Ari Shavit's Cri de Coeur

The New York literati have given an overwhelming thumbs-up to Ari Shavit's new book on Israel/Palestine, My Promised Land. The New York Times, for one, has given rave reviews not only in its daily edition but also in a front-page piece in its Book Review.  Other media followed.  It is a love fest of extraordinary proportions. 

This is an approbation from, as I say, the literati, and seems to be based overwhelmingly on the alleged literary merits of this volume. There was much talk of the "lyricism" of the book;  more than one reviewer spoke of a "cri de coeur."  Professional historians have yet to weigh in.  Their judgement can be expected to be more restrained, if not outright negative.

The overwrought "literary" prose is exemplified in the author's musings on Israel's atomic project at Dimona  (p. 196):

          And now when the sun rises high above the mountains of Jordan, when the desert air begins to warm and the silver dome shines in the distance, I think about its place in our lives.  Because in the most basic sense, it is our real taboo.  Our common secret-not-secret.  It is the real thing, scientific and concrete, that embodies the root of our existence here.  And the unique predicament of our existence here.  That's why we prefer to avert our gaze from Dimona.  That's why we prefer not to know much about it.  That's why we prefer to know that it is there, but not what it is.   That's why we chose to ignore the tragedy enmeshed in Israel's great secret.

Earlier in the same chapter, Shavit suggests that Dimona is basically an immoral enterprise:  "for the first time in history, the Jews could have the ability to annihilate other people." (P. 180)  In fact, much of the book consists of moral condemnation of Israel and Zionism,  especially in regard to the occupation of the territories.

And yet, since Shavit is no anti-Israel propagandist in the mold of, say,  Noam Chomsky, he gives many indications that he recognizes the defensive aspects of the occupation.  He does not advocate a simple immediate unilateral withdrawal from the territories:  "if Israel does not retreat from the West Bank, it will be politically and morally doomed, but if it does retreat, it might face an Iranian-backed and Islamic Brotherhood-inspired West Bank regime whose missiles could endanger Israel's security." (P. 401).  And, concerning the atomic weaponry at Dimona, he concedes that it "gave Israel half a century of relative security and gave the Middle East forty-six years of relative security."

So what are we to make of the heavy moralism in this book, this mea culpa that he pronounces so insistently and repeatedly on behalf of the Jews ?  If the occupation and the atomic weapon can be seen as a necessary evil, as he suggests, how can it be so unspeakably immoral, as he also suggests ?

The fact is that in Shavit there is a basic confusion between a posited absolute evil as a figure of speech on the one hand, and the real-life evil of individual human beings on the other.

We Jews say the confessional Ashamnuprayer on Yom Kippur, as follows:

We abuse, we betray, we are cruel,

We destroy we embitter, we falsify.

We gossip, we hate, we insult.

We jeer, we kill, we lie.

......

etc.

I do find the prayer moving, and of course there is truth in it.  But what kind of truth is it ?  Does it mean that I, and all my fellow congregants, actually go around killing people ?  I do not think so, and, what is more important, nobody in his right mind thinks so.  There is, if you will, a certain literary truth here, but it cannot be simply equated to the truth that we seek when we accuse actual human beings of actual crimes.  In Shavit's book, these two kinds of truth are hopelessly confused.  That is the first of the two fundamental flaws in the book.

The second fundamental defect is that Shavit, with all his sentimental affirmations of a universalist  human decency, is, in fact, severely biased against his fellow Jews.  He is very open to any evidence or suspicion of evidence of Jewish malfeasance, and, at the same time, either understates or completely ignores the Arab role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Among the incidents of early twentieth century Arab-Jewish conflict, three stand out:

1)  The Deir Yassin incident of 1948 during the War of Independence.   

Some  one hundred Arab civilians died in this Arab village in an action conducted by the right-wing Jewish militias of Etsel ("Irgun" in the English-language literature) and Lechi ("Stern Gang").  Shavit reports on the incident in a fulsome paragraph on page 395, of which the key sentence reads as follows:  "At least one hundred Palestinians were slaughtered."  He does not report that the larger Jewish community organizations condemned this action and sent a note of apology and explanation to King Abdullah.  In any case, note Shavit's term "slaughter," and the details concerning the victims.

2)  The Hebron incident of 1929. 

