Monday, July 09, 2007

Israel's Network of Expatriate Treachery

1.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7253
Is the Likud a Leftist Party?

2.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/1#2223
Alternative Bumper Stickers


The Israeli Left has long devoted much of its energies to creating snappy
little seditious bumper stickers. This is natural since most leftist thought
can be easily contained within the confines of a bumper sticker, especially if
it is on a Volvo.

But the Non-Left has been lazy about countering this bumper sticker barrage
from the Left.

So I wanted to suggest some alternative bumper stickers that should be produced
and displayed on all non-leftist motor vehicles. Here they are:

1. National Suicide is Not a Peace Process
2. An entire Generation will Now Have to Pay for THEIR Stupidity
3. No Leftists, No Treason
4. The Solution is EmPOWERment (with big photo of electric chair)
5. Turn off their Lights
6. Get out of the Left - for Israel's Sake
7. Teach Hania to Debka at the End of a Rope
8. End the Illegal Palestinian Occupation of Israeli Lands
9. The Illegal Palestinian Occupation of Israeli Lands Corrupts
10. Take a Jewish Settler Out to Lunch
11. Put a Post-Zionist in a Cage
12. The Lobotomy Clinic - I am not just the Owner, I am also a Customer (with
photo of Peres)
13. Solve the Parking Congestion Problems in Ramallah
14. Send Avrum to Ramallah but Don't Let Him Back
15. Pigskins!
16. Protect Laboratory Animals: Put a Leftist in a Cage
17. I used to be a Leftist but then I Learned to Read
18. Send Amir Peretz to Cuba
19. You bring the Tar and I'll Bring the Feathers
20. Haaretz - Black and White and Red all Over
21. Suha Sure Looks Good in Black
22. Take the Mapai out of the Likud
23. Let 'Em Have a State in Guantanamo Bay
24. Tanks A Lot
25. For Every Jew a B-52
26. Defund the Kibbutzim
27. Kick 'em Out of Ramat Aviv and Send 'em Home to Yesha
28. IQ Tests for Knesset Members Now
29. End the Axis of Evil between the Jewish Left and Arab Fascism
30. Bulldoze Orient House
31. Peace is Harmful for Flowers and Other Living Things
32. Another Soccer Mom for the Death Penalty
33. End the Illegal Conquest of Corsica
34. Guns Don't Kill Terrorists, Jews Kill Terrorists
35. If You See this Police Van for Interrogating Palestinians A-Rocking, Don't
Come A-Knocking
36. Palestinian Refugees? Fuggedabowdit!
37. De-Activate Judicial "Activists"
38. What Part of Denazification do you not Understand?
39. No Tenure, No Leftism
40. Peace Now - Just Pretend that War Does Not Exist


3. Network of Expatriate Treachery
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 9, 2007
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28926

It seems that Israel-bashers and anti-Semites of the Left and of the Right
never tire of the delight in discovering and recruiting yet another Jew
willing to serve as spokesperson for their political agendas. They are
invariably convinced that if they can point to any Jew who mouths their
mantras about Israeli "apartheid" and Zionist "racism", never mind that
Israel is the only Middle East country that is NOT an apartheid regime,
then surely what they are saying MUST be true. And if those Jews also
happen to be ex-Israelis, people who grew up in Israel and claim to know
all about it, what chance can there be for anyone to debunk the lies and
hate being marketed?

In recent years the world has seen the growth of networks of ex-Israeli
Jewish leftists, disgruntled people living outside of Israel and devoting
their energies to delegitimizing and undermining the very existence of the
Jewish state. The other Israel-phobes delight in them. Each new one to
come along is greeted with serendipitous ecstasy, proclaimed a courageous
hero of moral outrage, defying Zionist "oppression." These ex-Israelis
serve as a SWAT team for anti-Semites of all stripes, and as apologists
for Arab terror and Islamofascism. A favorite tactic is to place these
people on the podium to create "balanced" speaker panels, consisting of
both Arabs and Israelis, all of whom inevitably reach the conclusion that
the Arab "version" of history is completely correct and that the only
reasonable "compromise" is for Israel to capitulate to all Arab demands.
After all, both Arabs and Israelis are telling the audience the same
things!

