matter of criticism of Israel in America was ? for once ? thoroughly ventilated. The implications of the cancellation, Judt believes, were ?serious and frightening?, though the affair had its absurd side: the organisers of a talk he was due to give at Manhattan College on October 17 2006 asked him not to mention Israel ? not an easy task given that it was a Holocaust memorial lecture, and its agreed title was ?The Holocaust in postwar Europe?. (He withdrew.)
Judt says, resignedly, that the adjectives used to describe him in the media have now changed. He has become, in America, ?the controversial Tony Judt? and ?Tony Judt, well-known critic of Israel?. He finds this ?a bore?, especially as his opinions ?aren?t regarded as especially unconventional in the rest of the world?. So it made his day when a member of the audience at a lecture he gave recently came up to him afterwards and said, perhaps a little disappointedly: ?You?re not controversial, you?re just complicated.?
·*This paragraph was changed on Tuesday May 20. It originally said that just before the essay was published, Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, asked: ?You are Jewish, aren?t you?? But Robert Silvers did not ask the question. An editor of the New York Times op-ed pages put the question to Judt, in 2006, in relation to a different essay published by that newspaper.[/justify]
Leo Frank and the Birth of the Anti-Defamation League of B'n
Moderator: Le Tocard
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Dejuificator II
- Erudit
- Posts: 552
- Joined: Thu Mar 03, 2011 9:47 pm
[justify][large]Were the Spies Journalists the ADL Snoops[/large]
Counterpunch February 1999
Were the Spies Journalists? The ADL Snoops
The organization's main "fact-finder" was doubling
as a spy for the white South African government while his
buddy, a San Francisco cop who had tutored El Salvadoran
death squads on the finer aspects of torture, was
providing its officials with personal information on the
organization's putative enemies when the story broke in
San Francisco in December, 1992. The organization was the
Anti-Defamation League.
The ADL claims to be the nation's leading defender
against prejudice and bigotry but in this instance its
targets were members of the African National Congress and
its supporters, and apparently everyone, Arab and
non-Arab, who had the temerity to criticize Israel. This
included some who drove to Arab community events where
the ADL's "fact-finder", Roy Bullock, and the cop, Tom
Gerard, took turns writing down their license plate
numbers, which Gerard turned into addresses thanks to his
access to California motor vehicle records.
Their spying efforts proved to be part of a much
larger intelligence gathering operation that targeted
some 12,000 individuals and more than 600 left-of-center
organizations in northern California.
After the first flurry of publicity, the ADL's spin
doctors successfully kept the story from receiving the
national coverage that the situation warranted. But the
story hasn't gone away.
Last November the California Court of Appeals handed
down a decision that paves the way for a major test later
this year of the ADL's penchant for spying on its
enemies. It was the most significant episode in a
slow-moving class-action case filed in 1993 by 19
pro-Palestinian and anti-apartheid activists who claim to
be victims of the ADL's snooping operations.
The plaintiffs say they were illegally spied on by
Bullock, then considered the ADL's top "fact-finder" by
his now deceased chief, Irwin Suall, and that such spying
constituted an invasion of privacy under the provisions
of the California Constitution.
The ADL's defense, accepted by the court in 1994, is
that the Jewish defense organization is, collectively, a
"journalist" and, therefore, can legally engage in
information-gathering activities regardless of the
source. At question was access by the plaintiffs to
information contained in 10 boxes of files seized by the
San Francisco police from the ADL's San Francisco office
in April, 1993, and placed under court seal where the ADL
has fought fiercely to keep them. In the years since
then, efforts by the court to settle the case have
foundered on the ADL's refusal to allow potentially
embarrassing depositions taken by plaintiffs' lawyer
ex-Congressman Paul (Pete) McCloskey of Bullock, ADL
officials and police officers to be be made public and
its files opened. The plaintiffs have been unwilling to
compromise on either of these issues.
Then, in September, 1997, Judge Alex Saldamondo
ruled that McCloskey's clients were entitled to see what
the ADL had on them in its files. Two plaintiffs, Jeffrey
Blankfort and Steve Zeltzer, co-founders of the Labor
Committee on the Middle East, who had "outed" Bullock as
an ADL spy after he infiltrated their group in 1987,
received an extract of their files from the DA's office
the day before they were ordered sealed. Both contain
illegally obtained information, much of which, say
Blankfort and Zeltzer, is erroneous.
When ADL's appeal of that decision was rejected by
Court of Appeals Judge Anthony Kline, the ADL persuaded
the State Supreme Court to return the case to the full
court for a hearing. On November 15, 1998, the court
reaffirmed ADL's status as a journalist and acknowledged
its right to maintain files and obtain information on all
but two of the remaining plaintiffs on the basis that
they are "limited-purpose public figures" which it
defined as having been publicly engaged and identified in
activities around a particular issue, in this instance
opposition to Israeli occupation and/or South African
apartheid. There is no protection, said the court, for
obtaining information illegally on non-public figures.
The court made an important qualification, however,
ruling that for "limited purpos "figures, the
journalist's shield only applies if the information
obtained is to be used for journalistic purposes. It does
not protect the ADL from charges that it passed
information about the plaintiffs to "foreign governments
(in this instance, Israel or South Africa) or to others"
which is what the plaintiffs claim the ADL has done.
Although the Court of Appeals vacated Judge
Saldamando's decision, it did state that representatives
of the plaintiffs had the right to request a review of
ADL's files to discover possible constitutional
violations, each of which would be worth $2500. While
this may seem a small sum, there are hundreds of
Arab-Americans and anti-apartheid activists whose names
appear in the ADL's files who potentially could collect
if the ADL loses in court or is forced to settle the
case.
The origins of the story are murky. What the press
reported was that the SFPD acted on a tip from the FBI,
which was supposedly concerned about files on the Nation
of Islam that were stolen from its local office, and
arrested Gerard, who allegedly had done the pilfering. In
Gerard's computer they found files on more than 7,000
individuals, many of them Arab-Americans, as well as
information on hundreds of left-to-liberal organizations
filed by Gerard as "pinko". In his locker, they found a
black executioner's hood, a number of photos of
dark-skinned men bound and blindfolded, CIA manuals, a
secret document on interrogation techniques, stamped
"secret" and referring to El Salvador, and numerous
passports and IDs in a variety of names, all with his
picture.
This splendid fellow began meeting with Richard
Hirschhaut, chief of the ADL's San Francisco office in
1986, during which, according to a "confidential"
Hirschhaut memo to the aforementioned ADL chief
"fact-finder" Suall, he provided "a significant amount of
information" on "the activities of specific Arab
organizations and individuals in the Bay Area" That memo
hasn't been made public but what was reported created a
nightmare for the ADL when it turned out that Gerard had
been exchanging non-public, personal information from
government files with Bullock, a paid informant for the
ADL since 1954 and whose own computerized "pinko" files
on leftish and liberal folks, when seized by the police,
proved to be a third again as large as Gerard's.
According to police, his computer contained the names of
nearly 12,000 individuals, 77 Arab-American
organizations, 29 anti-apartheid organizations, and more
than 600 "pinko"groups which included such revolutionary
outfits as the NAACP, Asian Law Caucus and SANE/FREEZE,
as well as 20 Bay area labor unions including the SF
Labor Council. There were in addition, files on 612
right-wing organizations and 27 skinhead groups.
According to SF police inspector Ron Roth, 75
percent of their contents was non-public information
illegally obtained from government agencies.
After indicating that the ADL would be charged with
violating the California's Business and Profession's
code, SF District Attorney Arlo Smith did an
extraordinary thing. He made available to the public,
merely for the copying costs, some 700 pages of documents
incriminating the ADL in a nation-wide intelligence
gathering operation run out of New York by Suall. One of
the significant parts of that report was Bullock's
admission that he was paid by a South African
intelligence agent to spy on anti-apartheid activists
(which he was already doing for the ADL.) He had reported
on a visit to California by the ANC's Chris Hani, ten
days before the man expected by many to succeed Nelson
Mandela, returned home to be brutally murdered.
The ADL attempted to portray Bullock as a free-lance
investigator, but no one was convinced, because since
1954 Bullock had been paid through a cutout, an ADL
lawyer in Beverly Hills. After his exposure, Bullock was
put directly on the ADL's payroll. ADL's position on the
ANC was identical to that of the South African government
- they considered it to be a "terrorist" "communist"
organization. At the time, Israel was furnishing arms to
maintain the apartheid regime in power.
In1994, Smith announced that he would not prosecute
either the ADL or Bullock since it would be "expensive
and time-consuming both to the SFDA and the defendants"
a curious judgement considering the overwhelming evidence
in his possession.
In its settlement with the city, the ADL, admitted
no wrongdoing, agreed to restrain their operatives from
seeking non-public data on ADL's enemies from government
agencies and, putting a happy face on the story, promised
to create a $25,000 Hate Crimes Fund and another $25,000
for a public school course.
Another class-action case filed by the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee and other spied-upon groups
such as CISPES, the Bay Area Anti-Apartheid Network and
the National Lawyers Guild, was settled in 1996, also
under conditions favorable to the ADL, but without the
approval of some of the suing groups.
In that instance, again without admitting wrongdoing
or opening its files, the ADL agreed: to remove
questionably obtained information from its files; that
it would not seek non-public information on individuals
from government employees and would pay $25,000 to a
fund to improve relations among Jews, blacks and other
minorities. A similar deal was offered to McCloskey's
plaintiffs but they turned it down since it would let the
ADL off the hook and allow its secrets to be kept intact.
Both sides will be back in Judge Saldamando's court
in March to hear a new discovery motion from McCloskey
and probably to set a trial date, something the ADL has
been trying to avoid, given the embarrassment that would
inevitably ensue, whatever the outcome. Its latest ploy
has been to ask the judge for a summary judgement, in
other words, dismissal of the case, something he is
unlikely to do.
The deaths of veteran journalists Colin Edwards and
George Green reduced the number of plaintiffs by two and
subsequently four others, whose political activities
were relatively limited, were dropped from the case.
McCloskey, himself a victim of ADL attacks and whose wife
Helen is one of the plaintiffs, is pursuing the case pro
bono. Typically he is faced in court by four or five
lawyers for the ADL.
Contributions for the plaintiffs may be sent to Paul N.
