The following is an excerpt from a column by Robert Fulford of the National Post regarding the recent outrage over Ms. magazine refusing to print an ad submitted by the American Jewish Congress with the heading "This is Israel," accompanied by photos of three Israeli women -- the Supreme Court president, the speaker of the Knesset and the deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Putting the particular issue of the Ms. ad aside, I was interested in what he had to say with respect to why there is so much hatred in the world for Israel.


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What do you think? How much of a role do you think Israel's success has to do with the level of hatred people seem to have for it? How much can be accounted for by anti-semitism alone? Discuss.

I once attended a Palestine Solidarity Movement event at a university I then attended. The entire program was dripping with hatred for Israel, it wasn't a rational discussion or forum. It was merely an excuse for Jew-haters to gather under the banner of anti-israelism...

And the author certainly makes a good point, that even if all the lies and libels are true, the Israel-Conflict is just one of many conflicts around the world. If they were silent during the balkanization of Europe, if they were silent when the Hutu's killed 800,000 Tutsis, if they were silent when the Somalia national government killed 300,000 ethnic somalis during the Somali civil war of the late eighties, if they are silent about Darfur, if the were silent when the Russians decimated Chechnya, if they are silent about the current Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq, if they were silent during the crackdown in Burma last summer, if they are silent about Rober Mugabe's destruction and killing in Zimbabwe, if they were silent when the Chadian government killed all opposition leaders last month, if they are silent about China's brutal occupation of Tibet, if they are silent about the present day ethnic cleansing in Kenya, if they were silent when the Filipino government snuffed out an insurgency by killing 160,000 people, if they were silent when 70,000 people were killed in the Sri Lankan civil war, if they are silent about the continued occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco since 1991, if there were silent while the Irish Republican Army has and continues to kill civilians, if they are silent as the Basque Separatists continue to kill innocent Spaniards, if there were silent as the Eritreans killed 120,000 Ethiopians during the Eritrean-Ethiopian war of 1999, if there were silent when 200,000 civilians were killed during the First Congo War in 1997 and another 5.4 million civilians killed (that was not a typo) during the Second Congo War of 1997-2003, if they are silent as FARC rebels in Colombia continue to kill 3,000 innocent civilians each year, if they were silent as 400,000 people were killed during the 27-year-long Angolan Civil War, if there were silent as 160,000 people were killed during fighting in Algeria during 1992-2002, if they were silent as 150,000 people were killed during the Second Liberian Civil War from 1999-2003, if there were silent as 200,000 Guatemalan citizens were killed during the Guatemalan Civil War of 1960-1996, if there were silent as over 8,000 Nepali Maoists were killed by the Nepali government from 1996-2006, if there were silent as 900,000 people were killed in Mozambique during their recently ended 25 year long civil war, then they certainly have no right to criticize Israel.

Torn, did you just write all that off the top of your head? (not that I'd be surprised if you did).

It took a me a few minutes to get the numbers but yeah...

I'm sure there are many conflicts I missed...

two questions:
1. who's "they"?
2. what's the source for this limitation on the "right to criticize"? aren't my students entitled to criticize the reading load i pile on them without also criticizing every other professor in the department/university (let alone all departments/universities) who mandates a similar burden?

I've been saying this for years. The only reason Israel is on the agenda is anti-semitism pure and simple. And ironically even the most ardent pro Palestinian activists look at them with complete and utter disdain.

Did you know that there are refugee camps in Lebanon, and that they are not permitted to work or for the most part interact with the rest of society? Did you know that "palestinians" are barred from many Arab countries and are not allowed to participate in most international Arab conferences?
They are the scourge of the Arab world, and their own brothers deliberately allow and contribute to their suffering in order to demonize Israel.

And you really don't believe that all the concerned leftists want anything to do with "palestinians" or help them if it involves having move to where THEY live. There are already 10 million Arabs in France, and the rest of Europe is crawling with them as well. If they really cared about the plight of the palestinians they would take in a few more, there are only a few million total. Many cities are bigger than that....