Some sixty Yeshiva students were killed by Arab forces in an action that was devoid of military motivation insofar as anyone could tell at the time or later.  Nor were these students Zionist.  It seems to have been anti-Semitism, pure and simple.  Now Shavit alludes to this incident, totally offhand and somewhat cryptically, as a "massacre of 1929." (P. 204.)  Massacre yes.  But no "butchery," and no description or counting of victims.  Unlike Shavit’s emphatic treatment of Deir Yassin, his treatment of Hebron consisted of no more than an obiter dictum. In general, all his references to Arab violence consist of obiter dicta, written, it would seem, as concessions to be used against accusations of bias.

3)  The Kfar Etzion massacre of 1948. 

Here I quote from Wikipedia:

The Kfar Etzion massacre refers to a massacre that took place after a two-day battle between Jewish settlers and soldiers of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion and a combined force of the Arab Legion and Arab villagers, on May 13, 1948, the day before the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Of the 129 Haganah soldiers and Jewish combatant kibbutzniks who died during the defence of the settlement, Martin Gilbert states that fifteen were murdered on surrendering.[1] Controversy surrounds the responsibility and role of the Arab Legion in the killing of those who surrendered. The official Israeli version maintains that the settlers and soldiers were massacred by villagers and the Arab legion as they were surrendering. The Arab Legion version states that it arrived too late to prevent the villagers' onslaught, which was motivated by a desire to revenge the massacre of Deir Yassin, and the destruction of one of their villages several months earlier.[2] The surrendering fighters are said to have assembled in a courtyard, only to be suddenly fired upon, and that many died on the spot, while most of those who managed to flee were hunted down and killed.[3]

Four prisoners survived the massacre and were transferred to Transjordan.[3] Immediately following the surrender on May 13, the kibbutz was looted and razed to the ground.[3] The members of the three other kibbutzim of the Gush Etzion surrendered the next day and were taken as POWs to Jordan.

The bodies of the victims were left unburied until, one and a half year later, the Jordanian government allowed Shlomo Goren to collect the remains, which were then interred at Mount Herzl. The survivors of the Etzion Bloc were housed in former Arab houses in Jaffa.[4]

There is no reference of any sort to Kfar Etzion in Shavit's book.  No lyrical writing, no cri de coeur.  Not even an obiter dictum somewhere.  Simply nothing. 

***********

So from the evidence of his treatment of these three incidents at least, It must be said that Shavit  is biased toward an Arab point of view.

And this impression of bias is strengthened when we consider Shavit’s treatment of anti-Semitism among Palestinian Arabs.  Anti-Semitism appears eleven times in his index.  In ten of these instances, the reference is to anti-Semitism in Europe.  One of the items refers to Iraq.  Not one refers to Palestinian Arabs.

Various Israeli leaders and writers make appearances in this book.  But there is no reference to Y. Harkabi, the author of the pioneering study “Arab Attitudes to Israel,” (1972).  Nor will the reader find the name of Robert Wistrich, the great scholar of contemporary anti-Semitism.

Shavit does devote one chapter (Chapt. 13) to his interviews with a number of Israeli Arabs.  In particular there is Mohammed Dahla, whom, he says, he “loves.”  (P. 323). Dahla is a lawyer who devotes much of his time to the legal defense of accused terrorists.  In this connection, we also very casually learn, again as an obiter dictum,  of  a shaheed, a “martyr” killed while performing terrorism.

This is the only reference to the institution of  martyrdom in the Palestinian population. Shavit does not tell us about Dalal Mughrabi, the martyr-terrorist responsible for the death in 1978 of 38 Israelis, including thirteen children. t Mughrabi is today celebrated as a great martyr and hero by the Palestinian Authority.  Quite a few public places  have been named in her honor by the Palestinian authority.

As Shavit averts his eyes from Mughrabi, he averts them from the institution of martyrdom  among Palestinian Arabs.  Nor does he see  the relevance of Syrian conditions to Israel-Palestine, that is to say the relevance of the culture of violence in the Arab population.  He can see no connection, none that he reports in any case, between the Arab violence in the surrounding Arab countries and the Palestinian Arab preachments of violence and “martyrdom” against Jews..

In the end, Shavit’s biased moralism amounts to a blindness  to the reality of real Arabs. He either does not see or does not care that, in reality, he is patronizing his beloved Arab friends when he  ignores what they say and what they do in favor of a cri de coeur, positing them as noble savages forever victimized by immoral Jews.

Veiling History at the Leo Baeck Institute

What Has Happened to the LBI ?

