{"id":65816,"date":"2015-03-15T10:14:53","date_gmt":"2015-03-15T18:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=65816"},"modified":"2015-03-15T10:14:53","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T18:14:53","slug":"university-of-washingtons-simpson-center-puts-israel-in-the-dock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=65816","title":{"rendered":"University Of Washington\u2019s Simpson Center Puts Israel In The Dock"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edward Alexander writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli \u2013 and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 Philip Roth, Operation Shylock (1993)<\/p>\n

Although we live in a new Dark Age in which millions of people are assaulted daily with some version of the argument that the misfortunes of the world are to be explained in terms of \u201cIsrael,\u201d the University of Washington\u2019s Simpson Center has decided to add its two cents worth of calumny with a \u201cresearch cluster\u201d entitled \u201cPalestine and the Public Sphere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Its first featured speaker is Omar Barghouti, a stalwart of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to expel Israel from the family of nations; its three UW \u201cfaculty contacts\u201d \u2013 Sandra Silberstein, Eva Cherniavsky, and Anis Bawarshi \u2013 are all (like Simpson director Kathleen Woodward) English professors.<\/p>\n

The allegations against Israel brought by academic boycotters are countless, and make the tiny country \u2013 that \u201c[expletive] little country,\u201d as a French diplomat who unzipped his mouth in public said some years ago \u2013 guilty of every evil on the planet with the exception of avian flu. But let us examine their favorite one: Israel is an \u201capartheid\u201d state. According to the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, \u201cAll academic exchanges with Israeli academics\u2026have the effect of normalizing Israel and its politics of occupation and apartheid.\u201d<\/p>\n

On every American campus that deems itself \u201cprogressive\u201d there is an Israel Apartheid Week each spring. For days on end the self-declared friends of the human species spew fire and vitriol at the Jewish state and call for its elimination, so that the globe may be Judenstaatrein (purified of a Jewish state).<\/p>\n

There have never been apartheid laws in Israel. Jews and Arabs use the same buses, clinics, government offices, theaters, restaurants, soccer fields, and beaches. (Did I fail to mention universities in my list? Here is Mr. Barghouti to remind me: his academic institution of choice for pursuing a Master\u2019s degree in philosophy was Tel Aviv University, of the nation he paints as irredeemably biased.)<\/p>\n

All citizens of Israel, regardless of religion or ethnic origin, are equal before the law. That law accords full political, civil, and human rights to all people, including the more than one million Arab citizens, some of whom serve in the Israeli parliament and cabinet. Israel is also the only country in the world to have sought out and brought to its shores, entirely on its own initiative, tens of thousands of black Africans for purposes other than slavery, granting them full citizenship. There is, to be sure, extreme and murderous racial and religious discrimination in the Middle East \u2013 have BDSers assessed the causes of the 130,000 killed and 20 million refugees from nearby Syria? \u2013 so much so that Israel is nearly the only state in the region where \u201capartheid\u201d is not practiced in some form.<\/p>\n

The Simpson Center has for many years been zealous in sponsoring or co-sponsoring peripatetic Israel-haters. In 2008, in an act of depraved malevolence, Simpson marked Israel\u2019s 60th birthday by bringing to campus, with help from the Graduate School, Norman Finkelstein, the dream-Jew of the world\u2019s anti-Semites, and Yitzhak Laor, a second-tier Israeli poet who specializes in depicting his country as the devil\u2019s experiment station.<\/p>\n

Lest there be any doubt about where Woodward\u2019s Simpson Center stands in relation to the campaign to demonize Israel, it shamelessly recommends, as its model of scholarship in this area for \u201cdepth, tenor, and thoughtfulness,\u201d the scandalous tract by yet another English professor, Jacqueline Rose, called The Question of Zion. A critic of the psychoanalytic persuasion, Rose has put Zionism on the couch in a way that gives some support to those who claim that psychoanalysis is the disease it purports to cure. She depicts mass murderers as \u201cpeople driven to extremes,\u201d rhapsodizes about bonding with Islamist fanatics, lashes out against \u201cthose wishing to denigrate suicide bombers and their culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAppalled at what the Israeli nation perpetrated in my name,\u201d Rose wishes to live \u201cin a world in which we did not have to be ashamed of shame\u201d and looks forward to curing her shame-sickness by destroying its cause: Israel. The book\u2019s level of scholarship is exemplified in the following sentence: \u201cIt was the same Paris performance of Wagner. . .that inspired Herzl to write Der Judenstaat [the Jewish State], and Hitler Mein Kampf.\u201d (Is there a normally attentive junior high school student who would not laugh at this historical absurdity?)<\/p>\n

Careful observers of the organizations that strive to demonize Israel will notice the frequency with which they trot out what Kafka called \u201cDisplay Jews\u201d like Rose. One hesitates to call such Jews self-haters because so many of them are sick with self-love. They become Jews by virtue of the (much-advertised) fact that they are not Zionists.<\/p>\n

Perhaps a cautionary and charitable note of warning, especially to the English professors among them, is in order. Stoking the fires of Jew-hatred is a risky business because the flames quickly get out of control. Jew-haters are notoriously poor at distinguishing between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. Like poor Cinna, the unfortunate poet in Shakespeare\u2019s Julius Caesar who is mistaken by the \u201cfirebrands\u201d come to avenge their murdered emperor, insisting that he is not \u201cCinna the conspirator,\u201d they will find it useless to plead \u201cI am Professor Rose the anti-Zionist! I am not Professor Rose the Zionist.\u201d The killers \u2013 in Paris or Toulouse or Copenhagen \u2013 will nevertheless reply: \u201cIt is no matter. Tear her to pieces, she\u2019s a Jew.\u201d<\/p>\n

About the Author: Edward Alexander is professor emeritus in the English department at the University of Washington and the author of a number of books including \u201cThe State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal\u201d (Transaction, 2012).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Alexander writes: \u201cIn the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli \u2013 and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65817,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65816\/revisions\/65817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}