Small activist groups of expatriate Israeli leftists now operate in the
United States, Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, devoting themselves to the
war against Israel's survival. These are by and large people who despise
their previous homeland and who serve as toadies for anti-Zionism and Arab
aggression. Many of these disgruntled expatriates unapologetically call
for Israel to be destroyed. Some of them justify and cheer anti-Jewish
terrorism in all its forms. They generally promote boycotts against their
former homeland, and sometimes initiate attempts to prosecute Israeli
leaders and army officers in courts outside Israel.

One particularly noisy segment of this phenomenon is its academic wing,
consisting of expatriate Israelis with PhDs, holding teaching jobs at
academic institutions outside Israel. These "academics" are generally
less crude than some of the non-academic Israeli expatriate haters of
Israel, people such as Gilad Atzmon (a saxophone player in Britain who
stars at all the Trotskyite events there), who has called for the burning
down of synagogues, or Shraga Elam, a Swiss ex-Israeli best known for
writing sycophantic letters of admiration to Holocaust Denier David
Irving, or Dror Feiler, a Swedish ex-Israel best known for creating "art"
celebrating a Palestinian terrorist mass murderer, or the Russian-born
ex-Israel who calls himself "Israel Shamir", a deranged Holocaust denier
and darling of European Neo-Nazi groups. "Shamir", a regular on
Counterpunch, is so openly pro-Nazi that even European anti-Israel
activist groups repudiate him as an embarrassment to their cause.

In contrast, there are dozens of ex-Israeli academics whose careers
consist largely of churning out literate print and web agitprop, inciting
hatred against Israel and sometimes also against Jews, while collaborating
with Israel's enemies. In some cases these people are failed academics
who were unable to obtain and hold academic jobs in Israel itself, and so
they are "getting even" by devoting themselves to the "progressive" quest
for Israel's annihilation. Most of these "academics" are so extreme that
they make Ward Churchill look like a moderate.

It is worth emphasizing that expatriate ex-Israeli academic leftists are
NEVER people whose inability to find academic work in Israel has anything
to do with their political opinions. Israeli universities are themselves
large petri dishes of "Post-Zionist" (meaning anti-Zionist) radicalism and
leftwing extremism. Not only does the holding of leftwing opinions not
prevent people from being hired and promoted at Israeli academic
institutions, but in some departments it is all but impossible to teach if
one is NOT a leftist extremist. At the department of political science at
Ben Gurion University, for example, the lone pro-Israel faculty member was
fired for holding politically incorrect opinions. At Tel Aviv University,
it is almost impossible to find non-leftists in linguistics and
philosophy. Sociology departments in Israeli universities are all
near-monolithic little Kremlins of Marxism and leftwing "Post-Zionist"
extremism. Political science departments are almost as uniformly
far-leftist. Political extremism does not disqualify someone from
pursuing an academic career in Israel. Indeed there are many examples of
people with inadequate (or even laughable) academic publication records
who are nevertheless hired and promoted by Israeli universities, as acts
of political solidarity by others already inside the system.

So if seditious opinions or ideological extremism are no obstacle to
building an academic career inside Israeli universities, what drove these
expatriates to seek "refuge" outside Israel? The answer is often that
these are pseudo-academics completely lacking any semblance of academic
excellence or scholarly achievement, whose resumes are too scanty even to
serve as figleaf for their employment at Israeli universities.

Perhaps the best known Israeli academic expatriate who has made a career
out of impugning and defaming Israel is Dr. Ilan Pappe, until recently a
lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, now at the
University of Exeter in the UK. Pappe openly calls for Israel to be
exterminated. He was the main inciter of the British academic unions to
declare a boycott against Israeli universities. Pappe may be best known
for having fabricated a "massacre" of Arabs by Jews in 1948, an imaginary
massacre that never took place and for which no evidence whatsoever has
ever existed. Together with a graduate student under his supervision,
Pappe decided one fine morning that members of the Hagana Jewish militia
had massacred Arabs in the coastal town of Tantora south of Haifa in 1948
during Israel's War of Independence. Journalists present at that battle
witnessed no massacre. Even Arab propagandists had never alleged one had
taken place. Arab survivors of the battle spoke of being helped and fed
by the Hagana militiamen.

Pappe's graduate student later admitted in court that the whole story of
the Tantora "massacre" was an invention. Pappe, however, continues to
tout the "massacre" libel anywhere he can find himself an audience, and -
since its invention - the story has become part of the official canon on
every Islamofascist and anti-Semitic web site on earth, including
Palestinian and Neo-Nazi ones. Pappe was not fired for that fraud,
although he should have been, and today roams the world proclaiming that
he is the "victim" of "persecution" by his old University of Haifa
comrades. That claim was cited by the British boycotters as a
justification for their own campaign against Israeli universities.