The Seven Veils of Irene Runge

Something was amiss from the start.  The venerable Leo Baeck Institute of New York, home for much scholarly research and documentation of German Jewish history and culture, invites to an evening with Irene Runge (Aug. 28, 2013):

"Irene Runge … was born the daughter of German-Jewish emigres in Manhattan in 1942.  In 1949, she returned to Berlin (East) with her parents, committed Socialists who wanted to help build a different kind of Germany in the newly founded German Democratic Republic (GDR)."

Committed "Socialists" who wish to live in Stalin's "German Democratic Republic"  ?  The correct description for these folks is Communists, Stalinist Communists.  And "Communists,"  indeed, is the term used in the German press to describe Ms. Runge's parents.   Why does the LBI engage in this bit of obscurism, of veiling, of not telling how it is ?  As we shall see, there were quite a few other things that Ms. Runge and the LBI organizers of this event chose to veil.  

I attended the evening with my daughter Rachel.  The event was co-sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, an agency of the German Left party.  (This Foundation is known for its anti-Israel agitation worldwide.)  Of course there was no mention of what the martyred Rosa had thought of her Jewish roots, although, surely, I could not have been the only one in this audience of aged Jews who knew about it:

In 1917 she wrote her friend Mathilde Wurm a harsh response to the latter’s concern about pogroms. “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” Rosa declared outright. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.” (From Sarah Honig)

Runge's speech was meandering and only rarely touched on the autobiographical themes that had been promised.  The totalitarianism of the GDR in her childhood was never mentioned, nor did the subject of Israel come up in any sustained way.  Runge took some sideswipes at what she considered Israel's bad position in regard to the immigration of Russian Jews to Germany.  She also complained that an Israeli journalist in Berlin, a critic of Israel, was not given an adequate hearing by the community.  But this theme was not emphasized.  Nothing of a political nature was emphasized.  Her tone was light-hearted and joking, much to the pleasure of her many friends in the audience.

But there was an elephant in the room which nobody wanted to notice.  I had written an email to the LBI leadership about the proboscidean earlier in the day, but had not received a reply.  The problem which nobody at this meeting mentioned is that Ms. Runge had been a secret spy for the Stasi for seventeen years, and, for that reason, had been dismissed from her East Berlin university after the fall of the Wall.  There is a record of at least one of her Stasi accomplishments.  It seems that a family of her acquaintance was planning to flee East Germany.  Ms. Runge reported this to her Stasi handlers, and the family in question was sent to prison.  Ms. Runge received a special financial reward for this work at the time, as well as a special certificate of merit.

Much of Ms. Runge's Stasi background can be found here.  But in a recent interview, Ms. Runge complains that it is she who has been victimized by being dismissed from the university.  In any case, if she has any regrets for her Stasi work, these have not come to light in any of the statements of hers that I have seen. On the contrary, she remains stridently unapologetic.

Back to the meeting at the LBI.  An octogenarian operative of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee took the floor during the discussion period to praise Ms. Runge's efforts on behalf of Russian Jewish immigrants to Berlin after the fall of the Wall.  After the meeting ended, I took the opportunity to chat with this gentleman.  "Yes, yes, I know all about her," he told me.  "In fact, I myself have been reported to the Stasi by her.  But with all that, I like this woman."  And everyone in the room -- I being the only exception -- was charmed by Irene,  this loquacious, witty, charming Berliner.

The Menace of the Charlatan

A charlatan (also called swindler or mountebank) is a person practicing quackery or some similarconfidence trick in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretense or deception. (Wikipedia)

Broadly conceived, the charlatan plagues us in many forms.  There was Mr. Ponzi, together with his modern imitators like Mr. Bernard Madoff and many others, whose marks fell victim to his representations of financial wizardry.  There are quasi-religious charlatans, like the late L. Ron Hubbard,   who promise eternal bliss, more or less, in exchange for devotion and revenue from his followers.  And there are also the less conspicuous braggarts who  flaunt imaginary or puffed-up credentials (the Doctor X's and Reverend Y's of the media) to gain specious prestige.

But most commonly, the term charlatan attaches to the medical quack -- the man (or rarely the woman) who urges you to put your faith and money into practices and nostrums whose efficacy and/or safety have not been established by the canons of science.  Instead of science, the appeal is to  the charisma of the charlatan, who, in turn, proposes notions of ancient wisdom, spiritual enlightenment, ostensible Asian healing skills, resentments toward scientific elites, folk lore, new age thinking.

