Thursday, April 24, 2008

TAU Psychology Prof Denounces The Haggada!

1. Carlo Strenger is a professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University
and one of the more extreme leftist Post-Zionists on a campus that is
crawling with them. Strenger has a long track record of Israel bashing
and leftist propagandizing ( see for example

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/936471.html ,

http://www.minfo.gov.ps/English/opinions/11-06-07b.htm ,

http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=604_0_1_0_M ) . He
frequently appears on Palestinian terrorist web sites. He sits in the
same department at Tel Aviv University where "The Psychology of the
Occupation" is a course. (We have posted about that propaganda course
earlier, after which the then-President of TAU, Itamar Rabinovich, wrote
the heads of our own university demanding that we be silenced!)

This past week, Strenger outdid his anti-Israel leftist friends and took
on not only Zionism but the Passover Haggada! You can seeit, in

http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/976908.html in Hebrew (not
available in English). There Strenger explains how the Haggada is a
backward archaic anti-democratic document. And in fact that is the whole
problem with Israel . that it attempts to incorporate in its essence those
primitive sentiments from the Bible and Haggada.

Strenger claims that the basic message in the Haggada is that Jews must
"blindly obey" commandments they suppose come from God. He says that the
Haggada justifies unjust killing of the first-born sons of the Egyptians,
that we are obliged to go to the Temple Mount where Abraham supposedly
bound Isaac, that Abraham was a bruit willing to allow both Isaac and
Ishmael to die needlessly, and we are told to persecute Amalek unjustly.
Needless to say, Amalek, Ishmael, Isaac, and Abraham are mentioned nowhere
in the Haggada, nor even is Moses. But that is all enough for Strenger to
proclaim that in his house, no one reads (is permitted to read?) the
Passover Haggada.

Now what really bothers Strenger of course is that if people read the
Haggada or the Bible they may get the foolish idea that Jews have the
right to their own state and to Jerusalem, something Strenger no doubt
wants us all to "question." Israel has squashed the "traditional Jewish
tradition of critical thinking and irony," opines Strenger, meaning . I
guess . that too many Israelis laugh at his own "ideas." He names Woody
Allen and Steven Spielberg (and Spinoza, who is fashionable among the
atheist clique) as non-religious Jews whom we in Israel should all take as
our role models. He claims Maimonides himself abandoned Judaism for a
while, although (to Strenger's disappointment?) returned to it. He
denounces the Zionist movement and Ben Gurion for filling the minds of
Israelis with such mythology and archaic nonsense, which then directly led
to a group of simply awful people building settlements in Palestinian
lands after 1967. He adds that the story of Masada is a fabrication and
that the great archeologist Yigal Yadin knew it was fake but kept it
hidden in a grand conspiracy because he was afraid of what revealing the
fabrication would do to Israeli morale. All of which proves that
Strenger's mind is about as deep as that of Barry Chamish and just as
capable of inventing conspiracist nonsense.

The main conclusion of Strenger is that if we in Israel detach ourselves
from "myths" about having a divine right to our land, then we will be
forced to face the fact that we are oppressors who stole the land of
another "people." Never mind that the "Palestinians" are a "people" in
about the same sense as the members of United Airlines frequent flyer
program are.

Meanwhile, his rant in Haaretz gives us a pretty good idea of what he
washes the brains of his students in.

2. Hmmm. Wonder if this is Chamish's doing for Chabad canceling his
talks in Florida:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3534841,00.html


