EclectEcon

Alan Adamson quotes this brief section from Mark Steyn's controversial book, America Alone:

Everyone's for a free Tibet but nobody's for freeing Tibet.
...
If Rumsfeld were to say, 'Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,' the bumper sticker crowd would be aghast. They'd have to bend down and peel off the 'FREE TIBET' stickers and replace them with 'WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER'.'

Steyn is a very amusing writer. And, like Alan, I thank the recent Osgoode Hall law students who did so much to popularize his book in Canada.

From John Leo in the NRO [h/t to Eva]:

The human-rights tribunals are a censor’s dream. Under Canada’s human-rights act, commissioners can convict if they believe any published material is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Since they are “remedial” institutions and not real courts, they need not follow strict legal procedures or grant traditional rights of the accused. No one goes to prison, but the panels can fine and silence people at will — and run up the lawyer bills for years. Truth is no defense, and commissioners are authorized to confiscate a computer without a warrant. Evidence can be woefully flimsy. ...

The kangaroo courts — a national one, plus one in each province — have been under fire for months, mostly because of the Mark Steyn case. In 2006, Maclean’s magazine ran an excerpt from Steyn’s book, America Alone, warning of Islam’s threat to the West. Steyn predicted that Muslims would become a “successor population” in Europe because of their high birth rate. Three of the human-rights commissions pounced. The British Columbia panel completed a five-day hearing but has not yet released a ruling. The Ontario panel dropped the case, saying it lacked jurisdiction over printed material. The federal human-rights commission is still investigating.

Steyn and Maclean’s have churned up a good deal of controversy. Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, ran a June 16 editorial under the headline, “Curb Bigoted Acts Not Free Speech.” It said that calls for reform, including a few in parliament, “reflect growing unease that an unwarranted chill is being cast on free speech.” ...

Having shown little concern about the national anti-free-speech apparatus for years, the Canadian public is beginning to notice.

My favourite drug dealer, JB, has some amusing speculation about why the University and College Union of England has been trying to implement a boycott of Israeli scholars:

Unions are about, at least in part, protectionism (protecting the jobs of people who would lose them in a completely open market). The UCU are merely protecting themselves against being shown up by Jewish scholars, since no intelligent, self-respecting Jew would now want to go to Britain on an exchange basis, whether or not the UCU sanctions a boycott.

Next on the UCU list will be Americans and then Germans if number of Nobel laureates by country is used as a metric for sanctions.

From the National Review Online [h/t to BenS]:

Most of the media in Canada and the United States ignored the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal that took place last week in a windowless basement in Vancouver. Now, a group of provincial human-rights commissars will decide whether or not National Review’s incomparable Mark Steyn and the largest-circulating magazine in Canada, Maclean’s, will be fined or otherwise censured for printing an excerpt from Steyn’s book, America Alone. The piece argued that demographic trends indicate that Western Civilization will sooner or later be forced to confront problems associated with radical Islam. We believe that the right to free speech must be defended almost without exception, but it’s worth noting that Steyn’s article was perfectly within the bounds of reasonable opinion journalism.

Please, PLEASE read the whole thing!

On the same topic, here is a cartoon BenS sent along:

This is priceless material. Andrew Coyne is live-blogging the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal's hearings on a case brought by Islamists who were offended by Mark Steyn's piece in Maclean's Magazine [h/t to BenS]. One very strong entry:

10:16 AM
They’re going to call, among others, Dr. Andrew Rippon, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Victoria, to show that Steyn has misunderstood the relationship between the Koran and Islamic society. Well, that’s as may be. Would be a good subject for debate. But why exactly does that require the state to adjudicate it?

Okay, I could probably make that point after every line. …

I confess. I have not seen Fitna, the movie. Having read some reviews, I don't really care whether I see it. I doubt if it is a very good movie or a very bad movie. But I'd rather read blogs or watch CSI on television.

If you really want to see it, there are lots of sites hosting it even though threats from Muslim extremists caused LiveLeak to remove it from their site.

Nevertheless....

As when the Danish cartoons caused so much violence among Islamic extremists, I am once again appalled and deeply concerned about the clash between their perceptions of their religion and the heretofore sacrosanct western ideals of freedom of speech. I am equally appalled that Canada's embarrassment to the world, Louise Arbour, has once again spoken out against freedom of the press and in favour of appeasing terrorists. Here is a letter my friend Eva sent Ms. Arbour:

I have just read that you have condemned the movie, "Fitna".

Have you seen it? I doubt it. I have seen it because I took advantage of the opportunity to watch it during the short number of hours it was shown on a web-site. I knew that the time would be short and, of course, threats have been made to the lives of the people who posted the film on the internet and they have been obliged to withdraw the film.

If you had seen it, you would know that the film consists of exact extracts from the Koran. Yes, the verses are very bloody and full of hate, but Wilders didn't invent the verses. What he did was to show that there are powerful, murderous sectors of the Islamic world who take the inflammatory, incitement contained in the verses very literally indeed. The verses were accompanied by newsreel shots of the incitement being carried out in the real world, by Islamic militants, not by Mr Wilders. The newsreel shots were originally broadcast on AL Jazeera, the BBC and other media outlets. You didn't complain then, did you?

Aren't you addressing your moralistic fervour in the wrong direction? Aren't you blaming the messenger and not the originators of the worldwide hate, blood, gore and mayhem? Admit, you are terrified of the true violators of human rights and turn your anger to those who point it out. If you were truly concerned with human rights you would speak out against the atrocities committed in the name of Islamic extremism.

Geert Wilders' film Fitna, a critical examination of Islamism and the Quran, is now available on the internet (e.g. see here). For reviews, see this by Eugene Volokh or this from Reuters.

Update: For more, see this, especially see the statment from LiveLeak, which is hosting the video, and see Update III:

I just watched Geert Wilders’ film, Fitna, The Movie. My initial reaction is a yawn. No surprise, of course. ...

Anyone who has seen terrorist propaganda films is familiar with most of the scenes and most of the disgusting conflations of the Quran with acts of violence, murder, kidnapping and anti-semitism. Such behavior has been condemned resoundingly among Muslims. Those that use the Quran for illegitimate and criminal ends should be punished by the fullest extent of the law.

What I’m really wondering: is Wilders’ protesting against Islam or the monopoly extremists already have over grainy, low-budget, youtube videos? The only difference I see is that Wilders plays the best of Western classical music — an insult to the legacy of Tchaikovsky — than death chants.