The charlatan may or may not sport legitimate medical credentials.  But when employed as sales devices for quackery, the validity of such credentials is zero.

The marketing of such quackery is probably as old as the institution of thievery, to which it is of course related.  But like the other ancient afflictions of man, charlatanism has developed modern forms, no the least of which is its use of television and the computer.

We now have an excellent, up-to-date description of modern charlatanism, Paul Offit's Do You Believe in Magic ?, HarperCollins, 2013.

The early chapters of the book give a rundown of some of the big names of 20th century charlatanism, among whom the name of Linus Pauling may be the most interesting.  After a most distinguished career in science, including a Nobel prize in chemistry, Pauling turned his back on science and began advocating cultic nostrums.  Apparently the turn occurred when he was 65 years old, in 1966,  and the reader is left wondering whether the cause was some sort of senescence.  Offit does not mention this, but Pauing gave an earlier indication of oddness, when he participated in  Communist fellow-travelling in 1948 by endorsing the Henry Wallace candidacy for President, and again a year later, when he participated in the Communisty-organized "Peace Conference" at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Some of Offit's most important information concerns the lucrative trade in largely worthless dietary supplements, which amounts to some $34 billion a year.  It is difficult to turn on the radio, or even the TV, without being accosted by these hucksters.  Offit describes how this industry, with the connivance of certain politicians (the late William Proxmire among them), successfully evaded government regulation of these often dangerous products.  And speaking of politicians, Richard Blumenthal, then attorney general of Connecticut and now a US senator, deserves dishonorable mention for promoting a charlatan notion of Lyme disease, thereby causing great harm to many patients.

Offit also describes some of the best-kown charlatans on todays TV, notably Deepak Chopra and Mehmet Oz.  Here he exposes the culpability of popular TV personalities who introduce and enable the charlatans:  Oprah Winfrey, Mel Gibson, Whoopi Goldberg, Larry King, Tom Cruise, Mike Wallace, Geraldo Rivera, and many others.

The Case of Gabor Maté: "power, insight, clarity, candour, compassion, humor, and warmth of ... presentations."

When I was teaching at the University of British Columbia in the middle 1960's, a small number of radical undergraduate students began to be heard from, making up for smallness of numbers with volume of startling assertions.  Among them was a Jewish student originally from Hungary, Gabor Maté.  Some few years before that I had been active in a group advocating aid to the Doukhobors, a religious group that had managed to get into trouble with the authorities.  At one of the meetings of this committee,  Gabor, then about 17, appeared in the tilboshet -- blue uniform shirt -- of the Habonim Zionist youth organization.  He wanted to offer the help of his organization, which, he intimated, he was authorized to represent.  Fine.  But he had some reservations.  Fine.  All these were settled, and so Chaver Maté became one of our committee.

Fast forward a few years, and Gabor became a Student Senator, quoted with great frequency in the student newspaper Ubyssey.  Then came the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and Gabor, as suddenly in his conversion as Saul on the road to Damascus, became a convert to the Arab cause.  Israel was wrong, very wrong, criminally wrong.  Wrong from the very beginning.  This is what he confided to a campus audience, as reported in the Ubyssey of October 12, 1967:

The basis of the crisis was that to create the
state of Israel, an Arab country had to be taken
forcefully, Mate said.
"Palestine was not an empty country," he
said. "The Zionists relied on the protection of
the British Empire, without which there would
not have been a Jewish state. "
The alleged overwhelming force of the
Arabs is false, said Mate. In 1948, the total
Arabs armies had 47,000 men; the total Jewish
army, 80,000.

Maté did not give the source for his appraisal of the 1947 military situation.  The authoritative work on the Israeli army by Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz puts the total of Haganah Jewish combatants in 1947 at 29,677.  The Palestinian Arab fighters were augmented by the ground armies and airforces of Egypt, Jordan (under British command), Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, with additional forces from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Lybia.

Those were days in which it was still rare for a Jew to thunder against Israel, and Maté did receive attention.  Now that he is sixty-nine years of age, he is still active in the anti-Israel movement of Canada.  But this is no longer his primary claim on the attention of his fellow citizens.  Gabor Maté has become a health guru.

from website of Gabor Maté, July 17, 2013

For some years after graduating from the UBC medical school, Maté practiced medicine in the city of Vancouver.  If memory serves, he was never certified in any medical specialty.  I say if memory serves because he is no longer a licensed physician, so his qualifications are not available from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia which only lists licensed physicians.  (I have not been able to find out why he is no longer licensed.) Nevertheless, and in contravention of BC's Health Professions Act which restricts the use of "doctor" and "physician" to licensed physicians, Maté continues to call himself both "doctor" and "physician."