McCloskey, Jr. Atty., 333 Bradford St., Redwood City, CA
94063
(For more information see: [small]http://www.adlwatch.org[/small]
E-mail at melblcome@igc.com)[/justify]
Counterpunch February 1999
Were the Spies Journalists? The ADL Snoops
The organization's main "fact-finder" was doubling
as a spy for the white South African government while his
buddy, a San Francisco cop who had tutored El Salvadoran
death squads on the finer aspects of torture, was
providing its officials with personal information on the
organization's putative enemies when the story broke in
San Francisco in December, 1992. The organization was the
Anti-Defamation League.
The ADL claims to be the nation's leading defender
against prejudice and bigotry but in this instance its
targets were members of the African National Congress and
its supporters, and apparently everyone, Arab and
non-Arab, who had the temerity to criticize Israel. This
included some who drove to Arab community events where
the ADL's "fact-finder", Roy Bullock, and the cop, Tom
Gerard, took turns writing down their license plate
numbers, which Gerard turned into addresses thanks to his
access to California motor vehicle records.
Their spying efforts proved to be part of a much
larger intelligence gathering operation that targeted
some 12,000 individuals and more than 600 left-of-center
organizations in northern California.
After the first flurry of publicity, the ADL's spin
doctors successfully kept the story from receiving the
national coverage that the situation warranted. But the
story hasn't gone away.
Last November the California Court of Appeals handed
down a decision that paves the way for a major test later
this year of the ADL's penchant for spying on its
enemies. It was the most significant episode in a
slow-moving class-action case filed in 1993 by 19
pro-Palestinian and anti-apartheid activists who claim to
be victims of the ADL's snooping operations.
The plaintiffs say they were illegally spied on by
Bullock, then considered the ADL's top "fact-finder" by
his now deceased chief, Irwin Suall, and that such spying
constituted an invasion of privacy under the provisions
of the California Constitution.
The ADL's defense, accepted by the court in 1994, is
that the Jewish defense organization is, collectively, a
"journalist" and, therefore, can legally engage in
information-gathering activities regardless of the
source. At question was access by the plaintiffs to
information contained in 10 boxes of files seized by the
San Francisco police from the ADL's San Francisco office
in April, 1993, and placed under court seal where the ADL
has fought fiercely to keep them. In the years since
then, efforts by the court to settle the case have
foundered on the ADL's refusal to allow potentially
embarrassing depositions taken by plaintiffs' lawyer
ex-Congressman Paul (Pete) McCloskey of Bullock, ADL
officials and police officers to be be made public and
its files opened. The plaintiffs have been unwilling to
compromise on either of these issues.
Then, in September, 1997, Judge Alex Saldamondo
ruled that McCloskey's clients were entitled to see what
the ADL had on them in its files. Two plaintiffs, Jeffrey
Blankfort and Steve Zeltzer, co-founders of the Labor
Committee on the Middle East, who had "outed" Bullock as
an ADL spy after he infiltrated their group in 1987,
received an extract of their files from the DA's office
the day before they were ordered sealed. Both contain
illegally obtained information, much of which, say
Blankfort and Zeltzer, is erroneous.
When ADL's appeal of that decision was rejected by
Court of Appeals Judge Anthony Kline, the ADL persuaded
the State Supreme Court to return the case to the full
court for a hearing. On November 15, 1998, the court
reaffirmed ADL's status as a journalist and acknowledged
its right to maintain files and obtain information on all
but two of the remaining plaintiffs on the basis that
they are "limited-purpose public figures" which it
defined as having been publicly engaged and identified in
activities around a particular issue, in this instance
opposition to Israeli occupation and/or South African
apartheid. There is no protection, said the court, for
obtaining information illegally on non-public figures.
The court made an important qualification, however,
ruling that for "limited purpos "figures, the
journalist's shield only applies if the information
obtained is to be used for journalistic purposes. It does
not protect the ADL from charges that it passed
information about the plaintiffs to "foreign governments
(in this instance, Israel or South Africa) or to others"
which is what the plaintiffs claim the ADL has done.
Although the Court of Appeals vacated Judge
Saldamando's decision, it did state that representatives
of the plaintiffs had the right to request a review of
ADL's files to discover possible constitutional
violations, each of which would be worth $2500. While
this may seem a small sum, there are hundreds of
Arab-Americans and anti-apartheid activists whose names
appear in the ADL's files who potentially could collect
if the ADL loses in court or is forced to settle the
case.
The origins of the story are murky. What the press
reported was that the SFPD acted on a tip from the FBI,
which was supposedly concerned about files on the Nation
of Islam that were stolen from its local office, and
arrested Gerard, who allegedly had done the pilfering. In
Gerard's computer they found files on more than 7,000
individuals, many of them Arab-Americans, as well as
information on hundreds of left-to-liberal organizations
filed by Gerard as "pinko". In his locker, they found a
black executioner's hood, a number of photos of
dark-skinned men bound and blindfolded, CIA manuals, a
secret document on interrogation techniques, stamped
"secret" and referring to El Salvador, and numerous
passports and IDs in a variety of names, all with his
picture.
This splendid fellow began meeting with Richard
Hirschhaut, chief of the ADL's San Francisco office in
1986, during which, according to a "confidential"
Hirschhaut memo to the aforementioned ADL chief
"fact-finder" Suall, he provided "a significant amount of
information" on "the activities of specific Arab
organizations and individuals in the Bay Area" That memo
hasn't been made public but what was reported created a
nightmare for the ADL when it turned out that Gerard had
been exchanging non-public, personal information from
government files with Bullock, a paid informant for the
ADL since 1954 and whose own computerized "pinko" files
on leftish and liberal folks, when seized by the police,
proved to be a third again as large as Gerard's.
According to police, his computer contained the names of
nearly 12,000 individuals, 77 Arab-American
organizations, 29 anti-apartheid organizations, and more
than 600 "pinko"groups which included such revolutionary
outfits as the NAACP, Asian Law Caucus and SANE/FREEZE,
as well as 20 Bay area labor unions including the SF
Labor Council. There were in addition, files on 612
right-wing organizations and 27 skinhead groups.
According to SF police inspector Ron Roth, 75
percent of their contents was non-public information
illegally obtained from government agencies.
After indicating that the ADL would be charged with
violating the California's Business and Profession's
code, SF District Attorney Arlo Smith did an
extraordinary thing. He made available to the public,
merely for the copying costs, some 700 pages of documents
incriminating the ADL in a nation-wide intelligence
gathering operation run out of New York by Suall. One of
the significant parts of that report was Bullock's
admission that he was paid by a South African
intelligence agent to spy on anti-apartheid activists
(which he was already doing for the ADL.) He had reported
on a visit to California by the ANC's Chris Hani, ten
days before the man expected by many to succeed Nelson
Mandela, returned home to be brutally murdered.
The ADL attempted to portray Bullock as a free-lance
investigator, but no one was convinced, because since
1954 Bullock had been paid through a cutout, an ADL
lawyer in Beverly Hills. After his exposure, Bullock was
put directly on the ADL's payroll. ADL's position on the
ANC was identical to that of the South African government
- they considered it to be a "terrorist" "communist"
organization. At the time, Israel was furnishing arms to
maintain the apartheid regime in power.
In1994, Smith announced that he would not prosecute
either the ADL or Bullock since it would be "expensive
and time-consuming both to the SFDA and the defendants"
a curious judgement considering the overwhelming evidence
in his possession.
In its settlement with the city, the ADL, admitted
no wrongdoing, agreed to restrain their operatives from
seeking non-public data on ADL's enemies from government
agencies and, putting a happy face on the story, promised
to create a $25,000 Hate Crimes Fund and another $25,000
for a public school course.
Another class-action case filed by the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee and other spied-upon groups
such as CISPES, the Bay Area Anti-Apartheid Network and
the National Lawyers Guild, was settled in 1996, also
under conditions favorable to the ADL, but without the
approval of some of the suing groups.
In that instance, again without admitting wrongdoing
or opening its files, the ADL agreed: to remove
questionably obtained information from its files; that
it would not seek non-public information on individuals
from government employees and would pay $25,000 to a
fund to improve relations among Jews, blacks and other
minorities. A similar deal was offered to McCloskey's
plaintiffs but they turned it down since it would let the
ADL off the hook and allow its secrets to be kept intact.
Both sides will be back in Judge Saldamando's court
in March to hear a new discovery motion from McCloskey
and probably to set a trial date, something the ADL has
been trying to avoid, given the embarrassment that would
inevitably ensue, whatever the outcome. Its latest ploy
has been to ask the judge for a summary judgement, in
other words, dismissal of the case, something he is
unlikely to do.
The deaths of veteran journalists Colin Edwards and
George Green reduced the number of plaintiffs by two and
subsequently four others, whose political activities
were relatively limited, were dropped from the case.
McCloskey, himself a victim of ADL attacks and whose wife
Helen is one of the plaintiffs, is pursuing the case pro
bono. Typically he is faced in court by four or five
lawyers for the ADL.
Contributions for the plaintiffs may be sent to Paul N.
McCloskey, Jr. Atty., 333 Bradford St., Redwood City, CA
94063
(For more information see: [small]http://www.adlwatch.org[/small]
E-mail at melblcome@igc.com)[/justify]
Last edited by Dejuificator II on Tue Oct 15, 2013 1:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
Nous serons toujours là.
-
Dejuificator II
- Erudit
- Posts: 552
- Joined: Thu Mar 03, 2011 9:47 pm
[justify][large]Who's the Dog Who's the Tail and the ADL[/large]
By Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom
April 22, 2006
I DON'T usually tell these stories, because they might
give rise to the suspicion that I am paranoid.
For example: 27 years ago, I was invited to give a
lecture-tour in 30 American universities, including all
the most prestigious ones - Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
MIT, Berkeley and so on. My host was the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, a respected non-Jewish organization,
but the lectures themselves were to be held under the
auspices of the Jewish Bet-Hillel chaplains.
On arrival at the airport in New York I was met by one
of the organizers. "There is a slight hitch," he told
me, "29 of the Rabbis have cancelled your lecture."
In the end, all the lectures did take place, under the
auspices of Christian chaplains. When we came to the
lone Rabbi who had not cancelled my lecture, he told me
the secret: the lectures had been forbidden in a
confidential letter from the Anti-Defamation League,
the thought-police of the Jewish establishment. The
salient phrase has stuck to my memory: "While it cannot
be said that Member of the Knesset Avnery is a traitor,
yet..."
AND ANOTHER story from real life: a year later I went
to Washington DC in order to "sell" the Two-State
solution, which at the time was considered an
outlandish, not to say crazy, idea. In the course of
the visit, the Quakers were so kind as to arrange a
press conference for me.
