- 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."
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches
at University College London, tells me that Oxfam has refused to accept
£5,000 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?
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=344510
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