Nor does he show undue modesty about his overall intellectual or humane qualifications.  This is how he describes himself on his website:

Gabor Maté M.D. is a bestselling author whose books have been published in nearly twenty languages worldwide. Dr. Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, from addiction and attention deficit disorder (ADD) to mind-body wellness, adolescent mental health, and parenting. A renowned thinker and public speaker, he addresses audiences all over North America, including professional and academic groups like nurses’ organizations, psychiatry departments, and corporate conventions, as well as presentations and seminars for local community groups and the general public. As a writer and speaker, he is widely known for the power, insight, clarity, candour, compassion, humor, and warmth of his presentations.

Unlike other such figures, Maté does not seem to sell nostrums or "supplements." (But he has been warned by the Canadian government to cease administering psychedelic drugs). He seems to obtain his revenue from the four books he has published and the lecture circuit.  He advertises these businesses on the internet;  a search for his name yields a number of paid-for links.  And, as he points out on his site, "Please note that Dr. Maté maintains a busy speaking schedule year-round and is generally booked well in advance."

Maté is something of a public figure in Canada, where he is frequently quoted on his views on the etiology and treatment of various diseases.  As his website says

Common to all of Dr. Maté’s work is a focus on understanding the broader context in which human disease and disorders arise, from cancer to autoimmune conditions like MS, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, or fibromyalgia; childhood behavioral disorders like ADD, oppositionality, or bullying; or addiction, from substance abuse to obsessive gambling, shopping, or even workaholism.

A family friend of ours has been struggling with cases of severe ulcerative colitis in her family.  She read some of Maté's writings and now feels that, as a result of reading Maté, she understands the etiology of that disease:  stress in childhood, and "intergenerational stress" due to the experience of European Jews in the nineteenth century.  Note that Maté, though he was once a physician, has had no specialized training in this disease, nor, for that matter in cancer, yet he feels qualified to express himself on how all such diseases start: childhood stress. To overcome such stress, he urges psychedelic drugs and psychotherapy. (See WELLNESS | Dr. Gabor Maté: Can Psychedelics Help Treat Cancer?)

In addition to presenting himself as a "physician," Maté also presents himself as a  "gifted psychotherapist."  If he has either license or training in that field, these are not specified in his advertising.

As Offit explains in some detail,  charlatan prescriptions, especially, as is the case here, when presented under color of credentialled medicine, constitute an obvious menace to the health and welfare of all who fall prey to them.

With all his medical charlatanism, Maté has never forgotten where he came from: the petulant anti-Israel movement of his youth to which he remains publicly attached.  In return, his medical quackery has been endorsed by well-known figures in that movement: Naomi Klein in Canada (“Gabor Maté’s connections – between the intensely personal and the global, the spiritual and the medical, the psychological and the political – are bold, wise and deeply moral. He is a healer to be cherished and this exciting book arrives at just the right time.” Naomi Klein), and by Amy Goodman in the US.

Most of today's medical charlatans seem to stay away from entanglements with extremist politics.  Here Gabor Maté must be counted as an exception, although, as we have seen in the case of Linus Pauling, he is not a pioneer.

The Pleasures of Anti-Semitism

Eve Garrard

Anti-Semitism (often called "anti-Zionism" by its adepts) is a mystery to those who look for rational explanation.  But the British philosopher Eve Garrard has offered a brilliant analysis which I, for one, find altogether convincing:

Antisemitism is much more than a cognitive error. It attracts by providing the deep emotional satisfactions of hatred, tradition, and moral purity.

Click here to read her article.

Women at the Kotel

Every month a group of women go to the Kotel in Jerusalem to pray while wearing talitot (prayer shawls) in an area designated as all male. They are there to challenge the authorities' compromise decision to restrict women to one area only.  This month this demonstration made headlines the world over because one of the women was a sister of a celebrity:  Rabbi Susan Silverman, sister of the comedian Sarah Silverman.  The women were promptly arrested in front of media photographers.  No charges were laid, but the women were told not to go to the Kotel again for two weeks.  Here is the Jerusalem Post's coverage.