When I arrived, I was amazed. The hall was crammed
full, practically all the important American media were
represented. Many had come straight from a press
conference held by Golda Meir, who was also in town.
The event was to last an hour, as is usual, but the
journalists did not let go. They bombarded me with
questions for another two hours. Clearly, what I had to
say was quite new to them and they were interested.
I was curious how this would be reported in the media.
And indeed, the reaction was stunning: not a word
appeared in any of the newspapers, on radio or TV. Not
one single word.
By the way, three years ago I again held a press
conference, this time on Capitol Hill in Washington. It
was an exact replica of the last time: the crowd of
reporters, their obvious interest, the continuation of
the conference well beyond the appointed time - and not
a single word in the media.
I COULD tell some more stories like these, but the
point is made. I recount them only in connection with
the scandal recently caused by two American professors,
Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the
University of Chicago. They published a research paper
on the influence of the Israel lobby in the United
States. [for a pdf file of this paper, go to
[small]http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications ... Index.aspx[/small]
In 80 pages, 40 of them footnotes and sources, the two
show how the pro-Israel lobby exercises unbridled power
in the US capital, how it terrorizes the members of the
Senate and the House of Representatives, how the White
House dances to its tune (if indeed a house can dance),
how the important media obey its orders and how the
universities, too, live in fear of it.
The paper caused a storm. And I don't mean the
predictable wild attacks by the "friends of Israel" -
which means almost all politicians, journalists and
professors. These pelted the authors with all the usual
accusations: that they were anti-Semites, that they
were resurrecting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and so forth. There was something paradoxical in these
attacks, since they only illustrated the authors' case.
But the debate that fascinates me is of a different
nature. It broke out between senior intellectuals, from
the legendary Noam Chomsky, the guru of the Left
throughout the world (including Israel), to progressive
websites everywhere. The bone of contention: the
conclusion of the paper that the Jewish-Israeli lobby
dominates US foreign policy and subjugates it to
Israeli interests - in glaring contradiction to the
national interest of the US itself. A case in point:
the American assault on Iraq.
Chomsky and others rose up against this assertion. They
do not deny the factual findings of the two professors,
but object to their conclusions. In their view, it is
not the Israel lobby that directs American policy, but
the interests of the big corporations that dominate the
American empire and exploit Israel for their own
selfish aims.
Simply put: does the dog wag its tail, or does the tail
wag its dog?
I AM NERVOUS about sticking my head into a debate
between such illustrious intellectuals, but I feel
obliged to express my view nevertheless.
I'll start with the Jew, who went to the Rabbi and
complained about his neighbor. "You are right'" the
Rabbi declared. Then came the neighbor and denounced
the complainant. "You are right'" the Rabbi announced.
"But how can that be," exclaimed the Rabbi's wife,
"Only one of the two can be right!" "You are right,
too," the Rabbi said.
I find myself in a similar situation. I think that both
sides are right (and hope to be right, myself, too).
The findings of the two professors are right to the
last detail. Every Senator and Congressman knows that
criticizing the Israeli government is political
suicide. Two of them, a Senator and a Congressman,
tried - and were politically executed. The Jewish lobby
was fully mobilized against them and hounded them out
of office. This was done openly, to set a public
example. If the Israeli government wanted a law
tomorrow annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 Senators
(at least) would sign the bill forthwith.
President Bush, for example, has withdrawn from all the
established American positions regarding our conflict.
He accepts automatically the positions of our
government, be they as they may. Almost all the
American media are closed to Palestinians and Israeli
peace activists. As to professors - almost all of them
know which side of their bread is peanut-buttered. If,
in spite of that, somebody dares to open their mouth
against the Israeli policy - as happens once every few
years - they are smothered under a volley of
denunciations: anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi.
By the way, American guests in Israel, who know that at
home it is forbidden to mention the influence of the
Jewish-Israeli lobby, are dumbfounded to see that here
the lobby does not hide its power in Washington but
openly boasts of it.
The question, therefore, is not whether the two
professors are right in their findings. The question is
what conclusions can be drawn from them.
LET'S TAKE the Iraq affair. Who is the dog? Who the
tail?
The Israeli government prayed for this attack, which
has eliminated the strategic threat posed by Iraq.
America was pushed into the war by a group of Neo-
Conservatives, almost all of them Jews, who had a huge
influence on the White House. In the past, some of them
had acted as advisers to Binyamin Netanyahu.
On the face of it, a clear case. The pro-Israeli lobby
pushed for the war, Israel is its main beneficiary. If
the war ends in a disaster for America, Israel will
undoubtedly be blamed.
Really? What about the American aim of getting their
hands on the main oil reserves of the world, in order
to dominate the world economy? What about the aim of
placing an American garrison in the center of the main
oil-producing area, on top of the Iraqi oil, between
the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Caspian Sea? What
about the immense influence of the big oil companies on
the Bush family? What about the big multinational
corporations, whose outstanding representative is Dick
Cheney, that hoped to make hundreds of billions from
the "reconstruction of Iraq"?
The lesson of the Iraq affair is that the American-
Israeli connection is strongest when it seems that
American interests and Israeli Interests are one
(irrespective of whether that is really the case in the
long run). The US uses Israel to dominate the Middle
East, Israel uses the US to dominate Palestine.
But if something exceptional happens, such as the
Jonathan Pollard espionage affair or the sale of an
Israeli spy plane to China, and a gap opens between the
interests of the two sides, America is quite capable of
slapping Israel in the face.
AMERICAN-ISRAELI relations are indeed unique. It seems
that they have no precedent in history. It is as if
King Herod had given orders to Augustus Caesar and
appointed the members of the Roman senate.
I don't think that this phenomenon can be wholly
explained by economic interests. Even the most orthodox
Marxist must recognize that it also has a spiritual
dimension. It is no accident that American (as well as
British) fundamentalist Christians invented the Zionist
idea well before Theodor Herzl hit upon it. The
evangelical lobby is no less important in today's
Washington than the Zionist one. According to its
ideology, the Jews must take possession of all the Holy
Land in order to make the Second Coming of Christ
possible (and then - the part they don't shout about -
some Jews will become Christians and the rest will be
annihilated at Armaggedon, today's Meggido in Northern
Israel).
At the basis of the phenomenon lies the uncanny
similarity between the two national-religious stories,
the American myth and the Israeli. In both, pioneers
persecuted for their religion reached the shores of the
Promised Land. They were forced to defend themselves
against the "savage" natives, who were out to destroy
them. They redeemed the land, made the desert bloom,
created, with God's help, a flourishing, democratic and
moral society.
Both societies live in a state of denial and
unconscious guilt feelings - over there because of the
genocide committed against the Native Americans and the
horrifying slavery of the blacks, here because of the
uprooting of half the Palestinian people and the
oppression of the other half. Both here and there,
people believe in an eternal war between the Sons of
Light and the Sons of Darkness.
ANYHOW, THE American-Israeli symbiosis is unique and
far too complex a phenomenon to be described as a
simple conspiracy. I am sure that the two professors
did not mean to do so.
The dog wags the tail and the tail wags the dog. They
wag each other.
GUSH SHALOM p.o.b. 3322 Tel Aviv 61033[/justify]
By Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom
April 22, 2006
I DON'T usually tell these stories, because they might
give rise to the suspicion that I am paranoid.
For example: 27 years ago, I was invited to give a
lecture-tour in 30 American universities, including all
the most prestigious ones - Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
MIT, Berkeley and so on. My host was the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, a respected non-Jewish organization,
but the lectures themselves were to be held under the
auspices of the Jewish Bet-Hillel chaplains.
On arrival at the airport in New York I was met by one
of the organizers. "There is a slight hitch," he told
me, "29 of the Rabbis have cancelled your lecture."
In the end, all the lectures did take place, under the
auspices of Christian chaplains. When we came to the
lone Rabbi who had not cancelled my lecture, he told me
the secret: the lectures had been forbidden in a
confidential letter from the Anti-Defamation League,
the thought-police of the Jewish establishment. The
salient phrase has stuck to my memory: "While it cannot
be said that Member of the Knesset Avnery is a traitor,
yet..."
AND ANOTHER story from real life: a year later I went
to Washington DC in order to "sell" the Two-State
solution, which at the time was considered an
outlandish, not to say crazy, idea. In the course of
the visit, the Quakers were so kind as to arrange a
press conference for me.
When I arrived, I was amazed. The hall was crammed
full, practically all the important American media were
represented. Many had come straight from a press
conference held by Golda Meir, who was also in town.
The event was to last an hour, as is usual, but the
journalists did not let go. They bombarded me with
questions for another two hours. Clearly, what I had to
say was quite new to them and they were interested.
I was curious how this would be reported in the media.
And indeed, the reaction was stunning: not a word
appeared in any of the newspapers, on radio or TV. Not
one single word.
By the way, three years ago I again held a press
conference, this time on Capitol Hill in Washington. It
was an exact replica of the last time: the crowd of
reporters, their obvious interest, the continuation of
the conference well beyond the appointed time - and not
a single word in the media.
I COULD tell some more stories like these, but the
point is made. I recount them only in connection with
the scandal recently caused by two American professors,
Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the
University of Chicago. They published a research paper
on the influence of the Israel lobby in the United
States. [for a pdf file of this paper, go to
[small]http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications ... Index.aspx[/small]
In 80 pages, 40 of them footnotes and sources, the two
show how the pro-Israel lobby exercises unbridled power
in the US capital, how it terrorizes the members of the
Senate and the House of Representatives, how the White
House dances to its tune (if indeed a house can dance),
how the important media obey its orders and how the
universities, too, live in fear of it.
The paper caused a storm. And I don't mean the
predictable wild attacks by the "friends of Israel" -
which means almost all politicians, journalists and
professors. These pelted the authors with all the usual
accusations: that they were anti-Semites, that they
were resurrecting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and so forth. There was something paradoxical in these
attacks, since they only illustrated the authors' case.
But the debate that fascinates me is of a different
nature. It broke out between senior intellectuals, from
the legendary Noam Chomsky, the guru of the Left
throughout the world (including Israel), to progressive
websites everywhere. The bone of contention: the
conclusion of the paper that the Jewish-Israeli lobby
dominates US foreign policy and subjugates it to
Israeli interests - in glaring contradiction to the
national interest of the US itself. A case in point:
the American assault on Iraq.
Chomsky and others rose up against this assertion. They
do not deny the factual findings of the two professors,
but object to their conclusions. In their view, it is
not the Israel lobby that directs American policy, but
the interests of the big corporations that dominate the
American empire and exploit Israel for their own
selfish aims.