From Reuters:

AMSTERDAM, March 23 (Reuters) - A U.S.-based web service, which Islam critic and Dutch right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders planned to use to show his film critical of the Koran, said on Saturday that it had inactivated the site due to complaints.

"This site has been suspended while Network Solutions is investigating whether the site's content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy," the company said on the site www.fitnathemovie.com.

Wilders, who has given few details about his 15-minute film, has said he plans to release 'Fitna' on the Internet before the end of the month after Dutch broadcasters declined to show it. Fitna is a Koranic term sometimes translated as "strife". ...

The film is not so much about Muslims as about the Koran, Wilders wrote in a commentary in Dutch daily De Volkskrant on Saturday. He said Fitna was a last warning for the West.

Wilders had previously warned of a "tsunami of Islamisation" in a country home to almost one million Muslims.

I expect there are other, bigger, faster sites willing to host his film, but if not, let me know and I'll figure out a way to do it on one of the sites I use.

On libertarians, control freaks, and politicians (i.e. Spitzer, in case you couldn't guess) [source]:

Once again, we see that a vehemently authoritarian moralizer is secretly a libertarian, at least in regards to his own rights.

It’s always other people’s freedom that needs to be curtailed.

link via Tim Worstall.

Mike, from The London Fog, makes a nice distinction:

Not being given free government money to inflict your artistic vision on the rest of us is completely different from being threatened by the police for inflicting that vision.

He then adds the following quote,

It's easy to be brave when criticizing Bush; the silence of the arts community about human rights commission censorship suggests the only thing they're really idealistic about is free money.

Minor note: I see he mispelled "gubmnt".

I expect that by making some negative comments about York University in my classes and on my exams, I have offended some people. I suppose that by writing "gubmnt" instead of "government" in my classes I have offended some people.

I sure hope I don't get dragged before the Human Rights Commissions for having done these things. Here's the background.

In my teaching, I often refer to York University in very negative terms. For the most part, students love it because York is a rival for both Guelph, where I am visiting this year, and UWO, where I am employed on a permanent basis.

As an example, when I am teaching about the minimum wage, I say,

Let's consider the market for unskilled labour

and while I'm saying that, I'm writing across the top of a supply and demand graph "York Graduates." And whenever I want to point out that some people might not behave as if they are rational maximizers (or might do dumb things in general), I say "York Graduates" or something like that.

York University does, indeed, have a reputation of being a commuter campus with many students who are less serious than many students at other universities. That said, their bizskool is pretty darned good. Their lawskool, however, has a reputation for being pretty left-wing and interventionist. Also, their campus is by far the ugliest in Canada and one of the ugliest in the universe.

As for my use of "gubmnt", I don't know when I started writing that in my notes and on the overheads (and exams). I suspect it started a couple of decades ago, under the influence of a former colleague who loved watching The Dukes of Hazard on television.

Two days ago, I received the following message from a student:

Dear Professor Palmer,

I am a student in your...Economics class ....
I am stating a concern about your midterms, most specifically your second midterm.

I found that your midterm was incredibly disrespectful. The two occurrences I am talking about are: question 3 when you made a reference to York University* and question 4 when you spelt ‘government’ as ‘gubment’.

Firstly, York is an honoured university in our province’s capital and I believe that students, faculty and graduates should be respected in the way that they deserve. Secondly, I have no idea what was being implied when ‘gubment’ was written down but I believe that the government of this country should be respected as well.

I noticed these on your first midterm as well as in class. I believe in freedom of speech but I also believe that there is a time and a place. The University of Guelph is a professional institution and is seen in a professional way.

Thank you very much,

Oops. If the criticism/concerns had stuck to my getting cheap laughs at someone else's expense, I could understand that; I don't normally think humour that puts down other people is all that funny. But this type of criticism is utter nonsense.

York is hardly an "honoured university"; it is at best a middling university in this province, and whether it is located in the province's capital is irrelevant. So what if it is located on the northern edge of Trono? I wonder if making York students the butts of my derogatory remarks makes them feel bad. I wonder if this is case warranting a complaint to the human rights commission.

As for my use of "gubmnt", regular readers of this blog will recall the many times I have praised the current Cdn gubmt for its position on Israel, Durban, Kyoto, Afghanistan, etc. But whether I write gubmnt or govt or gubment doesn't matter. To me it's just an amusing take-off on The Dukes.

I know my spelling sometimes bothers some people. They are not amused by "bizskool" or "eagre" or "Trono" or "gubmnt". But these quirks that amuse me hardly merit this type of reaction or concern.

What matters to me is that this student pulled out claptrap cliches and political correctness to question what I said and wrote.

*The question referred to was this (note that the answers were to be completed on Scantron sheets that have only choices a through e):

3. An appropriate question to ask someone who argues that moving toward free trade should occur only if the losers are compensated by the gainers is
a). How would you compensate the losers without creating incentives that would distort people’s incentives?
b). Would you be willing to compensate those who will lose if we do not move toward freer trade?
c). How do you propose to carry out this scheme?
d). How would you tax the gainers without creating deadweight losses due to the taxes?
e). All of the above would be appropriate.
f). What year did you graduate from York?

Also, the instructions for the exam included this admonition:

4. Calculators are not allowed. Also, no hats, no cell phones, no dictionaries, no talking, no beer, no wine, no illicit recreational drugs, and no extra paper.

I guess that would also be viewed as inappropriate by some people.

Salim Mansur, writing in the Trono Sun, has a careful statement of why western cultures are in danger of being swamped if they continue to pursue multi-culturalism without regard for the ethics and culture of individual freedom:

The most pressing issue in the West at the present time relates to culture and not the economy....

At the core of this culture is the affirmation that an individual irrespective of gender and colour represents the centre of the liberal world's ethical foundation. This was a radically altered vision of humanity rejecting the view that an individual is an appendage of the collective -- tribe, caste or class -- into which he or she is born.

The triumph of the West as the second millennium ended was a confirmation of this liberal idea, however incomplete and with distance still to go, of freedom and democracy. ...

But the worm inside the multicultural apple was the mistaken view that the West could extend equal treatment to other cultures based on group identity without concomitant erosion of its own cultural value of individual freedom.

Multiculturalism weakened the argument that newcomers should adjust to the cultural values of the West by adopting the guilt-ridden notion that any such demand smacks of imperialism....