I belong to a Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn which lost no time to declare,  in a statement sent to all members, how proud it is of the arrested women, not least because one of those arrested is a former rabbi of the very synagogue in question.  

My response was, I believe, muted.  Here it is:

Women at the Kotel --

Compromise or Civil Disobedience ?

I must respectfully dissent from the sentiments expressed in [Synagogue] Connections (Feb. 14) concerning the Women of the Wall.

I agree that women should be able to pray at the Kotel on an equal footing with men.  The question is how to achieve this objective.

Basically, there are two sides to the story.  The appearance of women at the Kotel wearing tallitot, etc., is offensive to a many Orthodox Jews.  To them, it constitutes desecration.   Hence it is necessary, in the eyes of Israeli authorities, to fashion a compromise, one which takes into account the religious sensitivities of both the Orthodox and those of the more liberal Jewish communities.  The Israel Supreme Court has taken up the case on a number of occasions, and now the Israeli government has designated Natan Sharansky to help in working on the compromise.

At the moment, the authorities have designated a certain area of the Kotel where women can pray in full freedom.  To the Women of the Wall this is not enough, they apparently want equal access to the whole Kotel.  I sympathize with that demand, but, again, the issue is how to pursue the issue.

The Women of the Wall have chosen civil disobedience to assert their rights.  Civil disobedience obviously has a role in the face of intolerable oppression. But does the compromise worked out by the Israeli authorities constitute such intolerable oppression ? In my view, it does not.  The spectacle of people getting arrested at the Kotel gives rise to a world-wide press coverage that suggests oppression in Israel.  This suggestion is basically flawed.  For that reason,  rather than applaud the WotW for their civil disobedience we should urge them to seek the way of compromise and peaceful persuasion.

The Reform and Conservative groups that support the WofW are based, to a large extent, outside of Israel.  In my view, they do not adequately appreciate what the Israeli Supreme Court in this connection has called the minhag hamakom, the local custom.  The Jewish Old City of Jerusalem, religiously speaking, has been Orthodox for centuries, and those of us in the diaspora need to understand its sensitivities, without, of course, giving up our own convictions.

Finally, I cannot at all agree with the statement's suggestion that Israel has somehow failed to "honor all Jews."  The Israelis are struggling with the very difficult problem of religious/secular relations of which the Kotel problem is but a small aspect. The Israelis seek to find reasonable compromises.  I can find no merit in the suggestion that their handling of the Kotel issue constitutes a fundamental violation of human rights.

UPDATE:

For a careful analysis of the situation, please see the article by Rabbi Jeremy Rosen

Dystopia on Bedford Avenue -- Ct'd

(For an earlier installment of this series, see my 2011 blog on the subject)

It gets worse at Brooklyn College.  The Political Science Department is now a political action group against Israel, and City Hall is complicit.  This became clear last week when Poli Sci officially sponsored an agi-prop event at the  College with the connivance of the College's president and also that of the Mayor of the City of New York, 

For a description of the "BDS" event at Brooklyn College, see the ADL statement.

For a description of the "BDS" movement, see this video

Those of us (including most elected officials in Brooklyn) who criticized PoliSci's endorsement  stressed that we do not oppose the BDS event on campus;  what we oppose is the official imprimatur that the College, through its Political Science Department, has conferred on the event.  The situation is analogous to that of the Constitutional separation of church and state.  A public university may teach about religion, and it may allow student groups to practice religion on campus, but it may not officially sponsor or endorse sectarian religious practice.

Here are some documents on the controversy at Brooklyn College.

Many of us wrote to various officials at the College, stating each time that we do not oppose the event but do not want the College to sponsor it, and each time we got the same answer:  we must have freedom of speech, and therefore the Department's sponsorship must stand.  Therefore ? How and why is official College sponsorship necessary for freedom of speech, or any other kind of freedom ? The College officials act as if they hadn't heard the question;  they remain mum.  That isn't very smart, but it gets worse at City Hall.  

And indeed, the most zany performance was that of the Mayor of the City, Michael Bloomberg.  Here he explains why, in his view, Brooklyn College must be allowed to officially sponsor BDS:

“If you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea,” he said in a news conference at City Hall.

Now our good mayor owns many homes in various parts of the world but apparently none in North Korea, so perhaps this gap in his holdings explains his opinion here. But with all that, is it plausible that the mayor, in the privacy of his own conscience, fails to appreciate the illogic of his pronouncement ?