Simply put: does the dog wag its tail, or does the tail
wag its dog?
I AM NERVOUS about sticking my head into a debate
between such illustrious intellectuals, but I feel
obliged to express my view nevertheless.
I'll start with the Jew, who went to the Rabbi and
complained about his neighbor. "You are right'" the
Rabbi declared. Then came the neighbor and denounced
the complainant. "You are right'" the Rabbi announced.
"But how can that be," exclaimed the Rabbi's wife,
"Only one of the two can be right!" "You are right,
too," the Rabbi said.
I find myself in a similar situation. I think that both
sides are right (and hope to be right, myself, too).
The findings of the two professors are right to the
last detail. Every Senator and Congressman knows that
criticizing the Israeli government is political
suicide. Two of them, a Senator and a Congressman,
tried - and were politically executed. The Jewish lobby
was fully mobilized against them and hounded them out
of office. This was done openly, to set a public
example. If the Israeli government wanted a law
tomorrow annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 Senators
(at least) would sign the bill forthwith.
President Bush, for example, has withdrawn from all the
established American positions regarding our conflict.
He accepts automatically the positions of our
government, be they as they may. Almost all the
American media are closed to Palestinians and Israeli
peace activists. As to professors - almost all of them
know which side of their bread is peanut-buttered. If,
in spite of that, somebody dares to open their mouth
against the Israeli policy - as happens once every few
years - they are smothered under a volley of
denunciations: anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi.
By the way, American guests in Israel, who know that at
home it is forbidden to mention the influence of the
Jewish-Israeli lobby, are dumbfounded to see that here
the lobby does not hide its power in Washington but
openly boasts of it.
The question, therefore, is not whether the two
professors are right in their findings. The question is
what conclusions can be drawn from them.
LET'S TAKE the Iraq affair. Who is the dog? Who the
tail?
The Israeli government prayed for this attack, which
has eliminated the strategic threat posed by Iraq.
America was pushed into the war by a group of Neo-
Conservatives, almost all of them Jews, who had a huge
influence on the White House. In the past, some of them
had acted as advisers to Binyamin Netanyahu.
On the face of it, a clear case. The pro-Israeli lobby
pushed for the war, Israel is its main beneficiary. If
the war ends in a disaster for America, Israel will
undoubtedly be blamed.
Really? What about the American aim of getting their
hands on the main oil reserves of the world, in order
to dominate the world economy? What about the aim of
placing an American garrison in the center of the main
oil-producing area, on top of the Iraqi oil, between
the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Caspian Sea? What
about the immense influence of the big oil companies on
the Bush family? What about the big multinational
corporations, whose outstanding representative is Dick
Cheney, that hoped to make hundreds of billions from
the "reconstruction of Iraq"?
The lesson of the Iraq affair is that the American-
Israeli connection is strongest when it seems that
American interests and Israeli Interests are one
(irrespective of whether that is really the case in the
long run). The US uses Israel to dominate the Middle
East, Israel uses the US to dominate Palestine.
But if something exceptional happens, such as the
Jonathan Pollard espionage affair or the sale of an
Israeli spy plane to China, and a gap opens between the
interests of the two sides, America is quite capable of
slapping Israel in the face.
AMERICAN-ISRAELI relations are indeed unique. It seems
that they have no precedent in history. It is as if
King Herod had given orders to Augustus Caesar and
appointed the members of the Roman senate.
I don't think that this phenomenon can be wholly
explained by economic interests. Even the most orthodox
Marxist must recognize that it also has a spiritual
dimension. It is no accident that American (as well as
British) fundamentalist Christians invented the Zionist
idea well before Theodor Herzl hit upon it. The
evangelical lobby is no less important in today's
Washington than the Zionist one. According to its
ideology, the Jews must take possession of all the Holy
Land in order to make the Second Coming of Christ
possible (and then - the part they don't shout about -
some Jews will become Christians and the rest will be
annihilated at Armaggedon, today's Meggido in Northern
Israel).
At the basis of the phenomenon lies the uncanny
similarity between the two national-religious stories,
the American myth and the Israeli. In both, pioneers
persecuted for their religion reached the shores of the
Promised Land. They were forced to defend themselves
against the "savage" natives, who were out to destroy
them. They redeemed the land, made the desert bloom,
created, with God's help, a flourishing, democratic and
moral society.
Both societies live in a state of denial and
unconscious guilt feelings - over there because of the
genocide committed against the Native Americans and the
horrifying slavery of the blacks, here because of the
uprooting of half the Palestinian people and the
oppression of the other half. Both here and there,
people believe in an eternal war between the Sons of
Light and the Sons of Darkness.
ANYHOW, THE American-Israeli symbiosis is unique and
far too complex a phenomenon to be described as a
simple conspiracy. I am sure that the two professors
did not mean to do so.
The dog wags the tail and the tail wags the dog. They
wag each other.
GUSH SHALOM p.o.b. 3322 Tel Aviv 61033[/justify]
Last edited by Dejuificator II on Tue Oct 15, 2013 1:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
Nous serons toujours là.
-
Dejuificator II
- Erudit
- Posts: 552
- Joined: Thu Mar 03, 2011 9:47 pm
[justify]Why I'm Leaving After 25 Years
[large]The ADL Pushes ?Tolerance??[/large]
Why I?m leaving after 25 years[/justify]
[justify]Foxman never tires
in his search for
?hate? ? real or
imagined
By Carl Pearlston
[small]http://www.jewishworldreview.com[/small] ? MY love affair with the ADL began almost 25 years ago. It has just ended with a curt note from the Board President advising me that I haven?t shown a sufficient ?demonstration of commitment to the ADL? to warrant retention on the Executive Committee or the Regional Board.? How did it come to this?
I had been nominated to the Board by a judge with whom I had worked during the heady civil rights years, and then to the Executive Committee by the head of the Speakers Bureau, for which I was very active. Not that the romance had not been rocky. I had always known that my conservative Republican political views were barely tolerated by my overwhelmingly liberal colleagues, and I was tempted to keep them to myself. We were nominally a non-partisan organization, but our meetings frequently felt uncomfortably like those of a Democratic Party club in which it was assumed that all shared a common liberal or ?progressive? political worldview and none could, or wanted to, hear a differing viewpoint.
Just after the recent presidential election, our Director accosted me at a meeting with a vehement ?You stole the election!? Our positions were usually those of the liberal wing of the Democratic party on issues like abortion, school choice, teacher pay, bilingual education, affirmative action, the homosexual agenda, gun control.
I once cited the comprehensive study by Yale University Law School?s Dr. John Lott on gun laws to the effect that in those states where people could legally carry concealed weapons, crimes against people actually declined, since criminals do not want to take a chance that their victim may be armed. I was met with the sarcastic and dismissive response that ?Only John Lott, [talk show host and JWR columnist] Larry Elder and you believe in that study.?
There was not a great tolerance for diversity of viewpoint nor introduction of new information. I was barred from distributing written material which was germane and relevant to issues under discussion; only material from staff could be disseminated. To be fair, a member did once tell me that at least I kept them honest ? i.e. they were forced to at least be exposed to ? even if not to consider, a different view.
But, it was an uphill struggle.
When I once confessed to our National Director, Abe Foxman, my feelings of just spinning my wheels, he candidly told me that I would have to realize that over 95% of those involved in the ADL were liberal and would be unsympathetic to my conservative views.
DEMONIZING EXPONENTS OF JEWISH VALUES
Lack of sympathy frequently translated into lack of civility. For example, at several meetings, there were objections that Dr. Laura Schlesinger?s radio program and planned TV program was offensive and insensitive to homosexuals. I pointed out that her views enunciate traditional Jewish values which deserve the support of a Jewish defense organization, and was greeted with derision and intemperate, hostile responses. When it came to the issue of homosexuals versus the Boy Scouts, ADL chose the homosexuals, all the way to the Supreme Court.
Then, in its otherwise commendable nationwide partnership with Barnes and Noble in the program Hate Hurts, which sponsors books and educates teachers and young children to fight hate, the ADL endorsed the books Heather Has Two Mommies and Steve Has Two Daddies as suitable tools for teaching tolerance to young children. Teachers? workshops and children?s reading groups were organized, using these and other books in conjunction with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which had earlier achieved a certain notoriety for its own school workshops wherein teenagers were taught the fine points of ?fisting? and other homosexual practices.
TURNING JUDAISM ON ITS HEAD
In this manner, fighting ?hate? became a euphemism for an attack on sexual morality, the traditional family, and the Jewish view that children deserve a loving father and mother, not two fathers or two mothers. It is only through a perverse notion of ?tolerance? that support for traditional teaching about the family is intimidated, and condemned.
When Dennis Prager participated by invitation in a panel discussion on church-state issues, some members actually hissed and booed his remarks in a hostile display of intolerance. A respected board member persistently repeated to all who would hear that Prager was insane.
When the organization published its harsh attack on the Religious Right in 1994, I was distressed as were many politically conservative Jews who do not share the ADL view that politically-active conservative Christians are our enemy. As (Jewish) syndicated columnist and JWR contributor Mona Charen wrote, ?The ADL has committed defamation. There is no other conclusion to be reached after reading its new report, The Religious Right: the Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. It is sad that an organization with a proud history of fairness should have descended to this kind of character assassination and name calling.?
A Board member of another affiliate was forced to resign because he publicly expressed disagreement with that report. It seems that the term ?religious right? is a talisman used to invoke a reflexive response of hostility without thought. So deep was the antagonism that when Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition, appeared at an ADL leadership conference and gave a heartfelt apology for past insensitivity, prejudice, and discrimination by Christians toward Jews, the private response by most members to his apology was hostility and distrust.
CONSTRUCTING A SOLID WALL BETWEEN ?SYNAGOGUE AND STATE?
There was a particular intolerance on the issue of church-state. The theory that freedom of religion require ?strict separation of church and state? was transformed into hostility to any public display of religion in general, to Christianity in particular, and even to Judaism. I do not understand the logic of a Jewish organization expending its time and resources to forbid the public display of the chief gift of the Jews to civilization? The Ten Commandments. Nor does it seem appropriate for us to engage in litigation to forbid another Jewish organization (Chabad) from displaying a Menorah on public property. I was told that such a display would encourage other religious groups, including Moslems, to exercise their right to similar displays.
