December 18, 2014 UC’s Moment of Truth The University of California—once home of the legendary Free Speech Movement—has an academic freedom problem. Earlier this year, we witnessed Nicholas Dirks, Chancellor of UC-Berkeley, co-opt the anniversary of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement to emphasize the limits that “civility” might, in his view, properly impose on freedom of speech. Now comes a new threat to […] Anti-Zionism Blog
December 18, 2014 Groups Question University of California Over Union BDS Resolution Several groups, including the Louis D. Brandeis Center, have just sent this letter to the University of California seeking answers about the recent vote of the UAW 2865 in favor of participating in the BDS movement. Kudos to the AMCHA Initiative for coordinating this work: Dear Chancellors Block, Blumenthal, Dirks, Gillman, Katehi, Khosla, Leland, Wilcox and […] Anti-Semitism Anti-Zionism Blog
December 18, 2014 Human Rights and Inhuman Interrogation Methods I consider torture—including waterboarding—not only morally but aesthetically revolting. But unlike Jews who miraculously always find their liberal preferences enshrined in biblical and rabbinic precedent, I find nothing in those traditions that directly bears on the question of torture except the Talmudic dictum, “ain adam mesim atsmo,” against self-incrimination. I’ve been more influenced by great […] Blog
December 14, 2014 For Whom the Bell Tolls Some sixty years ago, a group of American intellectuals—many of them Jewish academics including Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Richard Hofstadter—authored “The Radical Right,” bringing social science theory to bear on the attempt to understand and counter McCarthyism. Back then, academe—especially Jewish academe—felt threatened by irrational forces, not within the university, but buffeting it […] Blog
December 13, 2014 Jewish Liberalism–On Campus and Off For my historical thoughts, see the Los Angeles “Jewish Journal” here. Blog
December 3, 2014 Ode to the Anarchists Among Us, Then and Now In the U.S., “anarchist” was once a dirty word. Following the 1886 Haymarket Bombing in Chicago, in which 11 including seven policemen were killed by anonymous bombers, cartoons appeared nationwide of wild-eyed, suggestively Germanic anarchists blowing America to hell. Historians for a hundred years repeated the conventional wisdom that this was an exercise in pure […] Blog
December 2, 2014 Terrorism, “Lone Wolves,” and “Virtual Wolf Packs” Violence to change or impact the existing order may be as old as humankind. In terms of collective violence—let’s use the term “mob” for a phenomenon that may start small but can even morph into a revolution—it has had varied political, economic, and religious-ethnic motives over the course of the last thousand years in western […] Blog
December 1, 2014 Time for Jewish Harvard Grads to “Turn in Their Privilege”? Controversy has been raging for some time about whether white Harvard undergrads–including grandchildren of Holocaust survivors– should “turn in their privilege” and, because of historic (and historical) racial injustice in America, agree to accept second place in the admissions pecking order to African Americans. Even if one accepts this argument, it’s hard to see how […] Blog
November 26, 2014 Time to Divest From Palestinian Terror—Not Israel Recently, UCLA Students organized to protest the decision by the UC Regents to hike tuition, but mostly ignored an insidious behind-the-scenes spectacle. The UCLA Student government voted 8-2-2 to urge UC to divest from companies accused to doing business in the West Bank. Eerily, the vote occurred vituually at the same time that—half a world […] Blog
November 24, 2014 Me and the “I” Word I understand—given many prior posts in which I have criticized the Mideast (not domestic) policies of the Obama Administration—that some, maybe many readers, of this blog may think my prior post was a call to impeach President Obama. When I intend to be critical, I don’t hide it. The post hardly mentioned Obama and did […] Blog
November 23, 2014 How Not to Protect the Constitution When a president usurps power and subverts the Constitution, the U.S. Constitution provides a remedy: impeachment and removal from office. Hyperbolic language calling a president a “tyrant” or “despot” by politicians who lack the courage to impeach because it’s politically inconvenient is demagogic and dangerous. Outside of our constitutional system, in the whirlpool of political […] Blog
November 18, 2014 Turning the Other Cheek to Appease Radical Islam . . . and getting your head cut off. Read an adulatory account of the self-martyrdom at the hands of the Islamic State of Peter “Abdul-Rahman” Kassig: http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2014/10/12/becoming-abdul-rahman-peter-kassigs-family-inspired-journey-syria/17054647/ Blog
November 18, 2014 Palestinian Terrorists Leave Their Mark on Intellectual History There are critics who claim that Arabs have never contributed anything much to intellectual progress, arguing that–despite a few astronomers and mathematicians–the achievements of the so-called “Islamic Renaissance” of the Middle Ages was generally the handiwork of a handful of Jews and Coptic and Nestorian Christians who often published using Arabic names. Yesterday with an […] Blog
November 16, 2014 The Return of the Malevolent Jew: The Academic Nazification of Israel “What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?,” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.” The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This […] Anti-Semitism Anti-Zionism Blog
November 16, 2014 DC’s Pious Dean A Willing Dupe Breitbart News asked Dean of the National Cathedral, Gary Hall, whether it was appropriate to host Muslim prayers on the 100th anniversary of the last Caliph’s call for Jihad against nonbelievers, which resulted in the slaughter of innocent Christians. Hall responded, “I did not know that it was that anniversary. But knowing it now, it […] Blog
November 13, 2014 Hillary “Hadassah” Clinton That’s the contemptible Andrew Sullivan’s characterization of the implications of a Hillary presidency for U.S.-Israeli relations. See Aaron David Miller, “Would Hillary Be Good for the Holy Land,” “Foreign Policy,” at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/11/10/would_hillary_be_good_for_the_holy_land_obama_israel_bibi Blog
November 13, 2014 Obama’s “Special Relationship” with Israel in Action From Breitbart.com: “Even as he defiantly moves to unilaterally grant legal status to millions of people inside the U.S. illegally, President Obama’s State Department is making sure that such special favors are not meant for everyone. “The State Department’s unexplained refusal to extend a valid P1 visa currently held by an Israeli basketball player has […] Blog
November 12, 2014 Max Blumenthal Brings the BDS War to Berlin In my recent post on The Nation’s censorship of Eric Alterman – who had dared to mention the LDB Research Paper that documents Max Blumenthal’s anti-Semitism – I noted that the decision to delete Alterman’s reference might be connected to the criticism Max Blumenthal and his fellow anti-Israel activist David Sheen were encountering from some […] Anti-Semitism Anti-Zionism Blog
November 10, 2014 Max Blumenthal And The Nation’s Standards Over the weekend, I was alerted to a tweet posted by Max Blumenthal, who announced that “.@thenation decided @eric_alterman’s promotion of far-rightist painting me as anti-Semite ‘did not meet…standards’.” The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot showing an “Editor’s Note” that can be found under one of Eric Alterman’s recent posts at his regular Nation […] Anti-Semitism Anti-Zionism Blog
November 7, 2014 The Hamas Book Club Writing shortly after the publication of Max Blumenthal’s anti-Israel screed “Goliath” a year ago, Eric Alterman noted that it would be “no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).” As demonstrated at yesterday’s rather lavish “Palestine Book Awards ceremony 2014” in London – honoring, […] Anti-Semitism Anti-Zionism Blog