It became a one-way concession in which the West did the conceding and non-Westerners made rising demands....

The West is now exposed to the paradox of how self-generated loss of cultural identity is politically weakening in a global village, and the task ahead is for its recovery from multicultural delusion by reasserting once again values that made it strong and appealing to the rest.

$30 for 52 issues of a magazine that stood up for freedom of the press is a great deal. Click here to subscribe.

Note: I receive no commission or payment or anything for posting this information.

via BenS and John Meuller:

No biases here (from Mark Steyn's website, courtesy of BenS):

... [A]s it happens, the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission controversy is not short of agents provocateurs. Want some names?

Okay, step forward, senior CHRC "human rights investigator" Dean Steacy, last heard from in these quarters explaining that "freedom of speech is an "American concept". Mr Steacy likes to hang out at the "white nationalist" website Stormfront and post under the name "Jadwarr", as the CHRC quietly conceded just before Christmas ... [transcript deleted]

So let's see if I understand this. Canada's "Human Rights" Commissions have managed to get anonymous website comments designated a crime and its investigators now go around leaving such comments themselves? Is that right? Traditionally, an "agent provocateur" in the men's room has to entrap the guy in the adjoining stall into propositioning sex. In other words, the target still has to commit the actual crime. But in the case of the HRCs the agent provocateur can, in effect, commit the crime himself and then charge the target with it.

Nice work if you can get it. Agent Steacy and other current or former CHRC employees who do likewise would undoubtedly insist that they're nice liberal progressives posing as anti-Semitic white supremacists. But who's to say it's not the other way round? Maybe someone should take them to the CHRC.

The HRC scandal is not primarily to do with me, Ezra, Muslims, Christians, gays, white supremacists or anybody else. It is about the corruption of justice. The genius of the English legal system is the balance it strikes between the components of any trial - judge, jury, prosecutor, etc. The CHRC system muddies all the distinctions to the point where an ex-investigator is the serial plaintiff and a current investigator is posing as a perpetrator to create "crimes" in which there is no presumption of innocence.

And here's more:

In the three decades of the Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal's existence, not a single "defendant" has been "acquitted."

... Who has availed themselves of the "human rights" protected by Section XIII? In its entire history, over half of all cases have been brought by a sole "complainant," one Richard Warman. Indeed, Mr. Warman has been a plaintiff on every single Section XIII case before the federal "human rights" star chamber since 2002 — and he's won every one. That would suggest that no man in any free society anywhere on the planet has been so comprehensively deprived of his human rights. Well, no. Mr. Warman doesn't have to demonstrate that he's been deprived of his human rights, only that it's "likely" (i.e. "highly un-") that someone somewhere will be deprived of some right sometime. Who is Richard Warman? What's his story? Well, he's a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission: an investigator. ...

Isn't there something a little odd in a supposedly necessary Canadian federal "human rights" system used all but exclusively by one lone Canadian who served as a long-time employee of that system? Why should Richard Warman be the only citizen to have his own personal inquisition? You can hardly blame the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and no doubt the Supreme All-Powerful Islamic Executive Council of Swift Current, Sask., for now figuring they'd like a piece of the human rights action.

“If we ever lose our freedom in this country … the job will be done to us not by malevolent autocrats seeking to do bad, but by parochial bureaucrats seeking to do good,”

-- Alan Borovoy, Canada's best-known civil libertarian, who will be in Edmonton on January 23 to speak on the key issues concerning the infringement of free speech in Canada. His talk, Whatever happened to free speech?, is sponsored by the University of Alberta Centre for Constitutional Studies and the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership.

So much for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and academic freedom. From the Washington Post,

WARSAW — Polish prosecutors are considering taking the unusual step of filing criminal charges against an Ivy League professor for allegedly "slandering the Polish nation" in a book that describes how Poles victimized Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II.

Jan T. Gross, a Princeton University historian and native Polish Jew, has raised hackles here with the publication of "Fear," an account of Poland's chaotic postwar years in which Jews who barely survived the brutal Nazi occupation under the Germans often went on to suffer further abuse at the hands of their Polish neighbors.

The book was first published in 2006 in the United States, where reviewers found it praiseworthy. Gross's work, however, generated bitter feelings among many Poles who accused him of using inflammatory language and unfairly stereotyping the entire population as anti-Semitic. When the Polish-language edition of his book was released here last Friday, prosecutors wasted no time in announcing that he was under investigation.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office in Krakow, which is handling the case, said a decision was expected this week on whether to press charges against Gross or summon him for questioning.

The law in question was adopted in 2006, around the time that "Fear" was published in English; Gross and some other historians say it was partly a response to the book. The measure prohibits anyone from asserting that "the Polish nation" was complicit in crimes or atrocities committed by Nazis or communists. The maximum penalty is three years' imprisonment.

The threat of legal action has not deterred Gross so far. ...

"It's completely bizarre," he said, seeming to relish the attention. "There's an old saying in Polish that if God wants to punish someone, he takes away their brains first."

... "I'm not going to say the majority of his facts are wrong," said Machcewicz. "It is true: Polish anti-Semitism existed. There were pogroms. Many Jews were killed. There is no reason to deny it or hide it. . . . But the language he used is counterproductive."

Poland's tragic wartime history remains a highly sensitive topic here. The Nazis exterminated an estimated 3 million Jews in Poland, or about 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population. But 3 million other Poles were also killed, and many people see them as forgotten victims in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Many Poles are still reluctant to engage in an open discussion of those years. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the archbishop of Krakow, suggested this week that the publisher of the Polish-language edition of "Fear," a printing house with close ties to the church, had made a mistake.

"Your task is to promulgate the truth on history and not to wake up demons of anti-Polishness and anti-Semitism at the same time," he said. "Reading the book filled me with pain."

... As he prepared to launch his book tour, Gross said he was not surprised at the hostile reaction.

"The memories of the war here are fixed, of people being victims and heroes," he said. "The truth of the matter is that European societies during the war did not behave as they'd like to think toward Jews."

He also said he was not intimidated by the risk of a legal backlash or any other dangers. Next week, he is scheduled to make a public appearance in Krakow, the city where prosecutors are weighing legal action.

"People have warned me that I should worry and not walk at night alone, but I don't feel any threats," he said. At the same time, with his photograph in dozens of newspapers and magazines these days, he admitted to wearing a hat to disguise himself on the streets. "We'll see what happens," he said with a shrug.

