The events once again demonstrate the moral incoherence seen on many college campuses whenever there is debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Brandeis’ ideology has clearly been hijacked by the Left’s obsessive reverence for something that came to be known as “social justice,” an ideological pathology that informs the very educational mission of Brandeis today.
Students and liberal faculty on campus are urged to advocate for social and economic goals described in decidedly liberal/left intellectual formulations such as “social and economic justice,” “distributive justice” and “the global interconnections of oppression.” This latter view is ideal for conflating, at least in liberal imaginations, the shared complicity of America and Israel in their long-term oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine and the occupation of their land.
So it should come as no surprise that the list of guest speakers for the repellent Israeli Occupation Awareness Week includes an array of notorious anti-Israel speakers whose contribution to the week’s awareness-raising will not be an animated discussion of alternate views of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, but a one-sided and biased series of speeches calling for the continued murder of Jews in the name of resistance and the eventual extirpation of the Jewish state.
Headlining at Brandeis will be a speech entitled “Israel’s Escalating Policies of Apartheid” by the notorious Noam Chomsky, who clearly lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies and intellectually disingenuous distortions of history and fact.
If Chomsky’s verbal attacks against America has been his defining theme, an obsessive, apoplectic criticism of Israel has more completely dominated his criticism and spurious scholarship.
Like other anti-Zionists in the West and in the Arab world, Chomsky does not even recognize the legitimacy of Israel, believing that its very existence was, and is, a moral transgression against an indigenous people and that the creation of Israel was “wrong and disastrous…. There is not now and never will be democracy in Israel.”
Chomsky denounces Israel’s identity as a Jewish state as being essentially racist on its face and decries the very notion of its Jewishness as necessarily violating the concept of social equity by being exclusionary and elitist.
While he is happy toÂÂÂ-and regularly does-ignore the murder of Jews by Arabs, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel and its barbarous assault on its Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace.
A second guest at the Brandeis event will be Alice Rothchild, a physician, activist and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, a far-left, pro-Palestinian group that seeks to weaken Israel for its alleged human rights violations through targeted boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
Its stated goal in promoting a divestment campaign is to prevent companies from “[profiting] from the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” and while it regularly excuses the murderous behavior of Palestinians, it scolds the United States to “stop supporting repressive policies in Israel and elsewhere.” Rothchild not only believes that Israel has no moral right to exist as a Jewish state, but she has also written that Jews are not even a people, and so of course are undeserving of a state of their own.
“It is important to stress that the historic hatred of Jews was traditionally not part of the Arabic-speaking world until Jews began to claim Palestine for themselves,” she wrote in a letter to the Boston Globe, “and that the ‘return of land to Jewish people’ involves a particular reading of history, obliterates the several thousand years of others’ claims to this land, and ignores the academic questions regarding the probable multiple origins of the ‘Jewish people.'”
Rounding off the one-sided dialogue about the faults inherent in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank will be Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Her stream of anti-Israel propaganda is characterized by misstatements and contortions of history.
In 2009, for instance, after some 6,000 rockets had rained into southern Israeli towns from Gaza, Buttu repeatedly claimed “that none of these rockets actually [had] an explosive head on them, unlike the Israeli weaponry.”
And the actual lethality of the “crude, homemade rockets” aside, “the reason that they have been launched,” she asserted, is not because of any genocidal impulses on the part of Hamas but “is because of the fact that Israel has maintained a siege and a blockade against the Gaza Strip for the past 3 years in addition to military operations in the Gaza Strip”-in other words, the rocket attacks were Israel’s fault.
In a CNN interview with Rick Sanchez, Buttu also suggested that Israel’s initiatives to protect its citizenry from being murdered by random terrorist attack were unjustified. “Israel has a right to protect itself,” she admitted, but “it doesn’t have a right to protect its occupation. And what it has done is, it’s protecting its occupation.”
So if the Brandeis community wants to make itself collectively feel better by seeking to bring “social justice” to the long-suffering Palestinians by demonizing and delegitimizing Israel, it will have achieved that objective with the Israel-hating events.
But the only awareness that such events create is the realization that much of what tries to pass as scholarly debate on campuses today is nothing more than propaganda and ideology dressed up as true intellectual inquiry.
Editor’s note: The writer is the director of Boston University’s Program in Publishing and Digital Media at the Center for Professional Education and just finished a book about higher education titled Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews.