Pappe is not the only expatriate academic hater of Israel who has made
Britain his home. The vogue hatred of Israel and Jews among the British
chattering classes seems to have made Britain a welcoming refuge for such
people. Of the expatriate defamers of Israel there, the one with the
most serious academic reputation is Avi Shlaim, on the faculty at Oxford.
Shlaim is a far-leftist who has made a career out of one-sided bashing and
misrepresentation of Israel and the Middle East conflicts. Unlike many of
the other expatriate anti-Israel propagandists, Shlaim actually has some
bona fide academic publications, although he is much better known for his
pitbull attacks against Israel, such as those he publishes in Palestinian
propaganda journals. Such propagandizing seems to "count" as
"scholarship" at Oxford these days, and not only there. In Shlaim's
"research", the Arabs have always wanted peace and true democracy, while
the obstacle to peace has always been Israeli wickedness and racist
Zionist colonialism. He participates in the anti-Semitic (some would say
Neo-Nazi) organization "Deir Yassin Remembered" and can be seen here in
collaboration with Paul Eisen, a man widely regarded to be a Holocaust
Denier who claims that there were no Jews murdered in Auschwitz gas
chambers.

Shlaim was in the headlines recently for his struggle to get DePaul
hatemonger Norman Finkelstein tenured on the basis of the latter's vulgar
anti-Semitic screeds, a struggle that failed. While Finkelstein has never
published a research paper in a refereed academic journal, Shlaim was
willing to serve as Finkelstein's academic cheerleader because he
identifies with Finkelstein's political agenda. Shlaim is one of two
names that Finkelstein lists as recommenders for him on his own resume.
The second name is Noam Chomsky. Neither is from the same purported
academic discipline as Finkelstein. Shlaim is one of the people featured
in Professor Efraim Karsh.s Fabricating Israeli History: The New
Historians (Frank Cass & Co, Ltd. London, 2000), about pseudo-scholars
inventing "New History." Shlaim's articles are standard fodder in
classroom bashings of Israel at many campuses.

Perhaps the most malicious of the anti-Israel academic expatriates in
Britain is one Oren Ben-Dor, who teaches law at Southamptom University.
Ben-Dor is a regular on Counterpunch, where he rants against Israeli
"apartheid" and denounces those who think Israel has a right to exist as
hypocrites and people not truly pursuing peace:

'When "Israel's right to exist" is used as a litmus test for moderation
and pragmatism, the subtext is that it is reasonable for apartheid
practices which are at the core of the state as currently constituted to
be allowed to continue. Thus, those who mouth this mantra, and those who
try to limit the apartheid label to "the occupation", are complicit with
the apartheid inside pre-1967 Israel.'

Ben-Dor has been one of the ex-Israelis inside the UK initiating boycott
resolutions against Israel. He is one of a small group of ultras use the
term "Naqba Denial" as the moral equivalent of Holocaust Denial to
describe those who insist that Israel never conducted "ethnic cleansing"
of Arabs in 1948-49. ('Naqba" means catastrophe in Arabic and is now the
term of fashionable choice used by anti-Semites for Israel's creation.)
For Ben-Dor, Israel's very existence is an act or terror and an atrocity.

Within the United States, Los Angeles seems to have become the largest
center for anti-Israel academic expatriates from Israel. UCLA's Yael
Korin (at the Department of Pathology) runs the local chapter of the
venomously anti-Israel "Women in Black," which often collaborates with the
pro-terror Council on American-Islamic Relations and similar groups.
She is joined by Israeli expatriate Gabriel Piterburg, who teaches Middle
East Studies at UCLA in courses with large doses of anti-Israel
indoctrination. Piterberg, a fan of Edward Said, claims the nefarious
Zionists are persecuting him and academics like him. He has promoted
efforts to "divest" from Israel and is a vintage "New Historian", meaning
someone whose version of history differs little from that of the
ayatollahs in Iran.

Perhaps the most bizarre anti-Israel expatriate Angelino is Yigal Arens,
who works at the University of Southern California in computer technology.
Arens is the son of Moshe Arens, the militant nationalist political leader
of the Likud in Israel, who served as Israel's Minister of Defense. Arens
junior however has devoted himself to demonizing Israel and promoting
boycotts of Israel. Perhaps he enjoys making his daddy angry.