.

During the past year or so, Mark Steyn has published a book and several columns which have provoked the ire of some Muslims. In his book, a portion of which was excerpted in Maclean's Magazine on October 23rd, he quoted a Norwegian imam as saying that Muslims would "breed like mosquitoes" and eventually take over the western world.

In response, several Muslim law students from Osgoode Hall Lawskool objected, asserting that that particular comment and the article in general were defamatory. They sought redress from Maclean's, which suggested they should write a letter to the editor. That response was unsatisfactory to them. Instead, they brought a complaint to the Human Rights Commissions of several provinces and at the federal level as well.

Some of these commissions had the good sense to reject the complaint, but some provincial and the Canadian federal HRCs all agreed to hear the case. What stupidity. For an excellent summary, see this in The Economist, which takes a swipe at both Canadian media and its HRCs, saying,

Much of Canada's press and many broadcasters are already noted for politically correct blandness. Some fear that the case can only make that worse. Mr Steyn and others hope it will prompt a narrower brief for the commissions, or even their abolition. As he put it in his blog, “I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police.”

This isn't the first time the HRCs have given in to Islamophobia phobia. Two years ago, Ezra Levant published the Danish cartoons in the Western Standard (two of which were posted on this blog as well; also see this) and was brought up before the Alberta HRC. He is understandably dealing with the situation brilliantly, but he does not need either the angst or the threats or the wasting of his time for such attacks on Canadians' freedom of speech.

Mark Steyn has a pithy, witty account of Ezra Levant's trials and tribulations here. It also
provides a gripping account of the conditions under which Canadian William Sampson suffered while in a Saudi jail. Read the whole thing.

Two more points:

• Someone has begun a group on Facebook, apparently based in Alberta, "Ezra Levant is a piece of shit JEW", though that group appears to have been shut down now. To see its page, check out the material, including the screenshot on Small Dead Animals. And the group's members?
  Ali Zee - Admin (Calgary)
  Usher Ahmed (Calgary)
  Super Samer (Calgary)
  Issam Zeineddine (Forest Lawn High School)
  Khalil Jeha (Calgary)
  Hussien Abdulbaki (Calgary)
  Abe Rafih (Calgary)
  Bassam Youssef (Lebanon)
  Issam Khalil (Calgary)
  Manal Abdallah (MRC CA Alum '07).
  
  John Mueller of the University of Calgary has written,
  

  Freedom of speech means, among many other things, that these guys get to post whatever they want.
  
  And that I then get to share their work with you!
  
  One of those "win-win" type thingies...
  

• Speaking of John Mueller, I have seen copies of many of the things he has written recently, criticizing Human Rights Commissions. In response, he has received some pretty astoundingly conflicted hate-mail:
  

  in regard to harassing
  e-mails I've begun to receive, the second last night, with
  the subject line ... "Do you belong to the KKK? You should
  be in jail for what you said about the HRC!"
  
  Message 1: "Kiss your job good bye! No teacher can be this
  ignorant. You have shown your true colours, racist."
  
  Message 2:" We got Terry Tremaine from uni of Sask fired for
  much less than this. Your insane/racist attack on the Humans
  Rights Commission violates everything that it is to be
  Canadian. Terry Termain , former math prof, Is now working
  as a janitor. I bet there is not one single colleague or
  student at uni of Calgary that thinks you are anythng but a
  full blown Nazi. Crawl back under the rock, my friend. You
  are destroying your career and reputation.
  

Who is the racist? Who is the Nazi? Surely many of the recent actions of the thought police .... nazis... HRCs are much more antithetical to freedom than the criticisms of the HRCs.

How ironic that this decision was handed down yesterday.

By the way, be sure to check out Ezra Levant's website.

From Canada.com, via Brian Ferguson, is an article about how a researcher at the University of Alberta had his funding cut off and then was terminated because people did not like the topic of his research: the substitutability between smokeless and regular tobacco. His story helps explain one of the reasons I am a paid-up lifetime member of SAFS (The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship).

If you planned to attend the Conference on Academic Freedom and Research Integrity on Monday at Edmonton's Shaw Convention Centre, take note: It has been cancelled. The reason? Several academics, apparently, did not approve of the subject matter.

The forum was organized by Carl Phillips, a University of Alberta professor with a deeply personal interest in the issue. That's because he studies something many of his colleagues hate: tobacco - specifically, the health benefits of smokers switching to smokeless tobacco. And he's suffering for it.

In June, his faculty voted to cut off his industry research funding, though the university long ago cleared the funding as ethically clean. Shortly after, Prof. Phillips says he received a letter. Since he no longer had funding, his department said, he was being terminated.

"Despite the fact there was no actual evidence the money was running out," he says, noting that the vote was unofficial and probably non-binding without administration's consent. "Not to mention there are all kinds of other sources I could have gotten money from."

Since then, the Harvard PhD says he's been subject to repeated and intrusive audits, been charged by colleagues with ethical violations and has had research projects cancelled for what he says are the flimsiest of excuses. "Even with Holocaust deniers, or when someone says the Taliban are wonderful, even in those cases, they get the sufficient respect that somebody stands up and points out that these people don't know what they're talking about. But nobody's ever said I'm wrong. Nobody has actually challenged the premise of my research. They basically just tried to shut the whole thing down without having to address the substance of it."

So, he and a handful of sympathetic colleagues arranged to air the issue of exactly how much freedom scientists have on campus these days. The conference would feature several professors who had faced similar problems. And it was planned for the Edmonton conference centre, at the same time and just down the hall from an international anti-tobacco conference "so that we could have sessions where we invited people from that conference over to make case for their attempts to suppress academic freedom," Prof. Phillips explains. But organizers of the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, he says, threatened to break their contract with the centre after they caught wind of his plan.

"The conference facility came to me and begged us to let them out of their contract because they were being put in the middle and they were convinced that this obviously much larger, much richer conference was going to pull out if they hosted us." Since not having the anti-tobacco attendees nearby defeated the purpose anyway, Prof. Phillips regretfully obliged.

Stifling tobacco research may not be something that most Canadians would get worked up about. But it is of a piece with a broader suffocation of university research or discussion of things considered politically incorrect, argues Peter Suedfeld, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia.

Even if I disagree with some scholars (e.g. most socionomologists), I staunchly believe that universities, of all places, are where we should thresh out controversial ideas. To avoid groupthink, it is imperative that academic freedom be defended in such instances.