But Israel is also responsible. All the other countries you mentioned pay no attention to public opinion and they do not spend every waking hour trying to find favor with the rest of the world. No one said a word when Russia a modern European country nuked and paved chechnya. China routinely commits atrocities and no one bats an eye. If Israel would just stand firm and do what needs to be done, and tell the world to go fly a kite, they almost certainly WILL do just that. Worst case there will be YET ANOTHER UN resolution passed against them. Big deal......

The people referred to in the article.


Absolutely, but if your students are heavily burdened by others professors and neglect to complain but never hesitate to complain about any slight burden you impose then you may begin to wonder what their true objectives are. Are they really concerned about the reading burden or are they trying to scapegoat you in any way they can...

Well, following this line of reasoning:

Palestinians are upset (justifiably or not) about their treatment under Israeli "occupation." Palestinians try to drum up support for their cause among sympathetic-seeming outsiders. These outsiders are moved by the Palestinian appeals to compassion and their ire is raised against Israel. Their ire is not equally raised for other, equally victimized groups since those groups didn't appeal to them specifically for help, or maybe this cause draws out their sympathy more than other valid causes for whatever reason, or maybe they do indeed support the rights of other victimized groups as well, just like some people support camps for Down Syndrome children and other people support Jewish Children's museums and other people support shemitta-observing farms (and others support all three).

/end DA

I think it is often true that criticism of Israel is underpinned by anti-Semitism, but I would not say it all boils down to that. And I don’t believe Israeli success is really such a strong factor.

What may be much more important is that Israel is strongly backed by the US. Some people in the West may be more sensitive to a country's actions if they believe that their government(s) is partly responsible for the outcomes. Some may also feel that it is not in America's best interest to support/ignore every Israeli move so they may publicize Israeli wrongdoings in order to sway the public opinion and force their governments to change the policy. Many others are rabidly anti-American and are all too happy to find faults with countries that receive American aid. Thus I would suspect that in some circles this strong hostility towards Israel is rather motivated by traditional leftist hatreds which trickle down to Israel rather than anti-Semitism.

Second, other conflicts often come and go or have very limited repercussions on the West, notwithstanding the number of victims. The Israeli-Arab conflict has been a constant for 60 years, it is relevant to a huge “audience” (the Arabs) and it is the t##### issue in the relationship between the US and other Western countries and the Arab world. Just because of that it is not surprising that it draws more attention and generates more heat.

Third, because the Jews were so victimized in the past and because this story is so well-known, Israel is particularly vulnerable to certain kind of charges.

how does that get at the question of where your limitation on the right to criticize comes from? if students choose to single out just one professor for criticism, even if many professors conduct themselves similarly and should, in principle, be subject to the same criticism, that's certainly their right. at least, i thought it was until you suggested that they don't have the right to complain about one if they're not going to complain about all.


or maybe the other professors aren't teaching courses that play as pivotal a role in their academic/professional career as mine...or maybe they expected something different from a female professor who could easily pass for their classmate...or maybe they heard other people complaining about me and are jumping on the bandwagon because it's easier to just copy what other people are saying rather than come up with their own complaints. if anything, scapegoating would be the last reason i'd think of, unless i had a victim mentality to begin with.

Who is silent about ETA? There have been massive demonstrations for years in the Basque country itself against ETA's use of violence... Have you ever heard of the "Espíritu de Ermua"?

I don't think I need to remind you of anti-ETA demonstrations and criticism in the rest of Spain, do I?

Just as it is your right to question their motives. You have every right to conclude that based on the ten times as much burden imposed by each of the other professors, that there are ulterior motives for the criticism aimed at you.



For the sake of argument lets assume a level playing field in which expectations don't differ from professor to professor.


The people referred to in the article.

Who? Ms. Magazine?
Try putting up an ad with three women including an ETA militant with the heading, "This is Euskadi" and then come back...