Well, why shouldn?t they? It is implicit in the meaning of freedom of religious expression and religious diversity, a freedom we have so long struggled to attain for ourselves. It is not in our country?s interest for us to demand a naked public square, devoid of any reference to G-d. Our cramped view of religious expression led us to oppose even the observance of a moment of silence in schools as being likely to encourage prayer.
The issue of parental choice in education, either by tax credits or vouchers, met with unwavering opposition based on what I believe is an erroneously perceived constitutional doctrine of ?separation of church and state,? along with a strong commitment to the teacher?s unions. At one meeting, I questioned Abe Foxman as to what the ADL would do in the likely event that the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of school vouchers. He said the ADL would never agree and would continue to press the court until the decision was reversed and the ADL viewpoint was adopted.
?YOU SHOULDN?T HAVE DONE THAT!?
Then, as he passed the table where my wife and I were sitting, he said to me, ?You shouldn?t have asked that question.? I then realized that the bloom was really off the romance.
I had always strongly believed in the ADL?s mission, as defined on a banner frequently displayed at the front of our meetings: ?? to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike?.? Our efforts against anti-Semitism were without peer. We were a Jewish organization primarily concerned with issues affecting the Jewish community, and secondarily with equality and fair enforcement of laws for everyone. I recall that many times in days past we deferred action on an item on the grounds that it was not related to Jewish community, and was thus beyond our purview.
AS ANTI-SEMITISM DECLINES, FINDING A NEW NEED TO EXIST
As years passed, the purview kept increasing along with the budget. While overt, and even latent, anti-Semitism was decreasing, our traditional mission as defender of the Jewish community was expanded to defender of all. We have become just another of many leftist ?rights? organizations. This realization was confirmed when I saw a new banner, displaying an unfamiliar mission statement: ??dedicated to translating democratic ideals into a way of life for all Americans in our time.?
This grandiose expansion of mission has had other consequences. The curbing of defamation?an action that has expanded to curbing of hate?a feeling, or emotion, or state of mind. If we can change people?s minds and the way they think, we will not have to control their actions. The program for changing hearts and minds, A World of Difference, was created in 1985 to change prejudiced feelings through ?sensitivity training?. It is reportedly very successful, highly commended, and widely used by governmental agencies and many companies.
Unfortunately, my exposure to the program at a leadership conference indicated that teaching the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural relativism resulted in denigrating the values and achievements of Western civilization and the desirability of a common American identity. There is now a nationwide industry of multicultural activists teaching various ?sensitivity? programs which increase awareness of racial identity, and result in racial separation and racial hostility.
CREATION OF A ?CRIME?
This focus on eliminating ?hate? logically led to the creation of ?hate crimes,? in which, a two-tier system of criminality was created: 1) those who commit crimes of violence for any reason other than hate, and 2) those who do injury solely because they hate the status or class of the victim (race, sex, nationality, religion, disability, occupation, sexual orientation, etc), Criminals of the latter class are punished more severely than those of the former, even though both may commit the same violent crime.
The punishment is levied on the thought, or feeling, or state of mind of the criminal and not the action, in keeping with the emphasis on eliminating and punishing hateful thoughts and feelings. Creating preferred classes of crime victims is not a proper function of the American criminal justice system. Nor does it seem desirable to federalize and supplant state criminal law enforcement, which is what results from enacting ?hate crime? legislation at the federal level.
The concept of ?hate crimes? inevitably leads to that of ?hate speech?, in which offensive, insensitive, or hurtful speech is legally banned, as it is in Canada where the criminal law punishes offensive speech as a form of group defamation. A minister was arrested there for publicly preaching, in accordance with the tenets of his faith, that the practice of homosexuality was immoral.
CHEAPENING THE HOLOCAUST
The ADL has properly rejected repeated demands by some of its leaders for adoption of similar group defamation laws as violating our free speech guarantees. At the same time, the ADL has led the effort to abate hateful speech not only in the public, but even the private forum in the interest of ?tolerance?. There have been repeated condemnations of various incidents of speech deemed hateful, hurtful, insensitive, or embarrassing to particular groups. All too frequently, however, free speech and the expression of religious belief have been the targets of these condemnations, such as religious references by political candidates, Christian prayers at the inauguration, religious symbolism in comics, expressions of religious beliefs by sports figures, or even expressions of the politically incorrect, as was the case when conservative activist David Horowitz was condemned as racially insensitive for placing ads in college papers denying the wisdom, fairness, and practicality of the growing movement for Slavery Reparations.
The ADL has illogically compared those ads to ones denying the Holocaust, while ignoring the issue of free speech curtailment in the violent reactions by students and compliant acts by college administrators to censor the ads and prevent intelligent discussion of the significant issue involved.
GIVING UP MY FREEDOM OF SPEECH
The ADL has always been a firm and loyal supporter of Israel, but it was also an early and naive advocate of the now-defunct Oslo peace process, to the ultimate detriment of actual peace. I frequently complained that we concentrated more on the process than the substance of peace, and that true peace was unlikely to occur since the root problem was not how much land Israel would give up, but Arab refusal to accept a viable Jewish state. All of our ?insider? briefings on the Mideast downplayed the risk to Israel posed by an armed Palestinian Authority or Palestinian state, and held out rosy and unrealistic prognostications of peace.
For example, at a leadership conference, we were treated to a talk by an Arab Ambassador urging us to take steps for peace, which translated into urging support for the election of Labor (Peres) over Likud (Netanyahu) in the coming election. It was portrayed, and accepted by many attendees, as a last chance for peace that was almost within our grasp. Most of us now see, in light of the past year?s warfare, that the ?peace? being urged was illusory and chimerical. So blinding was this hope for peace that, as reported, ADL had complimented the PA on their new school textbooks without even having read them, completely overlooking the virulent anti-Semitism contained therein. When I questioned our National Director about this, I became the target of attack and public humiliation for bringing up the matter. Nor did I endear myself by dwelling on our National Director?s central role on behalf of the ADL in devising and wangling a pardon for criminal fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich.
When I expressed my views on some of these matters in various letters and articles, in which I was not identified as an ADL Board member, I was rebuked in a stern letter from our President advising that I had publicly taken positions contrary to ADL policy, which was not permitted. I had not realized that, as the price of Board membership, I had given up my freedom of speech on issues on which the ADL had taken a position.
This was much like the old Leninist doctrine of ?democratic centralism?, in which debate is allowed only before a policy is adopted, and no dissent is tolerated thereafter. It seems odd that an organization which boastfully espouses and teaches ?tolerance? and ?diversity?, will not tolerate a bit of dissent and diverse viewpoint in its own lay leadership.
Carl Pearlston, a national board member of Toward Tradition, writes from California. Comment by clicking here.[/justify]
[large]The ADL Pushes ?Tolerance??[/large]
Why I?m leaving after 25 years[/justify]
[justify]Foxman never tiresin his search for
?hate? ? real or
imagined
By Carl Pearlston
[small]http://www.jewishworldreview.com[/small] ? MY love affair with the ADL began almost 25 years ago. It has just ended with a curt note from the Board President advising me that I haven?t shown a sufficient ?demonstration of commitment to the ADL? to warrant retention on the Executive Committee or the Regional Board.? How did it come to this?
I had been nominated to the Board by a judge with whom I had worked during the heady civil rights years, and then to the Executive Committee by the head of the Speakers Bureau, for which I was very active. Not that the romance had not been rocky. I had always known that my conservative Republican political views were barely tolerated by my overwhelmingly liberal colleagues, and I was tempted to keep them to myself. We were nominally a non-partisan organization, but our meetings frequently felt uncomfortably like those of a Democratic Party club in which it was assumed that all shared a common liberal or ?progressive? political worldview and none could, or wanted to, hear a differing viewpoint.
Just after the recent presidential election, our Director accosted me at a meeting with a vehement ?You stole the election!? Our positions were usually those of the liberal wing of the Democratic party on issues like abortion, school choice, teacher pay, bilingual education, affirmative action, the homosexual agenda, gun control.
I once cited the comprehensive study by Yale University Law School?s Dr. John Lott on gun laws to the effect that in those states where people could legally carry concealed weapons, crimes against people actually declined, since criminals do not want to take a chance that their victim may be armed. I was met with the sarcastic and dismissive response that ?Only John Lott, [talk show host and JWR columnist] Larry Elder and you believe in that study.?
There was not a great tolerance for diversity of viewpoint nor introduction of new information. I was barred from distributing written material which was germane and relevant to issues under discussion; only material from staff could be disseminated. To be fair, a member did once tell me that at least I kept them honest ? i.e. they were forced to at least be exposed to ? even if not to consider, a different view.
But, it was an uphill struggle.
When I once confessed to our National Director, Abe Foxman, my feelings of just spinning my wheels, he candidly told me that I would have to realize that over 95% of those involved in the ADL were liberal and would be unsympathetic to my conservative views.
DEMONIZING EXPONENTS OF JEWISH VALUES
Lack of sympathy frequently translated into lack of civility. For example, at several meetings, there were objections that Dr. Laura Schlesinger?s radio program and planned TV program was offensive and insensitive to homosexuals. I pointed out that her views enunciate traditional Jewish values which deserve the support of a Jewish defense organization, and was greeted with derision and intemperate, hostile responses. When it came to the issue of homosexuals versus the Boy Scouts, ADL chose the homosexuals, all the way to the Supreme Court.
Then, in its otherwise commendable nationwide partnership with Barnes and Noble in the program Hate Hurts, which sponsors books and educates teachers and young children to fight hate, the ADL endorsed the books Heather Has Two Mommies and Steve Has Two Daddies as suitable tools for teaching tolerance to young children. Teachers? workshops and children?s reading groups were organized, using these and other books in conjunction with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which had earlier achieved a certain notoriety for its own school workshops wherein teenagers were taught the fine points of ?fisting? and other homosexual practices.
TURNING JUDAISM ON ITS HEAD
In this manner, fighting ?hate? became a euphemism for an attack on sexual morality, the traditional family, and the Jewish view that children deserve a loving father and mother, not two fathers or two mothers. It is only through a perverse notion of ?tolerance? that support for traditional teaching about the family is intimidated, and condemned.
When Dennis Prager participated by invitation in a panel discussion on church-state issues, some members actually hissed and booed his remarks in a hostile display of intolerance. A respected board member persistently repeated to all who would hear that Prager was insane.
When the organization published its harsh attack on the Religious Right in 1994, I was distressed as were many politically conservative Jews who do not share the ADL view that politically-active conservative Christians are our enemy. As (Jewish) syndicated columnist and JWR contributor Mona Charen wrote, ?The ADL has committed defamation. There is no other conclusion to be reached after reading its new report, The Religious Right: the Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America. It is sad that an organization with a proud history of fairness should have descended to this kind of character assassination and name calling.?