3. Green Fascism:

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html


4. From Haaretz, of all places:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/977486.html

Beware, appeasement
By Ari Shavit

The suicidal left has found itself a new hero: Jimmy Carter.
Finally, someone is speaking the truth: Israel is an apartheid state.
Finally, someone is exposing justice: Palestinian terrorism is tantamount
to the actions of the Israel Defense Forces. Finally, someone is bringing
peace: He is welcomed by that modern-day Sadat, Khaled Meshal.
For the suicidal left, Carter is the good American cop who is
replacing the bad American cop and ending the dark era of George Bush.
After eight lean years, we once again have a brave Southern sheriff
chasing the true villain - Israel. Now, then, we can once again stretch
out on the soft sofas of the 1990s divan and suck on a hookah of sweet
illusions. As though Camp David never happened. As though Hamas did not
exist. Because Jimmy has come home. Carter has brought back hope.
In the spring of 1979, President Carter made history: He led
Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to sign a peace accord. Carter did not
initiate the accord. In some of his moves, Carter even jeopardized it. And
yet ultimately the former president headed the peace summit and brought
Egypt and Israel to the happy ending that they had had trouble reaching by
themselves. That glowing hour on the White House lawn is the hour of grace
in Carter's failed career in international politics. No one can take it
away from him.
In the fall of 1979, however, President Carter once again made
history: failing to understand that the Khomeini revolution was imminent,
he prevented the Shah from preventing the revolution. He thus brought
about a historical catastrophe whose dimensions remain difficult to grasp
even today. In the name of his commitment to moderation and human rights,
Carter allowed zealots to take over Iran and turn it into a regional power
of evil. This power of evil is about to become nuclear. It is a threat to
Israel's existence, to the stability of the Middle East and to world
peace. Carter bears the heavy burden of responsibility for this
development.
In November 1980, the Americans kicked Carter out of the White
House in disgrace. They did so because they felt that he had destabilized
America and brought it to its knees, and because they could no longer
stand everything he represented: weakness, sanctimoniousness and groveling
before evil.
For some 30 years, Carter has been perceived by most Americans as
a self-righteous fool who does not understand the basic physics of the
real world. The fact that the preacher from Georgia wrapped his alchemy of
international politics in a moralizing theology only increased the
repugnance he aroused. Just as Carter's policy is not really policy, his
morality is not really morality. There is no zealous thug that Carter will
not embrace. No third-world terrorist that he will not try to appease.
The problem, however, is not Carter, but Carterism. Carterism is a
policy of appeasement: it is the unwillingness of those who seek good in
the West to protect the values of the West when faced with an aggressor
from the East. Carterism is the inability of the enlightened in North
America and North Tel Aviv to face the fact that sometimes there is evil
in the Third World. Sometimes there is evil in the Arab world. There is
even Palestinian evil.
Carter himself is not very important. He did some damage to
Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian moderates, but the damage is limited. He
did talk peace with Hamas at the same time that Hamas was initiating a
military offensive at Kerem Shalom, an act that might have sparked a war,
but in this he only exposed his own shoddiness.
Carterism is far more important than Jimmy Carter. Carterism is a
profound scourge found among certain elites in the U.S., in Western Europe
and in Israel. Carterism is a dangerous distortion of thought and values
among those who presume to be thinkers committed to values.
The possibility that a Democrat will be elected president of the
United States in November makes the debate over Carterism relevant and
vital. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will have to choose whether to
continue in the sober tradition of Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy or to revive
Carter's appeasement. That is why it is important to speak out strongly
right now about the path chosen by the old man who came to visit us this
week.
This path is not only delusional, but immoral. Carterism's
cooperation with Hamas is cooperation with the oppression of women, with
the jailing of homosexuals, with the persecution of Christians. It is
cooperation with a religious tyranny that tramples the Palestinian
individual and seeks to eradicate the Israeli-Jewish collective. True,
George Bush too has wreaked calamity on the Middle East, but the way to
correct Bush's mistake is not to return to Carter's abomination. If the
Israeli, European and American left chooses to become a Carterist left, it
will indeed become a suicidal left.


4. A couple of days back a major expose of the abuses of students and the
misuse of the classroom by Neve Gordon for anti-Israel indoctrination and
propagandizing appeared here:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=44A95318-758A-41EC-8A5C-3E27F0AA2D12

Right afterwards, Gordon circulated his own message to his students at the
University of Michigan and to others saying that this article "proves how
impossible it is to teach Middle East Studies in America." You know, with
the Zionist lobby and all exposing what he tells his students.

Now Gordon does not teach Middle East Studies at all, or anything at all
for that matter, but merely engages in anti-Israel classroom incitement
and then calls it scholarship. His "academic record" consists mainly of
articles containing little more than anti-Israel propaganda. He is upset
NOT because it is "impossible it is to teach Middle East Studies in
America" but because some students are unwilling to keep quiet about the
nonsense he "teaches" and cite his classroom pronouncements verbatim.
Gordon, like so many other classroom propagandizers, wants only one point
of view to be expressed in class, his. Those he seek to have other points
of view presented are seeking to suppress the teaching of Middle East
Studies in America. Of course, at Gordon's Ben Gurion University in the
Department of Political Science, there are no problems because no Zionist
is allowed to teach there. Only correct anti-Israel points of view are
permitted.






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