SPME
As yet more evidence that academics are regularly able to engage in what George Orwell sardonically referred to as “doublethink,” “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” this month 40 professors…
read moreIntroduction BDS in September built on the summer’s conflict in Gaza, with a variety of efforts to condemn and isolate Israel in academia. European economic threats against Israel in order to force Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have also intensified after the…
read moreIt was hard not to be disturbed by the recent violence in Israel and Gaza, which did not start in June but has been going on for years. Especially troubling was the abuse of civilian populations on both sides by…
read moreWith the start of the academic year just around the corner, it is time for us to prepare ourselves for the Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) controversy that has hit many campuses and academic bodies. In 2005, the BDS movement…
read moreAs an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book, The World Turned Upside Down, since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge some three weeks ago, the streets of American and…
read moreJews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover…
read moreThe Haaretz headline says it all: ‘Well-known Italian Philosopher: “I’d like to shoot those Zionist bastards”’. Gianni Vattimo is Italy’s ‘most famous philosopher’ according toHaaretz’s reporter in Milan, Anna Momigliano. And now the world knows he is also a bigot and a…
read moreSeeming to give credence to Orwell’s observation that “Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence,” the world’s attention has turned once again to the…
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The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched Operation Protective Edge on July 8 in order to halt indiscriminate rocket fire from the Gaza Strip into Israel. It was eerily reminiscent of Israel’s 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense which sought to accomplish…
read moreSitting in my office almost forty floors above ground level in midtown Manhattan last week, I was astounded to be drawn away from my work by chants of “Free free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will…
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