One of the clearest cases for limiting free speech is the famous phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes about, "...falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre... " Another is the instigation to commit murder or other crimes. And a related case might involve urging genocide and supporting those who espouse it. From Melanie Phillips,

This is what happened on the streets of London yesterday. A demonstration organised by Iranian Islamists promoting the destruction of Israel, in which people called for the killing of Jews and waved Hezbollah flags. The police provide protection for such a demonstration on the basis that people are entitled to march provided they are not breaking the law. They ignore the fact that such incitement to murder is indeed against the law; they fail to grasp that a parade of Hezbollah flags is a recruiting device for Islamists; they refuse to acknowledge that such a demonstration is an flagrant act of intimidation by proxies for a terrorist regime which is currently blowing up our troops in Iraq, threatening genocide against Israel and intent on defeating the west in war. Welcome once again to Londonistan.

While this situation falls short of the "clear and imminent danger" criterion for abrogating free speech, I see no reason to permit the demonstrators to use public property while promoting their ideas. After all, freedom of speech does not require that all taxpayers provide scarce resources for the exercise of that free speech.

Click on the cartoon to see a larger, more legible version.

The British union of academics, the UCU, has, under legal advice, called off it's boycott of Israeli Scholars. From an announcement made by the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (of which I am a member),

UK Boycott of Israeli Academics Ruled Illegal

IAB is pleased to announce that the UK based University and College Union (UCU) has declared today, 28/9/07, that an academic boycott of Israel is illegal and cannot be implemented.

After receiving legal advice that cleared that “a call to boycott Israeli institutions would run a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation”… and “is also considered to be outside the aims and objects of the UCU”, the UCU’s strategy and finance committee recommended unanimously today, to immediately inform branches and members that:

• A boycott call would be unlawful and cannot be implemented
• UCU members' opinions cannot be tested at local meetings
• The proposed regional tour cannot go ahead under current arrangements and is therefore suspended.

As you might expect, this announcement leaves me both elated and yet concerned. Of course I am elated that the boycott has been called off, even if for the wrong reason. At the same time, though, I'm still disturbed that it might ever have happened in the first place, and I worry about the continuing anti-semitism and rabid anti-Israeli views that made this boycott more than rants of a few extremists.

From this source [h/t to Rebekah]:

"The members of Imperial College UCU have voted overwhelmingly - by more than five-to-one - to reject Motion 30 - the boycott of Israeli academic institutions," said Imperial UCU member and leading UK academic Michael J. McGarvey, Reader in Molecular Virology at Imperial's Division of Medicine.

"In conjunction with the very similar results from the recent ballots of members at the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this clearly demonstrates that the vast majority of ordinary members of UCU are against a boycott and the damaging effects that this could have on British academia."

At the Imperial College, 82% of the faculty members voted to reject the boycott, 2% abstained, and 16% voted in favour of the boycott. These results lead to two questions:

• What's wrong with the 18% who did NOT vote against the boycott, and
• How can "leadership" like the UCU union leaders claim to represent their membership in the face of such overwhelming rejection of their motion? They should resign en masse.

Less than Alan (87%), more than Rondi (77%):

You Are 82% Feminist

You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Are You a Feminist?

I see this as one of those quizzes on which it is good NOT to score super high. To score high, one would have to agree with some leftist views that are contrary to libertarianism. Also, to score high, one would have to not just accept but embrace same-sex parenting, other gay rights, and abortion rights, and I'm not prepared to go that far. I think scores in the 70s and 80s are a pretty good indication of someone's support for individual freedom.

If you think you know, you might want to think twice before writing a book about it. From SCSU Scholars:

... According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) one of the bastions of academic publishing, Cambridge University Press, has agreed to destroy its remaining copies of the 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World, by Burr and Collins. Kurtz also notes that the book is being pulled from bookstore shelves, and may disappear entirely.

Why? It seems that certain parties worldwide have decided they do not want their funding of terrorism to become to become known. ...

Ms. Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy, was threatened with a lawsuit over her book, Funding Evil:How Terrorism is Financed - and How to Stop It. She called Cambridge's capitulation decision "despicable."

In a blog post entitled, "Attention Authors: Be afraid, very afraid... if you write about Saudi support for terrorism," Emory Professor Deborah Lipstadt expands on the risks of self-censorship arising from fear of being sued. Defending even a baseless lawsuit can be very expensive.

It is very interesting that the MSM, dependent for its very existence on western civilization's protection of free speech, remains silent and unwilling to defend against certain attacks on speech. Failure to defend the rights of those who criticize the funding of terrorists risks losing true freedom of speech for everyone.

A large contingent of U.S. unions have issued a joint statement criticizing the British UCU proposed boycott of Israeli academics:

Over 30 American trade unions ranging from the American Federation of Teachers to the American Postal Workers have condemned the spate of boycott initiatives by trade union movements in the UK, branding them "inimical" and questioning the motives for singling out Israel.

The University and College Union motion to boycott Israeli academic institutions came in for strong criticism.

"Calls for academic boycotts of Israel are inimical to and counter to the principles of academic freedom and freedom of association, key principles for which academics and educational unions have struggled over many years. Rather than limiting interactions with Israeli educators, academics and educational institutions, we see the importance of maximizing, rather than proscribing, the free flow of ideas and academic interaction between peoples, cultures, religions and countries," the unions said in a statement issued late Thursday evening [July 22nd].

With atrocities occurring around the globe, the trade unionists questioned the motivations of the boycotters and asked why the motions are by nature one-sided: "With the large number of local, regional and international conflicts, with the diverse range of oppressive regimes around the world about which there is almost universal silence, we have to question the motives of these resolutions that single out one country in one conflict.

"We note with increasing concern that virtually all of these resolutions focus solely on objections to actions or policies of the Israeli government, and never on actions or policies of Palestinian or other Arab governments, parties or movements. We notice with increasing concern that characterization of the Palestinians as victims and Israel as victimizer is a staple of such resolutions. That there are victims and victimizers on all sides, and that many if not most of the victims of violence and repression on all sides are civilians, are essential items often not mentioned in these resolutions."

[h/t to BenS]

Scholars for Peace in the Mideast have an on-line petition opposing the proposed UCU boycott of Israeli academics. If you are an academic or a professional, please go to their site to read about the petition and to sign it:

http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/display_petitions.cgi?ID=9&Action=Sign

The BMJ is hosting a poll about the proposed boycott of Israeli academics. Here is the link.