A Board member of another affiliate was forced to resign because he publicly expressed disagreement with that report. It seems that the term ?religious right? is a talisman used to invoke a reflexive response of hostility without thought. So deep was the antagonism that when Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition, appeared at an ADL leadership conference and gave a heartfelt apology for past insensitivity, prejudice, and discrimination by Christians toward Jews, the private response by most members to his apology was hostility and distrust.
CONSTRUCTING A SOLID WALL BETWEEN ?SYNAGOGUE AND STATE?
There was a particular intolerance on the issue of church-state. The theory that freedom of religion require ?strict separation of church and state? was transformed into hostility to any public display of religion in general, to Christianity in particular, and even to Judaism. I do not understand the logic of a Jewish organization expending its time and resources to forbid the public display of the chief gift of the Jews to civilization? The Ten Commandments. Nor does it seem appropriate for us to engage in litigation to forbid another Jewish organization (Chabad) from displaying a Menorah on public property. I was told that such a display would encourage other religious groups, including Moslems, to exercise their right to similar displays.
Well, why shouldn?t they? It is implicit in the meaning of freedom of religious expression and religious diversity, a freedom we have so long struggled to attain for ourselves. It is not in our country?s interest for us to demand a naked public square, devoid of any reference to G-d. Our cramped view of religious expression led us to oppose even the observance of a moment of silence in schools as being likely to encourage prayer.
The issue of parental choice in education, either by tax credits or vouchers, met with unwavering opposition based on what I believe is an erroneously perceived constitutional doctrine of ?separation of church and state,? along with a strong commitment to the teacher?s unions. At one meeting, I questioned Abe Foxman as to what the ADL would do in the likely event that the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of school vouchers. He said the ADL would never agree and would continue to press the court until the decision was reversed and the ADL viewpoint was adopted.
?YOU SHOULDN?T HAVE DONE THAT!?
Then, as he passed the table where my wife and I were sitting, he said to me, ?You shouldn?t have asked that question.? I then realized that the bloom was really off the romance.
I had always strongly believed in the ADL?s mission, as defined on a banner frequently displayed at the front of our meetings: ?? to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike?.? Our efforts against anti-Semitism were without peer. We were a Jewish organization primarily concerned with issues affecting the Jewish community, and secondarily with equality and fair enforcement of laws for everyone. I recall that many times in days past we deferred action on an item on the grounds that it was not related to Jewish community, and was thus beyond our purview.
AS ANTI-SEMITISM DECLINES, FINDING A NEW NEED TO EXIST
As years passed, the purview kept increasing along with the budget. While overt, and even latent, anti-Semitism was decreasing, our traditional mission as defender of the Jewish community was expanded to defender of all. We have become just another of many leftist ?rights? organizations. This realization was confirmed when I saw a new banner, displaying an unfamiliar mission statement: ??dedicated to translating democratic ideals into a way of life for all Americans in our time.?
This grandiose expansion of mission has had other consequences. The curbing of defamation?an action that has expanded to curbing of hate?a feeling, or emotion, or state of mind. If we can change people?s minds and the way they think, we will not have to control their actions. The program for changing hearts and minds, A World of Difference, was created in 1985 to change prejudiced feelings through ?sensitivity training?. It is reportedly very successful, highly commended, and widely used by governmental agencies and many companies.
Unfortunately, my exposure to the program at a leadership conference indicated that teaching the values of diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural relativism resulted in denigrating the values and achievements of Western civilization and the desirability of a common American identity. There is now a nationwide industry of multicultural activists teaching various ?sensitivity? programs which increase awareness of racial identity, and result in racial separation and racial hostility.
CREATION OF A ?CRIME?
This focus on eliminating ?hate? logically led to the creation of ?hate crimes,? in which, a two-tier system of criminality was created: 1) those who commit crimes of violence for any reason other than hate, and 2) those who do injury solely because they hate the status or class of the victim (race, sex, nationality, religion, disability, occupation, sexual orientation, etc), Criminals of the latter class are punished more severely than those of the former, even though both may commit the same violent crime.
The punishment is levied on the thought, or feeling, or state of mind of the criminal and not the action, in keeping with the emphasis on eliminating and punishing hateful thoughts and feelings. Creating preferred classes of crime victims is not a proper function of the American criminal justice system. Nor does it seem desirable to federalize and supplant state criminal law enforcement, which is what results from enacting ?hate crime? legislation at the federal level.
The concept of ?hate crimes? inevitably leads to that of ?hate speech?, in which offensive, insensitive, or hurtful speech is legally banned, as it is in Canada where the criminal law punishes offensive speech as a form of group defamation. A minister was arrested there for publicly preaching, in accordance with the tenets of his faith, that the practice of homosexuality was immoral.
CHEAPENING THE HOLOCAUST
The ADL has properly rejected repeated demands by some of its leaders for adoption of similar group defamation laws as violating our free speech guarantees. At the same time, the ADL has led the effort to abate hateful speech not only in the public, but even the private forum in the interest of ?tolerance?. There have been repeated condemnations of various incidents of speech deemed hateful, hurtful, insensitive, or embarrassing to particular groups. All too frequently, however, free speech and the expression of religious belief have been the targets of these condemnations, such as religious references by political candidates, Christian prayers at the inauguration, religious symbolism in comics, expressions of religious beliefs by sports figures, or even expressions of the politically incorrect, as was the case when conservative activist David Horowitz was condemned as racially insensitive for placing ads in college papers denying the wisdom, fairness, and practicality of the growing movement for Slavery Reparations.
The ADL has illogically compared those ads to ones denying the Holocaust, while ignoring the issue of free speech curtailment in the violent reactions by students and compliant acts by college administrators to censor the ads and prevent intelligent discussion of the significant issue involved.
GIVING UP MY FREEDOM OF SPEECH
The ADL has always been a firm and loyal supporter of Israel, but it was also an early and naive advocate of the now-defunct Oslo peace process, to the ultimate detriment of actual peace. I frequently complained that we concentrated more on the process than the substance of peace, and that true peace was unlikely to occur since the root problem was not how much land Israel would give up, but Arab refusal to accept a viable Jewish state. All of our ?insider? briefings on the Mideast downplayed the risk to Israel posed by an armed Palestinian Authority or Palestinian state, and held out rosy and unrealistic prognostications of peace.
For example, at a leadership conference, we were treated to a talk by an Arab Ambassador urging us to take steps for peace, which translated into urging support for the election of Labor (Peres) over Likud (Netanyahu) in the coming election. It was portrayed, and accepted by many attendees, as a last chance for peace that was almost within our grasp. Most of us now see, in light of the past year?s warfare, that the ?peace? being urged was illusory and chimerical. So blinding was this hope for peace that, as reported, ADL had complimented the PA on their new school textbooks without even having read them, completely overlooking the virulent anti-Semitism contained therein. When I questioned our National Director about this, I became the target of attack and public humiliation for bringing up the matter. Nor did I endear myself by dwelling on our National Director?s central role on behalf of the ADL in devising and wangling a pardon for criminal fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich.
When I expressed my views on some of these matters in various letters and articles, in which I was not identified as an ADL Board member, I was rebuked in a stern letter from our President advising that I had publicly taken positions contrary to ADL policy, which was not permitted. I had not realized that, as the price of Board membership, I had given up my freedom of speech on issues on which the ADL had taken a position.
This was much like the old Leninist doctrine of ?democratic centralism?, in which debate is allowed only before a policy is adopted, and no dissent is tolerated thereafter. It seems odd that an organization which boastfully espouses and teaches ?tolerance? and ?diversity?, will not tolerate a bit of dissent and diverse viewpoint in its own lay leadership.
Carl Pearlston, a national board member of Toward Tradition, writes from California. Comment by clicking here.[/justify]
Nous serons toujours là.
-
Dejuificator II
- Erudit
- Posts: 552
- Joined: Thu Mar 03, 2011 9:47 pm
[justify]June 3, 2005
[large]Witch Hunt at Columbia
Targeting the University[/large]
By JOSEPH MASSAD
Targeting the university is the latest mission of right-wing forces who have hijacked not only political power and political discourse in the United States but also the very vocabulary that can be used against them. The campaign of the last three years or so to attack US universities as the last bastion where a measure of freedom of thought is still protected is engineered to cancel out such freedom and ensure that scholars will not subvert the received political wisdom of the day.
Some of the major tactics in this campaign have been the launching of witch hunts against specific professors, calling for their dismissal from their jobs, and, failing that, smear their reputation; target Middle East Studies as a scholarly field more generally and cut federal funding to it and place it under governmental supervision, and promote apologists for Israel in the guise of scholars as the only adequate scholarly alternative. While shutting down the educational process in favour of religious theories of creationism and the like has been around for a while, the recent attack on scholars who disagree with US foreign policy and the policies of the state of Israel are the main mobilisational issues of the current campaign.
What is at stake in this assault is not only academic freedom, but scholarship per se, and specifically scholarship on Palestine and Israel, which is the primary target of the witch-hunters.
What makes these anti-scholarship attacks possible and popular is the existence of a major discrepancy, even a radical disconnect, between popular knowledge and media coverage about the Palestine/Israel conundrum and established scholarly knowledge about the topic. It is this disconnect that the witch hunters mobilise against scholarship as proof that it is not media and popular knowledge, which defends Israeli policy and Zionism?s axioms, that is ideological, but rather academic scholarship which has largely uncovered unsavory facts about both. Thus when young American students who come from ideologically charged homes, schools, and environments, attend university classes about the subject, they mistake established scholarship as pro- Palestinian propaganda, a conclusion that is propped up by the likes of Campus Watch, the David Project, and the Anti- Defamation League, all three organisations who make it part or all their business to attack scholarly criticisms of Israeli policy.
Let me provide a few examples of what I mean. All respected scholars in the field agree that most or all Palestinians who became refugees in 1948 were expelled directly or indirectly by Israel. The debate that exists is about whether all Palestinian refugees were physically expelled by the Israeli army or that the Israeli army expelled the majority while a minority of refugees fled, not as a direct result of physical force but as an indirect consequence of actions taken by the Israeli army and government which might, or might not, have been deliberately intended to expel them. In contrast, media and popular ideological knowledge in the US still insists that the Palestinians fled on their own, or worse, were called upon to do so by Arab leaders (despite Israeli false claims that Arab leaders called on Palestinians to flee, research has shown that they called upon them to remain steadfast in their homeland) while the Zionists begged them to stay!