Obviously, the College officials and the Mayor know the difference between freedom of speech, to which even the most hateful of groups are entitled, and official sponsorship, to which they are not. So when these officials play dumb, when they make believe that they cannot see any distinction, well, bad faith is the inescapable conclusion.

While College officials and the Mayor (and also the editorialists of the New York Times) all lend their complaisance to the hate-Israel movement, the same cannot be said of the learned professoriate  of the Political Science Department.  Here it is not a matter of complaisance or even mere complicity but one of activism in a political cause.

Let me say at the outset here that things could be even worse.  Some time ago I looked into a somewhat similar situation at an affiliate school of the University of Toronto, viz. the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).  As I reported in a number of postings then, one of the departments there was so politicized that many of the MA theses produced in it were crude and ugly pieces of propaganda.

The same cannot be said of Poli Sci, at least insofar as I was able to determine.

Unlike the situation at OISE, for which all theses are freely available on the internet, Brooklyn College makes it difficult for outsiders to consult the products of its graduate programs.  BC theses are not available on the internet, nor are they even cataloged.  They are kept at the Brooklyn College Library Archives, to which, in principle, the public is not admitted.  However, upon application by e-mail, I was granted permission to inspect MA theses and, I must say, was given every courtesy by the librarians.  I looked at all the PolySci theses completed within the last two years, and I am satisfied that they were, by and large, free of undue political bias.

Notwithstanding its apparently satisfactory MA program, the Department has acted in the manner of a political combat group rather than as an academic department, and not only in this particular incident.


1.  I have googled all the 17 current members of the Department to get an impression  of the extent of political activism of these professors.  None of these people were identified as active on behalf of Jewish, Zionist, or pro-Israel causes.  None were identified on the internet as political conservatives.  On the other side, at least two had been signers of anti-Israel statements in the past.  Another one is identified as a former member of the Maoist Communist Workers Party, now defunct.  A further one is identified as active on the Far Left.  If there is diversity of viewpoint in this Department, it is not apparent to the naked eye.

2. Some two years ago,  the Department hired as adjunct instructor a person who was still in the midst of graduate studies, but, apparently by way of compensating for the lack of a Ph.D., was known for his strongly anti-Israel views.  (For a description of this incident, see here.)  The vote of the Department, we are told, was unanimous.  With some seventeen voting members, and in view of the fact that this particular appointment was so contentious on campus and in the community,  it is remarkable to find such unanimity.

3. When the current matter of BDS sponsorship came up for Department decision,  there again was a vote, but we are not told whether there was dissent.  The press tried to ascertain how the vote went but no member of the Department has so far been willing to divulge the numbers.  In any case, no member of the Department has come out to speak publicly against the sponsorship.  Again, there is a baffling wall of unanimity on a matter of great public contention.

4. When the chair of the Department was pushed for a statement on the BDS affair, his language was both combative and ambiguous:

A student group at Brooklyn College has organized a panel discussion regarding the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a non-violent response to the State of Israel's handling of the Palestinian conflict. On college campuses around the country and across the world, this issue is being discussed. Brooklyn College should be no different. The department of political science has thus decided to co-sponsor this event. We encourage students and members of the community to attend, pose their questions, and air their views.  (See my collection of documents) 

Read by an apologist for the Department, the statement might be interpreted to mean that the Department merely wishes to present BDS views without endorsing them.  But to anyone else, the phrase "a non-violent response to the State of Israel's handling of the Palestinian conflict" clearly signals support to the BDS movement.

5. Corey Robin, an Associate Professor in the Department (whose anti-Israel traces can be found on the internet), sent an e-mail to students and staff in January:

From Professor Corey Robin: URGENT: Hi everyone. I need you all to stop what you’re doing and make a phone call or write an email to the administration of Brooklyn College. A few weeks ago, my department (political science) voted to co-sponsor a panel discussion, featuring Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti, on the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement against Israel. In the last week, we’ve gotten a lot of pressure and pushback from the media, students, alumni, and now Alan Dershowitz (who’s been trying to track down our chair to “talk” to him). So far, the administration has held firm, but the pressure is only building and they are starting to ask us whether we endorse these views or are merely seeking to air them (to which we responded: “Was the Brooklyn College administration endorsing the pro-torture and pro-Israel views of Alan Dershowitz when it decided to award him an honorary degree?”) Anyway, I need you guys now to send an email or make a phone call encouraging the administration to stand by the department and to stand for the principle that a university should be a place for the airing of views, ESPECIALLY views that are heterodox and that challenge the dominant assumptions of society. Please contact: President Karen Gould ....; Provost William Tramontano ....; and Director of Communications and Public Relations Jeremy Thompson ..... Please be polite and respectful, but please be firm on the principle. Right now, they’re only hearing from one side, so it’s imperative they hear from many others.