Fortunately, the last time I looked, about 90% of the respondents opposed the boycott. My major concern is that even 10% of the respondents support the boycott of Israeli academics. I hope I never end up having to be treated by one of the supporters of the boycott.

The comments on the proposed boycott are generally very good. To see the comments of the responders to the poll, click here.

From Campus Watch, an incident related by Timothy Furnish about his job search:

During a meeting with the search committee, a professor produced irrefutable evidence that I "appeared to be more conservative than others in my field."...

Before heading home I met again with the search chair, who tried in vain to assure me that the ideological litmus test I'd just failed in fact had never occurred. I asked her if she had ever heard a committee member accuse a candidate of being "more liberal than others in the field." Of course she answered "never." When the rejection letter arrived, it was hardly a shock.

Be sure to read the context for these quotations in the original piece [h/t to BenS]

By a Druze student from Israel [h/t to MA]:

As a holder of two degrees from the University of Haifa and a PhD student at the University of London, I traveled to Bournemouth for the meeting of the British University and College Union (UCU) as an Israeli delegate on behalf of the Israeli Council for Academic Freedom.

The discussions at the meeting regarding the imposition of a boycott on Israeli academia took place in a hostile environment while ignoring all the facts we presented regarding freedom of expression and academic freedom at Israeli institutions of higher learning.

Evidence that Israeli lecturers who hold pro-Palestinian views are able to express their positions uninterrupted both in their research work and lectures, as well as in the media, had no effect whatsoever on the discussions.

Even when we presented a list of organizations and research centers that operate in the framework of Israeli universities and boast Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab cooperation, with the promotion of ties between the peoples their top agenda, it did not make a difference.

... The truth is that it is clear to this group of lecturers that Israeli academia is least at fault for what is happening in our region, certainly when compared to the freedom of expression at our neighbors' academic institutions. After all, the English know full well that the technological, academic, and cultural achievements in the State of Israel stem first and foremost from the freedom of expression and research in every field in Israel.

Therefore, the figures we presented were futile, because all they cared about was their one and only objective: De-legitimizing the State of Israel with no relation to its academia; presenting it as an apartheid state that deprives its minorities of elementary rights such as education and the freedom of expression.

The UCU: a bunch of scary non-scholars.

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East [SPME] have issued a scathing criticism of the UCU's motions proposing a boycott of Israeli academics. SPME seems to me to be somewhat leftwing, with many members opposed to the west-bank settlements; nevertheless they have spoken out against the boycott. Here, in part, is the SPME reaction:

[T]his action [was] instigated by a small group of anti-Israel union delegates who appear not to represent the views of the union membership and who have singled out Israel for opprobrium. The motion is an attempt to delegitimize and to silence the only Jewish state in the world, one of a tiny minority of states in the Middle East that truly honor academic freedom. In Israel's prestigious universities, faculty members represent all religious and political persuasions. Many Israeli professors are Arabs; many are Muslims. How professors at universities in Arab countries are Jews? How many are non-Muslims? How many belong to nondominant Muslim denominations?

In Iran, professors have been purged from universities for ideological and religious reasons, and an American academic, Haleh Esfandiari, was recently imprisoned while visiting her 93-year-old mother. Despite the gargantuan scale of human rights abuses in Sudan, Syria, China, Saudi Arabia, and, yes, Gaza, the UCU is not considering a boycott against any of them. Why not?


The proposed boycott is immoral and antithetical to academic principles. It shuts off dialogue, when one of the key purposes of universities is to promote dialogue and thereby the pursuit of truth. It ignores existing projects where Israeli and Palestinian academics cooperate. It requires academics to hew to one ideological line. And it constitutes discrimination on the basis of nationality.

That is the title of this piece by Bradley Burston [h/t to MA]. Here is an excerpt, but it is very well-written. rtwt [read the whole thing].

Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that you're a British academic. You believe strongly that the occupation must end, that the Palestinians should have an independent state, that Israel's military and diplomatic policies are wrongheaded to the point of immorality.

What to do? Simple. Find the one group within Israeli society which has consistently, vigorously and courageously campaigned against the occupation since its inception.

Then attack them.

...No matter that in the whole of the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein managed to hit all of Israel with a total of 39 missiles, and that two weeks ago, Hamas sent 40 rockets into the Sderot area in the space of a single day.

No matter that the Sapir College, Israel's largest public college, has for years been a primary target of Qassam crews.

No matter that in boycotting all Israeli academics on the basis of their being Israelis, the measure is patently racist, a grotesque reprise of the history of curbing academic freedom.

No matter that Israeli Arab academics who are staunchly opposed to the occupation are vehement opponents of the boycott as well.

No matter, even, that opposition to the boycott runs strong within the British University and College Union itself. In fact, all the more reason to press on.

For the genuine elitist, the unpopularity of an opinion is the best assurance of its real value.

Perhaps this is why the whole boycott campaign smacks of a uniquely far-left British brand of moral masturbation, a desperate, delusional, sterile, supremely self-contained form of non-activism that risks nothing even as it changes nothing.

Update: For more analysis and discussion, check out Lower Education from the New Republic by Marty Peretz. His article, along with comments there, offer some additional insights about the nature of the institutions that have been pushing the boycott.

First it was the AUT leadership, voting a boycott of Israeli scholars, and they were rebuffed, to say the least, by their general membership.

Then it was NATFHE, another union of academics, voting to boycott Israeli scholars, but they soon merged with the AUT, leaving a vote of their directors as meaningless.

But now the leadership of the combined unions, under the general grouping, the UCU, have voted to support a boycott of Israeli academics.

I strongly oppose their views on two grounds:

1. First, I am not convinced that Israel is doing much wrong with its occupation of the west bank. Failure to occupy the west bank would have been like telling robbers that if they get caught, the only punishment is that they must give back what they have stolen and that there will be no further deterrence. That's just plain silly because it doesn't discourage robbers from trying to steal again and again.
   
   Israel repelled an attack in 1967, only to have to fight another war in 1973. After that war, they said (and quite rightly under both international law and following just plain common sense) if you folks are going to keep using these lands as launching pads, both literally and figuratively, we're going to hold them until you renounce such plans. Such renunciation has not occurred.
   