Established scholarship enumerates all the racist laws and institutional racist practices in operation in Israel which discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, granting Jews differential rights and privileges over non-Jews, and rendering Israel a racist state by law. Popular and media knowledge, in contrast, depict Israel as a democratic liberal state that treats all its citizens equally. It is also established in scholarship that Israel discriminates against non-European Jews (the majority of the country?s Jewish population) and also against recent Russian Jewish immigrants, and has engaged and continues to engage in a racist discourse about them and in unofficial institutional discrimination against them (witness the most recent case of discrimination against Ethiopian Jews in admissions to Israeli universities). In contrast, popular and media knowledge depicts Israel as a place where all Jews are equal. Scholarly knowledge addresses the question of Israel as a quasi-theological state, where religious law governs major aspects of Jewish life and that only Orthodox Judaism is allowed to have religious authority over Jewish citizens to the exclusion of Reform and Conservative Judaism, let alone other Jewish denominations. In contrast, media and popular knowledge depict Israel as a secular state. These are only a few examples of how scholarly knowledge is drastically different from and contradicts media and popular knowledge about key issues regarding Israeli society and history.
Israel?s apologists and right-wing witch- hunters aim to establish this popular and media ?knowledge?, which echo the official positions of the State of Israel and its US lobby, as ?scholarly? and dismiss academic scholarship as ideology. It is in this context that many of the organisations and individuals attacking me are under the false impression that what I teach in my classes is a ?Palestinian? perspective or narrative. In fact, at the risk of engaging my fanatical critics, whose outrageous claims and inventions should not be given any legitimacy, I do no such thing. In my class on the topic, I teach academic scholarship on Palestine and Israel, which is precisely why the witch- hunters want Columbia to fire me.
As academic knowledge is of no interest to these ideologues, they have marshalled all their resources to transform the university into a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda. They have recently been joined by The New York Times who, in an editorial on 7 April, called on Columbia University to monitor the classroom for ?pro-Palestinian? bias. The Times ? editors asserted that the (illegitimate) investigative panel that Columbia University convened as part of its own intimidation of its own professors failed to examine the real allegations of pro-Israel students who are allied with pro-Israeli lobbying groups outside the university. These allegations speak of stridently pro- Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors. The panel had no mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching. That leaves the university to follow up on complaints about politicised courses and a lack of scholarly rigour as part of its effort to upgrade the department. One can only hope that Columbia will proceed with more determination and care than it has heretofore.
What the Times ? editors mean is that it is incumbent upon Columbia University to bring scholarly knowledge transmitted in its classrooms in line with Israeli propaganda, which the New York Times itself has never found too difficult to disseminate as objective truth anyway. Indeed, Ethan Bronner, the Times? deputy foreign editor, was quoted in an article on 24 April asserting that as far as United Nations Security Council resolutions on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict are concerned, the newspaper editors ?view ourselves as neutral and unbound by such judgements. We cite them, but we do not live by them.? If the Times can ignore so casually UN decisions as unbinding, why shouldn?t scholars do the same? Indeed why shouldn?t Columbia University do the same? The fact that for now at least, Columbia?s administration has not taken steps to monitor the politics of scholarship should not reassure us. Aside from his commitment to the pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian line espoused by the New York Times and manifest in many of his own public statements, Columbia?s president, Lee Bollinger, has spoken about his concern of a lack of ?balance? and the presence of ?bias? in some classes on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict taught at Columbia, which he intends to rectify. He even expressed concern that Columbia scholars of the Middle East do not seem to explain ?the relationship? between the environmental facts of life in the Middle East and Asia, or its diseases, and the culture there?? Columbia may soon hire Middle East scholars who will attempt to answer this important question!
The production of academic knowledge in American universities was never separable from the overall social, political, and economic requirements of the American state. Links between the university and state policy and the interests of the private sector have a long history and are structurally built into the research agenda of universities, most importantly through the mechanism of funding. I still remember how as an undergraduate in the US, I was always baffled by political scientists who would ridicule Soviet academic scholarship as lacking ?independence? due to its being beholden to an agenda set and funded by the Soviet state, while being proud of their own scholarship and discipline, which was hardly ?independent? of US government funding as well as funding from the private sector which most often drove US state interests. Despite these structural limitations, however, there remained an important and crucial space in the university where serious scholarship could be produced and which scholars have utilised to produce their work.
This is not to say that scholarship is unbiased. On the contrary, all respectable scholarship about Nazi Germany and the holocaust, to take an important example, is indeed biased against the Nazis, but no one except anti-Semites would dare equate scholarly judgment of Nazi Germany and the holocaust as the ?Jewish? perspective or narrative. The same applies to scholarship about South Africa under Apartheid, which is never described as the ?Black? perspective or narrative. Feminist scholarship is equally biased against sexism, but is not labelled as ?women?s? narrative or perspective. Scholarship on Stalin, on US slavery, on British colonialism, on American racism, on institutionalised sexism and discrimination against women, etc, is always biased, and no amount of lobbying from right-wing groups will force academics to teach the Nazi or slavery perspectives in the interest of ?balance.? It is this scholarly space that the university enshrines which the neo- conservative culture commissars want to close off. To do so, what better place to create consensus than the Palestine/Israel conflict on which there is total US cultural agreement echoed by the mainstream and the right-wing and left-wing press. If Fox news and CNN and ABC news can agree on the ?facts? surrounding Israel and its policies, as do the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily News, and the New York Sun, then surely critical scholarship on this question will find little popular support. In this regard you can have a civil libertarian Zionist like the Village Voice ?s Nat Hentoff, liberal Zionist apologists like the Nation magazine, and the New York Sun and the New York Post, join hands to discredit scholars on Palestine and Israel as ?dogmatic?, ?uncompromising,? ?strident? and the like. Ostensible civil libertarian and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz has not only joined the campaign in writing for the press, but also by lecturing at Columbia University against ?pro- Palestinian? professors whom he accused of supporting terrorism. Luckily, Dershowitz did not advise Columbia on the types of legal torture that it could mete out to ?guilty? professors.
This is not to say that there is no disagreement among the members of this unholy alliance. There is. Such disagreement revolves on the division between ?good? Arabs and ?bad? Arabs. This is not new but harks back to the emergence of Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat as the first ?good? Arab to be rescued from the lot in the American media. Since then, while the right-wing has had no truck with these divisions, as all Arabs are ?bad,? as far as it is concerned, the mainstream and the ?left? very much dabble in this division. Thus, Arabs who are seen as ?moderate? and who are seen as speaking a language that does not challenge all the received wisdom on Israel are considered ?good,? while those who are seen as exposing the hypocrisy of liberal apologists for Israel are ?bad? and are described as ?extremists.? This is an important strategy for liberal Zionists, as it achieves two important goals: it avoids and pre-empts the accusation of anti-Arab racism while encouraging ?moderation? among Arab scholars by offering them much needed public and media praise. Thus, I was recently faulted by the reporter of the left- liberal Nation magazine for daring to call Israel a racist state, even though I base my accurate description of the country on its myriad racist laws that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, and that grant Jews rights and privileges that are denied to non-Jews. Such laws include the law of return (1950), the law of absentee property (1950), the law of the state?s property (1951), the law of citizenship (1952), the status law (1952), the Israel lands administration law (1960), the construction and building law (1965), among others. What the Nation and Nat Hentoff find objectionable in my characterisation of Israel as racist is that it contradicts media and popular knowledge about Israel, which is the only acceptable measure of knowledge of the country in the US media. Herein lies their complicity with the rightwing on rejecting academic scholarship on Israel. The Nation and Hentoff, among others, made sure to contrast me with other ?moderate? Arab scholars whom they praise and do not dismiss.
By using the popular and media consensus on Palestine/Israel as its entry point for the dismantling of the university and its cardinal principle of academic freedom, the pro-Israel lobbyists were able to find allies in the university administration, among the faculty, and certainly among students. Even though the main target of the witch-hunters is academic scholarship on Palestine and Israel, which they want to delegitimise fully as a scholarly endeavour, in favour of accepting the official Israeli government?s representation of itself as academic truth, their efforts have mushroomed into an all out attack on the concept of academic freedom, and the very institution of the University. Their strategy, however, has backfired, as faculty quickly realised that the attack would indeed touch on the very nature of university pedagogy and the production of scholarly knowledge. In this regard, Columbia?s faculty and other faculties around the country have begun to mobilise against these enemies of academic freedom. These enemies of academic freedom do not only threaten junior faculty but all classroom settings and all scholarship.
In light of the organised power and influence of the witch-hunters, the task before academics is not only to continue to insist on writing and producing scholarship about Palestine and Israel, which will continue to expose the true nature of the Israeli state and its oppressive policies, but to defend the scholarly endeavour itself, which can only be ensured if the institution of the university is maintained as a space where academic freedom is upheld. The university, with all its limitations, is one of the few remaining spaces, if not the only remaining one, where critical intellectuals can still live the life of the mind. What the witch- hunters want us to do is to live the life of servitude to state power, as technocrats and as ideologues. This we refuse to do.
Joseph Massad is assistant professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University.
This article originally appeared in Al-Ahram.[/justify]
[large]Witch Hunt at Columbia
Targeting the University[/large]
By JOSEPH MASSAD
Targeting the university is the latest mission of right-wing forces who have hijacked not only political power and political discourse in the United States but also the very vocabulary that can be used against them. The campaign of the last three years or so to attack US universities as the last bastion where a measure of freedom of thought is still protected is engineered to cancel out such freedom and ensure that scholars will not subvert the received political wisdom of the day.
Some of the major tactics in this campaign have been the launching of witch hunts against specific professors, calling for their dismissal from their jobs, and, failing that, smear their reputation; target Middle East Studies as a scholarly field more generally and cut federal funding to it and place it under governmental supervision, and promote apologists for Israel in the guise of scholars as the only adequate scholarly alternative. While shutting down the educational process in favour of religious theories of creationism and the like has been around for a while, the recent attack on scholars who disagree with US foreign policy and the policies of the state of Israel are the main mobilisational issues of the current campaign.
What is at stake in this assault is not only academic freedom, but scholarship per se, and specifically scholarship on Palestine and Israel, which is the primary target of the witch-hunters.