I'm referring to the anti-apartheid meetings referenced in the article.

this still doesn't answer the question. granting me the right to draw self-victimizing conclusion doesn't justify your assertion that the right to criticize is limited to only those who use that right to criticize all manifestations of a phenomenon, while those who choose to focus on just one instance relinquish that right. so again, what's the source for your limitation on the right to criticize (which is, after all, merely a form of political speech; to my understanding, that can only be limited in cases of "clear and present danger" and/or when a "bad tendency" -- i.e. illegal activity -- will be perpetrated as a direct result of the speech, not in cases of speakers being selective about their topics)?

why would we make an unrealistic assumption like that? it certainly doesn't carry over to the international relations arena, where, for example, ostensible democracies are certainly expected* to have different human rights records than non-democracies.
but let's say we do go with your unrealistic assumption -- the question of limiting free speech still remains. say a late night talk show host repeatedly trashes just one particular politician for his corruption (a behavior that's generally expected [even if not applauded] of all politicians, if my middle america students' comments about their and their parents' political outlooks are at all representative). does he "certainly have no right" to issue that criticism simply because he didn't trash a whole host of other politicians who've engaged in corrupt behavior?


*this should not to be construed as suggesting that such expectations are necessarily borne out in practice, just that the expectations are indeed prevalent.

{clears throat}
How about when the entire world was against South African White minority rule and apartheid?

Is it just me or do these two pictures look like the same disease?

That's precisely why the Arabs need to be relocated (or otherwise disposed of). If not, before long, Israel will look like S. Africa does today....

The "humane" thing to do is to find the Arabs somewhere to live and ensure that they get there. Maybe even give them compensation if they will willingly leave. Israel can never give them citizenship or equal rights or they will turn the country into Palestine democratically and erase Israel from the map. We have enough problems with the Israeli Arabs as it is, we won't survive another few million. So Israel needs to make a choice, decide what is the higher value and do it, because they won't be able to sit on the fence forever. If they do, the decision will be made for them, and I for one am keeping my passport current....

In fact, even the Israeli Left has all but given up on the possibility of "coexistence". They also say that there must be a complete and absolute separation between Jews and Arabs, they only differ on what the borders should be and who should be "relocated"....

Which one is South Africa?

I think we're going in circles. I never said "a right to criticize is limited to only those who use that right to criticize all manifestations of a phenomenon." I merely said that you have every right to question their motives when they have failed to act in similar or worse circumstances. I have taken the view that those critical of Israel are indeed open to such questioning and in my opinion their failure to speak out regarding other conflicts is indicative to me that their criticism of Israel is motivated by feelings other than compassion for the Palestinians. In my opinion if they were truly motivated by their sympathies for the Palestinians then they would have similar compassions for those affected by conflicts elsewhere, conflicts of which have killed untold millions.



Firstly, I don't know how anything I said could possible be construed as "limiting free speech."

Having said that, yes, a TV show host who consistently and repeatedly harangues a low level employee for low level corruption when it is known to him that all this guy's supervisors and higher up are on the take for far higher amounts and are involved in much more serious corruption then his motivations may be questioned. Does it make make the low-level corruption permissible? Absolutely not. Does it make you wonder what motivations this guy has for protecting the big fish while going after the little guy? Heck yeah. Does the talk show host lose credibility and standing to complain? He sure does to me.

no; i think you might have just said something that you didn't mean.

no, that's not what you said.
you said this:

in short form, "if they were silent about [all these other human rights abuses], then they certainly have no right to criticize israel."
that's rather unambiguous in its implication that their right to criticize israel hinges on being non-silent about all the other human rights abuses you listed.
you might have intended to say "because they were silent about [all these other human rights abuses], you have every right to question their motives," but you certainly didn't say it. in fact, the only "right" you mentioned in the post was the right to criticize, not the right to draw conclusions.


limiting the right to criticize is limiting free speech. again, rather unambiguous.





i'm sorry, did something get lost in the translation from my post to your eyes?


relevance?

again, this is your misconstrual, not the scenario i actually posed.

so you're the arbiter of the right to criticize? why didn't you just cut to the chase and say that back in your first response to me?

cute, but "apartheid" and "territorial segregation" ("territoriale segregasie") are not quite synonymous. in fact, the "bantustan" were created (but called "natives reserves," much like the "native american reservations" that still persist in the US) long before the word "apartheid" had any political import (and for a very different purpose).

Torn,

It's this simple. If when you're driving someone cuts you off, do you have a right to call them an "idiot"? Apparently you've forgotten many millions (billions?) of other idiots who have escaped your wrath...
... but it doesn't make any difference right?