   Nevertheless, Israel has been open and democratic. Yes, it cut off payments to the Palestinian Authority once Hamas was elected, and for bloody good reason: Hamas has as one of its primary goals the eradication of Israel (and, incidentally, the Jews who live there). There is no earthly reason why the UCU should expect Israel to continue making payments to a sworn enemy. If they really disagree, let them all contribute 10% of their salaries to the US Republican party.
2. But even if you don't accept my first point, this one is compelling: in the name of academic freedom, there is no justifiable reason for this boycott. If the UCU wants to single out academics for boycott, let them single out those from China or Iraq or Iran or Egypt or any other place where there are documented human rights abuses or flagrant violations of the concept of academic freedom. Academic freedom says that we scholars should assess the works of others on their merits, not on the basis of the politics of their home country.
   
   Instead, the UCU picks on Israeli academics. There can be only one reason for this: anti-semitism, pure and simple. And it is frightening.

For more, please see this, which summarizes the motions that were passed by the UCU Congress.

Also, please see this from Engage, which says

1 This is not a decision to institute a boycott. That decision can only be made by the whole membership through a ballot. That was the commitment on which Sally Hunt was elected as General Secretary. Congress also backed a policy which does not allow a boycott of Israeli academic institutions unless it is called for by Israeli campus trade unions. Which it won't be.

2 UCU Congress has today voted for a roadshow touring colleges and universities drumming up support for an exclusion of Israelis - and only Israelis - from our campuses, our conferences and our journals. The union is mandated to finance this tour and to stack the debate in favour of a pro-boycott outcome.

And also see this for a reaction.

And one final point: where is the outrage from non-Jewish, non-Israeli organizations? I am embarrassed and appalled by the (so far) lack of responses from such groups. Am I the only gentile in the universe who sees things this way?

[h/t to MA for the links]

Update #1: also see this from Melanie Phillips and this from Little Green Footballs.

Update #2: Both Melanie Phillips and Normblog quote this from Ha'aretz:

On Wednesday, representatives of the new British University and College Union (UCU) will be meeting in Bournemouth. On the agenda is another proposal to boycott Israel's academic institutions. These proposals have become as regular and as predictable as Qassam attacks on Sderot. The fact that studies at the Sapir Academic College in Sderot are not taking place because of the constant rocket fire from Gaza, even though the college is not in occupied territory and Gaza is no longer occupied, apparently does not bother British academia. The fact that Hamas, which controls the Palestinian Authority, does not recognize even pre-1967 Israel, and commits acts of terror against civilians, does not matter either. These nuances did not stop one boycott initiator from saying last week that justice in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is entirely on one side.

Norm continued,

This editorial in Haaretz rightly identifies the thinking of the would-be boycotters as impelled by a desire to de-legitimize Israel - identifies it with 'the position that the very birth of the Jewish state was a mistake'.

Update #3: And check out Stephen Pollard's column about boycotts of Israel.

Update #4: Rénald writes,

I find this totally ridiculous! Why of all people attack the scholars??? Why not the bakers, bankers and doughnut makers? It would make as much sense.

Boycotting scholars is like boycotting knowledge...it can only lead to ignorance or maybe they are already there!

to which BenS adds,

Of course, but why boycott any Jewish institution? The boycotters are playing copycat and operating like an ignorant herd….which they are. I’ll make one exception for these ignorant hypocrites: let them boycott for themselves and their families any medical or scientific advancement created or produced by Jews -— but being hypocrites, they won’t do that.

Update #5 Tim Worstall says that English academic unions are not worth worrying about.

The academic unions are well known to be populated and run by people with any number of very peculiar bees buzzing under their bonnets. The rest of us look upon them almost fondly, as examples of a well meaning but possibly futile form of Care in the Community.

The idea that we should take seriously anything that comes from such obvious nutters simply never occurs to those of us outside the hallowed halls of academe.

I hope he's right, but the UCU is still wrong and very unscholarly.

It is so difficult to understand how scholars worthy of the name got to these views. Click here for a complete list of the motions that are to be discussed at the Bournemouth meetings later this week. I will not reproduce them here.

My recommendation: find out which schools support such anti-Semitic drivel, such blind one-sidedness, and boycott academics from those institutions. My guess is that such a retaliatory boycott would be totally unnecessary; I cannot imagine the authors of these motions produce much, if any, work that is truly scholarly in nature.

I see from the SPME website that there will be a booth at the Congress, operated by a combination of Israeli and Palestinian students, presenting examples of Israeli/Palestinian co-operation.

This week, the new union of post-secondary educators in the UK will be meeting, and one of the agenda items will be a proposed boycott of Israel and Israeli academics.

Why not a boycott of China for its treatment of Tibet? Why not a boycott of Palestine (and the other Arab-Muslim states) for their treatment of Jews? Why single out the country that has more democracy and more human rights (and, in many ways, less aggression) than any other country in the Middle East?

Even if you think Israel should not have occupied the west bank (and should have left it for the Jordanians and Syrians to use as a further launching pad for additional raids and rocket attacks on Israel), read this by David Hirsh, who believes Israel should withdraw from the west bank but who strongly opposes the boycott.

The boycott rhetoric does not help Palestinians. But it is seductive because it functions as a way to help boycotters feel better about living in a world in which horrors continue to happen. The boycott rhetoric doesn't stop the horrors and it doesn't make the world fair, but perhaps it can absolve us from the existential guilt that we bear because the world is what it is.

Perhaps it can do something about our terrifying feelings of powerlessness? In a post-national and a post-imperial world, the guilt of nationalism and imperialism can be focused on to Israel and we can thereby feel absolved ourselves. It is the ultimate "not in my name" gesture politics. It doesn't change anything but it enables us to step outside of the tear-stained reality of anti-semitism and empire, Holocaust and Nakba, aggressive settlement and nightclub bombing. But the dream of stepping outside history is vain and is intimately related to the nightmare of totalitarianism.

My own view is that academic freedom is more important than these types of political statements. But I've said all this before. Michael Yudkin makes the case quite well in one of his recent articles at Engage.

More on boycotts of Israel to follow this afternoon.

One of the papers at the conference I am attending has the phrase "social justice" in the title. Last week, before leaving for the conference, I told my colleagues at The Castle that typically this is just a buzz word/phrase for "condescending paternalistic pinko left-wing elitist interventionism". I'll be very curious to see if the paper fits the mold. I have tight priors that it will.