What makes these anti-scholarship attacks possible and popular is the existence of a major discrepancy, even a radical disconnect, between popular knowledge and media coverage about the Palestine/Israel conundrum and established scholarly knowledge about the topic. It is this disconnect that the witch hunters mobilise against scholarship as proof that it is not media and popular knowledge, which defends Israeli policy and Zionism?s axioms, that is ideological, but rather academic scholarship which has largely uncovered unsavory facts about both. Thus when young American students who come from ideologically charged homes, schools, and environments, attend university classes about the subject, they mistake established scholarship as pro- Palestinian propaganda, a conclusion that is propped up by the likes of Campus Watch, the David Project, and the Anti- Defamation League, all three organisations who make it part or all their business to attack scholarly criticisms of Israeli policy.
Let me provide a few examples of what I mean. All respected scholars in the field agree that most or all Palestinians who became refugees in 1948 were expelled directly or indirectly by Israel. The debate that exists is about whether all Palestinian refugees were physically expelled by the Israeli army or that the Israeli army expelled the majority while a minority of refugees fled, not as a direct result of physical force but as an indirect consequence of actions taken by the Israeli army and government which might, or might not, have been deliberately intended to expel them. In contrast, media and popular ideological knowledge in the US still insists that the Palestinians fled on their own, or worse, were called upon to do so by Arab leaders (despite Israeli false claims that Arab leaders called on Palestinians to flee, research has shown that they called upon them to remain steadfast in their homeland) while the Zionists begged them to stay!
Established scholarship enumerates all the racist laws and institutional racist practices in operation in Israel which discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, granting Jews differential rights and privileges over non-Jews, and rendering Israel a racist state by law. Popular and media knowledge, in contrast, depict Israel as a democratic liberal state that treats all its citizens equally. It is also established in scholarship that Israel discriminates against non-European Jews (the majority of the country?s Jewish population) and also against recent Russian Jewish immigrants, and has engaged and continues to engage in a racist discourse about them and in unofficial institutional discrimination against them (witness the most recent case of discrimination against Ethiopian Jews in admissions to Israeli universities). In contrast, popular and media knowledge depicts Israel as a place where all Jews are equal. Scholarly knowledge addresses the question of Israel as a quasi-theological state, where religious law governs major aspects of Jewish life and that only Orthodox Judaism is allowed to have religious authority over Jewish citizens to the exclusion of Reform and Conservative Judaism, let alone other Jewish denominations. In contrast, media and popular knowledge depict Israel as a secular state. These are only a few examples of how scholarly knowledge is drastically different from and contradicts media and popular knowledge about key issues regarding Israeli society and history.
Israel?s apologists and right-wing witch- hunters aim to establish this popular and media ?knowledge?, which echo the official positions of the State of Israel and its US lobby, as ?scholarly? and dismiss academic scholarship as ideology. It is in this context that many of the organisations and individuals attacking me are under the false impression that what I teach in my classes is a ?Palestinian? perspective or narrative. In fact, at the risk of engaging my fanatical critics, whose outrageous claims and inventions should not be given any legitimacy, I do no such thing. In my class on the topic, I teach academic scholarship on Palestine and Israel, which is precisely why the witch- hunters want Columbia to fire me.
As academic knowledge is of no interest to these ideologues, they have marshalled all their resources to transform the university into a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda. They have recently been joined by The New York Times who, in an editorial on 7 April, called on Columbia University to monitor the classroom for ?pro-Palestinian? bias. The Times ? editors asserted that the (illegitimate) investigative panel that Columbia University convened as part of its own intimidation of its own professors failed to examine the real allegations of pro-Israel students who are allied with pro-Israeli lobbying groups outside the university. These allegations speak of stridently pro- Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors. The panel had no mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching. That leaves the university to follow up on complaints about politicised courses and a lack of scholarly rigour as part of its effort to upgrade the department. One can only hope that Columbia will proceed with more determination and care than it has heretofore.
What the Times ? editors mean is that it is incumbent upon Columbia University to bring scholarly knowledge transmitted in its classrooms in line with Israeli propaganda, which the New York Times itself has never found too difficult to disseminate as objective truth anyway. Indeed, Ethan Bronner, the Times? deputy foreign editor, was quoted in an article on 24 April asserting that as far as United Nations Security Council resolutions on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict are concerned, the newspaper editors ?view ourselves as neutral and unbound by such judgements. We cite them, but we do not live by them.? If the Times can ignore so casually UN decisions as unbinding, why shouldn?t scholars do the same? Indeed why shouldn?t Columbia University do the same? The fact that for now at least, Columbia?s administration has not taken steps to monitor the politics of scholarship should not reassure us. Aside from his commitment to the pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian line espoused by the New York Times and manifest in many of his own public statements, Columbia?s president, Lee Bollinger, has spoken about his concern of a lack of ?balance? and the presence of ?bias? in some classes on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict taught at Columbia, which he intends to rectify. He even expressed concern that Columbia scholars of the Middle East do not seem to explain ?the relationship? between the environmental facts of life in the Middle East and Asia, or its diseases, and the culture there?? Columbia may soon hire Middle East scholars who will attempt to answer this important question!
The production of academic knowledge in American universities was never separable from the overall social, political, and economic requirements of the American state. Links between the university and state policy and the interests of the private sector have a long history and are structurally built into the research agenda of universities, most importantly through the mechanism of funding. I still remember how as an undergraduate in the US, I was always baffled by political scientists who would ridicule Soviet academic scholarship as lacking ?independence? due to its being beholden to an agenda set and funded by the Soviet state, while being proud of their own scholarship and discipline, which was hardly ?independent? of US government funding as well as funding from the private sector which most often drove US state interests. Despite these structural limitations, however, there remained an important and crucial space in the university where serious scholarship could be produced and which scholars have utilised to produce their work.
This is not to say that scholarship is unbiased. On the contrary, all respectable scholarship about Nazi Germany and the holocaust, to take an important example, is indeed biased against the Nazis, but no one except anti-Semites would dare equate scholarly judgment of Nazi Germany and the holocaust as the ?Jewish? perspective or narrative. The same applies to scholarship about South Africa under Apartheid, which is never described as the ?Black? perspective or narrative. Feminist scholarship is equally biased against sexism, but is not labelled as ?women?s? narrative or perspective. Scholarship on Stalin, on US slavery, on British colonialism, on American racism, on institutionalised sexism and discrimination against women, etc, is always biased, and no amount of lobbying from right-wing groups will force academics to teach the Nazi or slavery perspectives in the interest of ?balance.? It is this scholarly space that the university enshrines which the neo- conservative culture commissars want to close off. To do so, what better place to create consensus than the Palestine/Israel conflict on which there is total US cultural agreement echoed by the mainstream and the right-wing and left-wing press. If Fox news and CNN and ABC news can agree on the ?facts? surrounding Israel and its policies, as do the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily News, and the New York Sun, then surely critical scholarship on this question will find little popular support. In this regard you can have a civil libertarian Zionist like the Village Voice ?s Nat Hentoff, liberal Zionist apologists like the Nation magazine, and the New York Sun and the New York Post, join hands to discredit scholars on Palestine and Israel as ?dogmatic?, ?uncompromising,? ?strident? and the like. Ostensible civil libertarian and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz has not only joined the campaign in writing for the press, but also by lecturing at Columbia University against ?pro- Palestinian? professors whom he accused of supporting terrorism. Luckily, Dershowitz did not advise Columbia on the types of legal torture that it could mete out to ?guilty? professors.
This is not to say that there is no disagreement among the members of this unholy alliance. There is. Such disagreement revolves on the division between ?good? Arabs and ?bad? Arabs. This is not new but harks back to the emergence of Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat as the first ?good? Arab to be rescued from the lot in the American media. Since then, while the right-wing has had no truck with these divisions, as all Arabs are ?bad,? as far as it is concerned, the mainstream and the ?left? very much dabble in this division. Thus, Arabs who are seen as ?moderate? and who are seen as speaking a language that does not challenge all the received wisdom on Israel are considered ?good,? while those who are seen as exposing the hypocrisy of liberal apologists for Israel are ?bad? and are described as ?extremists.? This is an important strategy for liberal Zionists, as it achieves two important goals: it avoids and pre-empts the accusation of anti-Arab racism while encouraging ?moderation? among Arab scholars by offering them much needed public and media praise. Thus, I was recently faulted by the reporter of the left- liberal Nation magazine for daring to call Israel a racist state, even though I base my accurate description of the country on its myriad racist laws that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, and that grant Jews rights and privileges that are denied to non-Jews. Such laws include the law of return (1950), the law of absentee property (1950), the law of the state?s property (1951), the law of citizenship (1952), the status law (1952), the Israel lands administration law (1960), the construction and building law (1965), among others. What the Nation and Nat Hentoff find objectionable in my characterisation of Israel as racist is that it contradicts media and popular knowledge about Israel, which is the only acceptable measure of knowledge of the country in the US media. Herein lies their complicity with the rightwing on rejecting academic scholarship on Israel. The Nation and Hentoff, among others, made sure to contrast me with other ?moderate? Arab scholars whom they praise and do not dismiss.
By using the popular and media consensus on Palestine/Israel as its entry point for the dismantling of the university and its cardinal principle of academic freedom, the pro-Israel lobbyists were able to find allies in the university administration, among the faculty, and certainly among students. Even though the main target of the witch-hunters is academic scholarship on Palestine and Israel, which they want to delegitimise fully as a scholarly endeavour, in favour of accepting the official Israeli government?s representation of itself as academic truth, their efforts have mushroomed into an all out attack on the concept of academic freedom, and the very institution of the University. Their strategy, however, has backfired, as faculty quickly realised that the attack would indeed touch on the very nature of university pedagogy and the production of scholarly knowledge. In this regard, Columbia?s faculty and other faculties around the country have begun to mobilise against these enemies of academic freedom. These enemies of academic freedom do not only threaten junior faculty but all classroom settings and all scholarship.
In light of the organised power and influence of the witch-hunters, the task before academics is not only to continue to insist on writing and producing scholarship about Palestine and Israel, which will continue to expose the true nature of the Israeli state and its oppressive policies, but to defend the scholarly endeavour itself, which can only be ensured if the institution of the university is maintained as a space where academic freedom is upheld. The university, with all its limitations, is one of the few remaining spaces, if not the only remaining one, where critical intellectuals can still live the life of the mind. What the witch- hunters want us to do is to live the life of servitude to state power, as technocrats and as ideologues. This we refuse to do.
Joseph Massad is assistant professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University.
This article originally appeared in Al-Ahram.[/justify]
Last edited by Dejuificator II on Tue Oct 15, 2013 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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