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How
to shut up your critics with a single word
Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you
find
INDEPENDENT,
21 October 2002
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 £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?
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