(See my collection of documents)

Robin's reference to Alan Dershowitz is particularly telling:   A) Robin indulges in defamation of Dershowitz ("pro-torture," etc.) that is currently common in the Far Left but is totally without foundation.  For example, Dershowitz has never spoken at Brooklyn College on any contentious issue, let alone on Israel or the Palestinians.  See Dershowitz's own refutation of these attacks against him here. B) When Robin speaks about alleged appearances of Dershowitz  on the BC campus as justification for the BDS rally, his argument is of course tu quoque and not actually worthy of an Associate Professor of any discipline whatever.

In any case: is this the letter of an educator or of an agitator ?

6.  The following is a list of the sponsoring organizations for the BDS events (See my collection of documents)

Adalah NY
Al-Awda NY: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
American Muslims for Palestine
The Political Science Department at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College Student Union
Brooklyn For Peace
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual Association at 
Brooklyn College (LGBTA BC) - Upholding freedom of speech
Critical Palestine Studies Association at the CUNY GRAD Center
CUNY School of Law National Lawyers Guild Chapter
Existence is Resistance
Hunter SJP
International Socialist Organization
Jewish Voice for Peace
Jews say No!
Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
John Jay SJP
Columbia SJP
Muslim American Society Chapter - MAS on Campus
New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT)
The Occupy Wall St Social Justice Working Group
Students for Justice at NYU
Labor for Palestine
New York City Labor Against the War

Each of the groups other than the Poly Sci Department  is well known as overtly and unabashedly anti-Israel, some more so than others.  The Independent Socialist Organization, about which I have written elsewhere, is perhaps the most radical in this respect, demanding continuing intifada and the complete destruction of the Jewish state.

Why is an ostensibly neutral academic department in this list ?

Conclusion

If this were a church/state issue, the endorsement by a public, taxpayer entity of a sectarian cause would by clearly unconstitutional (Abington School District v. Schempp, 1963).  Mutatis mutandis, the sample principle should apply here.  New York's Jewish community and the elected officials of Brooklyn are right in demanding that Brooklyn College adopt more politically-neutral policies in the future.


UPDATE, February 15

Jonathan Marks, in an article "Department of Excuses," throws more light on the affair.  For instance, we now know that the Political Science Department attempted to secure the collaboration of other departments for its endorsement of BDS but was decisively rebuffed in all cases.

Very Creative Writing at the University of B. C.

When the Times Literary Supplement of January 11 carried an advertisement by the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, my interest was aroused.  No, I am not in the market for a job as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing (two of these positions are offered), and no, none of my grandchildren are either.  But I did spend many years at UBC, and have had a number of friends teaching CrWr there, and in general I like to keep up with things UBC.

The part of the advertisement that sparked my interest, in particular, began with the assurance that

The University of British Columbia hires on the basis of merit and is committed to employment equity and diversity within its community.

What can I say ?  Bravo, bravo, bravo.  Employment equity, great.  No nepotism.  No discrimination.  That means, for example, that one of my Orthodox Jewish nephews could apply.  Or that a young Tory acquaintance would not have his politics held against him.  Right ?

Well, as they say in the television commercials:  all that is true, but wait.  There is more.  The paragraph from which I have quoted continues as follows:

We especially welcome applications from members of visible minority groups, women, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities, and others with the skills and knowledge to engage productively with diverse communities. We encourage all qualified persons to apply; Canadian citizens and permanent residents of Canada will, however, be given priority. 

So it seems that while all persons are equal, some are more equal than others.  Everyone is encouraged to apply, but some more than others:  "women, Aboriginal persons ...."  are especially welcome.  And if you are not a Canadian, well, you can apply, but you will not "be given priority."

Moreover, the writing is so creative that no dictionary  in the world will help you detect its meaning.  What in the world are "persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities" ?  Do they mean gay and, well, transgendered people ?  The Creative Writers here will not say.  I guess that's why the writing is called Creative.