Now, if the "idiot" you cut you off is not only an "idiot" but also a paranoid schizophrenic he will obviously complain that everyone's always criticizing them, and it's part of an evil plot, and will cite as evidence that of all the idiots in the world you only told them off.

... I think that "Esav sone leYaakov halacha" is a self-fulfilling profecy, don't you think?

Obviously the two situations are different, but many have proposed that the tiny, scattered plots that have been turned over to the PA can't make for any viable entity, and they can only serve as a symbolic entity to which Palestinians living throughout Israel and the Palestinian territories are assigned "local status" to, ie a Bantustan.

i'm aware that "many" have drawn the comparison; however, that doesn't make it accurate (although i'll grant that it is more accurate than most other applications of "apartheid" to non-south african contexts) or useful as more than a polarizing rhetorical soundbite (much like "hitlery"). i thought the first part of your post ("How about when the entire world was against South African White minority rule and apartheid?") raised a good point (that israel is not the only country to have had world opinion nearly universally turned against it for its treatment of its racial/ethnic others), but one that was quickly lost by the subsequent implication that the israeli situation is apartheid redux.

You're right. I should have said that their silence regarding these other conflicts makes their motives suspect. They certainly have a right to criticize Israel just as much as anyone else does. It is my prerogative, however, and those of other reasonable people of sound mind, to question the truthfulness and sincerity of the criticism when it is inequitable and perceivably a result of a hatred for Israel and nothing else.

The TV show host scenario was modified to reflect the reality of anti-Israel criticism.

that's interesting.

that is too.

i don't see how. a high-growth, first-world country with economic indicators on par with OECD nations is the "little guy" compared to all the impoverished and malmanaged third-world countries on your list? how are angola and guatemala "big fish"?

For the record, I wasn't trying to suggest you aren't a reasonable person of sound mind.


First, there are countries on that list that make Israel's economic indicators seem paltry compared to theirs. Second, assuming that wasn't so, since when do economic indicators lessen the wrong of genocide and mass killing? Are you suggesting it is somewhat excusable if you have a low GDP?

Hmm, I seem to have trouble embedding this YouTube video.

...

It's not anti-semitism. It's a Marxist literary theory thing, and the idea of a societal paradigm shift as a requirement for progress. Support the weak against the strong no matter what until the weak become the strong. Currently the cause de jour is Western hegemony and the upstart Arab nationalists. Before it was something else, like civil rights, or South Africa. The merits of the issue don't really matter, like it doesn't really matter to the people pushing them what becomes of black communities after the civil rights, or in South Africa, or in the Palestine. It's the paradigm shift and the change of order that they are after.

These ideas start in the ivory towers of the graduate English departments and make their way down to the masses through academic articles and then magazine articles and then editorials and then these ideas take hold of the popular psyche, and the masses start working to change the paradigm.

This is the theory told to me by a friend who graduated from an elite English graduate program and spent time with these people. If you really think about it, it's the only theory that makes sense. Of course, there are other factors, such as oil interests and anti-semitism, but they are not primary.

i wasn't taking it personally. it's an interesting pronouncement regardless of my personal level of reason and soundness of mind.


you're the one who wants to sort countries into "little guys" and "big fish" (except, of course, when you want to insist on a "level playing field"). except perhaps in terms of landmass (or maybe self-victimization), i don't see how those classifications would work out so that israel fits unproblematically in the "little guys" category, especially when the comparison set is one comprised of the countries you listed. and, while human rights violations are never excusable, the human rights expectations bar certainly is higher for 1st world, high-growth, free-market democracies than it is for beleaguered third-world nations run (or run into the ground, as the case may be) by absolutist dictators.

what do you think of the marxist theory?

i have no experience with that sort of english department (they certainly exist, just not at the schools i've been affiliated with, or at least not among the english department members i've had any dealings with), so i really can't comment with respect to the israel situation. that said, i do have more than passing familiarity with the civil rights and antiapartheid movements, and to say that those had their roots (even their intellectual roots) in ivory tower english departments couldn't be further from the truth. if anything, the literary theory folks jumped on the bandwagon after the movements were already well underway.

right, the PLO was also well under way before the intellectuals got interested in them, i think this explanation is meant to speak more to how support for such movements builds up among Westerners.