Los Angeles is not their only refuge. Ella Shahat is an anti-Israel
far-leftist professor of Art and Middle East Studies at NYU. She promotes
the view that Zionism is a racist movement of "white" Ashkenazi Jews, and
"Oriental" Jews from Middle Eastern countries are its main victims. The
fact that not one in a thousand "Oriental Jews" agrees with her has never
stopped her promoting her "theory." A radical feminist who thinks
America is an evil imperialist bully, conducting 'crimes' of 'oil driven
hegemony' and 'murderous sanctions against Iraq,' she likes to call
herself an "Arab Jew." Other Israeli expatriates who hate Israel can be
found at other schools.

The sign of "having made it" for many of these people seems to be
appearing in "Counterpunch" magazine. The Counterpunch web magazine is
run by Neo-Stalinist Alexander Cockburn, who passionately despises the
United States, although not enough so to give up his California perqs and
head back to his rainy native British Isles. Cockburn's second greatest
passion is insisting that it is intolerable when people are accused of
being anti-Semites simply because they hate Jews. It is only a question
of time before Counterpunch will run columns demanding that people stop
referring unfairly to Hitler and Goebbals as anti-Semites. It already
runs "Israel Shamir" and Gilad Atzmon.

Unlike most of his leftwing competition, Cockburn shows no reluctance
about abandoning the pretense of "We are Anti-Zionists but not
Anti-Semites," and has long exhibited naked anti-Semitism. Some of the
writers appearing on Counterpunch are shared by Cockburn with Holocaust
Denial and Neo-Nazi web sites. Cockburn has run the anti-Semitic
conspiracy "theory", first fabricated by Neo-Nazi web sites, about how
Israel was actually behind the 9-11 attacks upon the US, this based on the
fact that some Israeli moving men were picked up by the FBI on the day of
those attacks and later released with an apology. Counterpunch has run
numerous other articles promoting "theories" about Israeli conspiracies,
and Cockburn himself endorsed the "theory" that Jews were behind the
anthrax attacks in America.

Cockburn has a special love for Israel-bashing Jews, and especially for
Israelis and ex-Israelis who hate Israel. Oren Ben-Dor and Ilan Pappe are
regulars on Counterpunch. Cockburn has also run Zalman Amit, an
anti-Israel professor emeritus at Concordia University (one who evidently
spends most of his time making ugly little objects of "art" through wood
turning) and a Pappe apologist. Amit has devoted his energies to trying
to prevent Canadians from making donations to social causes in Israel,
while ranting about the "Jewish Lobby." As far as we know, he has never
offered to end his occupation of the lands of Canadian Indians and to turn
all his worldly property over to them as compensation for his colonial
oppression of them.

In some cases, the actual career paths of anti-Israel expatriates from
Israel is itself a source of amusement. Ran Greenstein is an ex-Israeli
and a fourth-rate sociologist who devotes his energies to denouncing
Israeli "apartheid". But he does so from South Africa, where he teaches
at the University of Witwatersrand. "Wits" University was an all-white
school and the bastion of Afrikaaner racism, developed as the jewel in the
apartheid academic crown. The South African University Education Act
Extension of Act 45 of 1959 prohibited black students from attending
"Wits." Spending so much time denouncing Israeli "racism," Greenstein
has never gotten around to feeling disturbed by his own status as a
colonial occupier of Africa, benefiting from the fruits of apartheid.
Efraim Nimni is an ex-Israeli Marxist sociologist and a groupie of Edward
Said, who found an academic position in Australia at the University of New
South Wales. There he has made a career out of denouncing Zionism as a
form of "colonialism". Irony is not his strong point: living as an
occupier of aboriginal lands and a colonial interloper in Australia is not
something that has given him pause about his own battle against Israel and
Zionism.

These expatriate "academic" haters of Israel become the instant
celebrities of all anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activist groups wherever
they end up. Being literate, they specialize in turning out large
volumes of anti-Israel propaganda. And they are generally not squeamish
about who publishes and uses their poison.

Should the Far Left ever get its way and impose its "solutions," Israel
will cease to exist and its population will be annihilated in a second
Holocaust. For far-leftist academic haters of Israel inside of Israel,
they and their families will perish along with the "Zionist entity" they
despise, should they succeed in their malice. But the Israeli expatriates
who are working to destroy Israel from the outside are not putting their
lives on the line and face no such personal threat.






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