ZGram - 10/22/2002 - "How To Shut Up Your Critics With A Single Word"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

10/22/2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

[START]

How To Shut Up Your Critics
With A Single Word
By Robert Fisk
Commentary
The Independent - UK
10-21-2

Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will 
you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and 
brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that 
Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the 
"Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer - there are all sorts of 
solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am 
applying chemotherapy."
 
Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael 
Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead 
Palestinians". Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the 
former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will 
have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the 
territories". Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, 
General Meir Dagan - a close personal friend of Mr Sharon - believes 
in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat 
because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could 
become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live".
 
You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot 
because in much of the Western world, a vicious campaign of slander 
is being waged against any journalist or activist who dares to 
criticise Israeli policies or those that shape them. The all-purpose 
slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing 
promiscuity against anyone - people who condemn the wickedness of 
Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty 
of Israel's repeated killing of children - in an attempt to shut them 
up.
 
Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East Forum now run a 
website in the United States to denounce academics who are deemed to 
have shown "hatred of Israel". One of the eight professors already on 
this contemptible McCarthyite list - it is grotesquely called "Campus 
Watch" - committed the unpardonable sin of signing a petition in 
support of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants students 
to inform on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism".
 
The University of North Carolina is being targeted - apparently 
because freshmen were required to read passages from the Koran - 
along with Harvard where, like students in many other US 
universities, undergraduates are demanding that their colleges 
disinvest in companies that sell weapons to Israel. In some cases, 
American universities - which happily disinvested in tobacco 
companies - have now taken the step of blocking all student access to 
their records of investment.
 
Lawrence Summers, the Jewish president of Harvard, has denounced 
"profoundly anti-Israel views" in "progressive intellectual 
communities", that are - I enjoyed this academic sleight of hand - 
"advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect 
if not their intent". Mr Said himself has already described all this 
as a campaign "to ask students and faculty to inform against 
pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and 
seriously curtailing academic freedom".
 
Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches at University 
College London, tells me that Oxfam has refused to accept =A35,000 plus 
other royalties from his new book After the Terror following a 
campaign against him in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. Now I 
happen to take issue with some of Professor Honderich's conclusions 
and I think his book - praised by the American-Jewish scholar Noam 
Chomsky - meanders. I especially don't like his assertion that 
Palestinians, in trying to free themselves from occupation, have a 
"moral right to terrorism". Blowing up children in pizzerias - and 
Professor Honderich's book is not an endorsement of such atrocities - 
is a crime against humanity. There is no moral right to do this. But 
what in God's name is Oxfam doing refusing Professor Honderich's 
money for its humanitarian work? Who was behind this?
 
Our own John Pilger made a programme for Carlton Television called 
Palestine Is Still The Issue. I have watched it three times. It is 
accurate in every historical detail; indeed its historical adviser 
was a left-wing Israeli academic. But Carlton's own chairman, Michael 
Green - in one of the most gutless statements in recent British 
journalism - announced that it was "a tragedy for Israel so far as 
accuracy is concerned". Why Mr Green should want to utter such trash 
is beyond me. But what does he mean by "tragedy"? Is he comparing 
Pilger to a suicide bomber?
 
And so it goes on. It is left, of course, to the likes of Uri Avneri 
in Israel to state that "the Sharon government is a giant laboratory 
for the growing of the anti-Semitism virus". He rightly says that by 
smearing those who detest the persecution of the Palestinians as 
anti-Semites, "the sting is taken out of this word, giving it 
something approaching respectability". But we can take comfort that 
28 brave academics have signed a petition condemning President George 
Bush's build-up to war and Israel's support for it and warning that 
the Israeli government may be contemplating crimes against humanity 
on the Palestinians, including ethnic cleansing.
 
Have Mr Pipes and his chums put the names of these good men and women 
on their hate list? You bet they haven't. Because all of them are 
Israeli scholars at Israeli universities. I wonder why we weren't 
told about this.

[END]
 
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=3D344510