I think that's an interesting perspective, and although I personally think it's really a combination of a number of factors, a societal paradigm shift may indeed be one of them.

Big fish = Countries that kill, say, 100,000 people or more
Medium fish = Countries that kill, say, 25,000 to 100,000 people
Small fish = below 25,000 killed

(Numbers are totally arbitrary)

Even assuming all the lies and libels are true, Israel is not by any standard killing thousands upon thousands of Palestinians and is therefore certainly neither a big nor medium fish.

I reject the premise that the "expectations bar certainly is higher for 1st world, high-growth, free-market democracies than it is for beleaguered third-world nations run... by absolutist dictators." One is just as culpable for murder in the United States as one is in Equatorial Guinea. I think it is a pretty frightening proposition to even suggest that dictators should be given slack just because they are dictators and not "1st world, high-growth, free-market democracies." It seems you are incentivizing dictatorships.

Besides, even assuming that wasn't so, Western support was all over these conflicts. The West, in many cases, was in effect contributing to these conflicts by proxy through direct military, financial, and logistical support and training.

that's a rather crude measure of fishiness, don't you think? no controls for population? or means of murder? or a whole host of other potentially relevant factors?

did you miss the first part of that sentence, where i said that "human rights violations are never excusable"?

see above. how many times are you going to twist my words to suit your purposes?

it seems you don't know what incentivizing means.

once you play that card your fish hierarchy goes out the window.

westerners, or western intellectuals?

also, journalists and humanities academics don't tend to be the closest of bedfellows - i'm not sure i'd buy the academic (especially lit theory) media --> mass media "trickle-down" step of the theory without some hard evidence of that actually happening.

take for example the civil rights case that you mentioned earlier -- editorial page coverage closely followed the pattern of mass protest events, not the pattern of academic chatter. even the nation, a magazine with relatively close ties to academia, had very little editorial column discussion of civil rights through the early 1960s until the 1963 events in birmingham; from that month on, nearly every issue had an editorial page mention of civil rights. academic journals, meanwhile, had been discussing the matter practically nonstop at least since world war II.

Yeah, I don't know. But somehow the public, the masses just get interested in issues and acquire certain positions. Like Global Warming, or the run-up to the Iraq War for instance. All of a sudden it's on everyone's lips, and everyone's got an opinion, and people start seeing things in a new way. I don't know who the editorial boards are and if they hang out at the same mocha-drinking parties as the people in universities....

But aren't there people in policy think tanks with acedemic ties? And thinktanks push the agenda through their reports that often make their way to the papers.

Or maybe things are much simpler than that -- maybe people under the right circumstances just want to root for the underdog, for the perceived little guy, for the proverbial David (ironically). Makes for a good story line.

It might be crude but it is necessarily so. There are no other "relevant factors." Murder is murder no matter how you slice it, irrespective of the means or "controls for population" (whatever that means).


I didn't miss any part of any sentence. I never suggested that you had indicated human rights are excusable. You did, however, imply more than once that dictators leading beleaguered countries would be less culpable for committing genocide than first world country leaders. According to you, based on what you have posted above, neither would be excusable but one would be less culpable than the other.


Care to educate me?

"Incentive" as defined by American Heritage Dictionary is "something, such as the fear of punishment or the expectation of reward, that induces action or motivates effort." By holding dictators to be less culpable (again, not excusable as you allege I misconstrue your words to be) for actions they would be more culpable if commited as democratically elected leaders you "incentivize" dictatorships.

there's plenty of experiment-based research out there dealing with mass opinion formation. to my knowledge (admittedly, it's not my field), english department wine-and-cheese receptions don't generally figure prominently in the findings.

should be easy enough to find out for someone who wants to know if this theory has any credibility. as with my example of editorial space devoted to the civil rights movement, the data are out there and just need to be gathered and analyzed.

not generally ties to english departments. the academics i've known (or known of) who've moved into the think-tank world are the most number-crunchy and hard-policy-oriented of the social scientists, not anyone who gives any serious thought to literary theory.