Here, from an article in the New Criterion about Hayek, is a similar perspective:

Think only of the odious phrase “social justice.” What it means, in practice, is de facto injustice, since it operates by enlisting the legal machinery of justice in order to support certain predetermined ends. Partisans of “social justice” eschew “merely formal” justice; in so doing they replace the rule of law—which was traditionally represented as blind precisely because it was “no respecter of persons”—with the rule of (pseudo) “fairness.”

Let me add that despite his strong criticisms of socialism and big gubmnt, it is not at all clear to me that Hayek was opposed to having some sort of social safety net provided by gubmnt. It seemed to me, though, from what I read by him, that he favoured a much lower social safety net than we now have in either Canada or the US, that he saw the ideal as a bare minimum safety net.
[h/t to BenS]

The proposed boycotts of Israeli scholars by some members of UK teachers' unions have always seemed wrong to me. I oppose them on two grounds:

1. they are anathema to academic freedom, which I prize very highly no matter how much some "scholarly" research offends me, and
2. it seems so unfair and unreasonable to single out Israel when that country has so much more freedom than any other country in the middle east and there are so many other countries (China, anyone??) that restrict freedoms so much more seriously.

Recently I re-watched the 1960 movie, Exodus. (Actually, I much preferred the book). I was struck by how much, during the 1960s, the entire liberal left supported Israel then in contrast with their views now. What has changed? The main thing that has changed is that Jordan, Syria, and Egypt lost two wars and the Israelis took steps to protect themselves against future possible attacks. Odd, isn't it.

And while we're on the topic, why haven't the UK leftie academics called for a boycott of Arab academics because of the treatment of Jews and Christians in so many Arab countries?

.

The article below by Prof. Kellner (Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa and of the IAB executive committee), has appeared on Babylon (Norwegian based journal about the Middle East and North-Africa), vol. 5, nr. 1, April 2007, pp. 122-131. It is reproduced in whole with the permission of the author. The lower-case Roman numerals in brackets are endnotes, which are well-worth reading.

Kellner's important article "Resisting Falsehood and Protecting Integrity" is a reply to Omar Barghouti's call for an academic and cultural boycott: "Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Why the Academic and Cultural Boycott?" that also appeared in Babylon.
-------------------------------------------

"Resisting Falsehood and Protecting Integrity"

Menachem Kellner, University of Haifa[i]

Omar Barghouti's call for an academic and cultural boycott, "Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Why the Academic and Cultural Boycott?" is a sustained attempt to demonize Israel, intended to bring about its destruction.


I shall reply to Mr. Barghouti's essay calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. At the outset, let me grant him one important point. If, for a moment, I believed that Israel was as bad as he describes, I would support his call for a boycott. Unlike many of my colleagues, I do not believe that such boycotts are never justified. But I do believe that such boycotts are destructive of the trust upon which the scientific endeavor must be based, and may be used only in the most extreme cases and if there is some reasonable expectation that they will accomplish something positive. So, the question between us boils down to the following: is Israel the evil incarnate that Mr. Barghouti pretends it to be — or not?


Mr. Barghouti seeks to convince his readers that Israeli Jews are inveterate racists, and that Israel is an apartheid state. In the space allotted to me, I cannot possibly correct all of the deceptive falsehoods he uses — as the Hebrew expression has it, it is easier to throw mud than clean it up. By characterizing more accurately than Mr.
Barghouti the true nature and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and then addressing his two main charges, racism and apartheid, I will undermine his call for a boycott.


ACADEMIC LIFE IN ISRAEL


Reading Omar Barghouti's essay brought to mind a series of experiences I had when serving as Dean of Students at the University of Haifa in the 1990's. I used to organize various sorts of Arab-Jewish dialogues and discussions. Conducted by persons of good will from both communities, the discussions invariably foundered on questions of perception and context. Arab students saw themselves as a beleaguered minority on a campus in which roughly 80% of the students were Jewish (about the same ratio as in the general population), at which the language of instruction was not their own, and in a country which seemed to them to field a huge and frightening army. The Jewish students saw themselves as a beleaguered and threatened minority in a Middle East in which the vast majority of states not only refused to recognize Israel's right to exist, but remained in a state of war with Israel, supported terror organizations which wrought death and destruction on Israelis in school, on buses, and in cafés, and which drew upon the support of a billion or so Muslims around the world. Even then, a period of relative peace and optimism with the Oslo process in full swing, Jews and Arabs each saw themselves as victims of the other. Over the last seven years, since the late (unlamented by me) Yasir Arafat launched the so-called 'al-Aksa Intifada'[ii] the situation has grown markedly worse, and the conflict of perceptions has grown deeper. Over these same years, my own perception of the world has grown closer to that of those Jewish students whom only a decade ago I thought were paranoid.[iii] Unlike the Arab students at the University of Haifa who sincerely sought for an honorable and constructive modus vivendi with their Jewish colleagues, Mr. Barghouti seeks for the utter destruction of Israel and has put together a pastiche of distortions to generate support for that aim among readers of his article.[iv]


PALESTINIAN VS. ISRAEL ATTITUDES - A FUNDAMENTAL ASYMMETRY


Mr. Barghouti's essay reflects the fundamental asymmetry of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I am not referring to the asymmetry of military power between Israel and the Palestinians, but to the asymmetry of objectives. Ever since the Camp David accords of 1978, Israeli governments and Israeli society have more and more come to accept the inevitability and rightness of there being two states west of the Jordan River, one predominantly Israeli-Jewish and one exclusively Palestinian-Arab.[v] But, in contrast, ever since the year 2000, it has become painfully evident that Palestinian society has overwhelmingly rejected the right of Israel to exist at all.[vi] Thus, the 'al-Aksa Intifada' was not launched in order to undo the results of the 1967, but to undo the results of 1948.[vii]


This fundamental asymmetry is reflected in other ways. Every Israeli withdrawal from territory it had occupied has repeatedly been misconstrued by its enemies as a sign of weakness and has had devastating consequences for Israel. Israel under Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip, uprooting 8,000 Israelis and destroying two dozen towns and villages,[viii] and Hamas responded by increasing its daily shelling of Israeli settlements in the Western Negev.[ix] Earlier, Israel under Barak withdrew from Southern Lebanon and Hezbollah moved 10,000 katyusha rockets into the area, turning every resident of Lebanon into a hostage for its adventurism.


But the most chilling asymmetry is that of ultimate ends: what would Israel do if Hezbollah disarmed? Turn its back on Lebanon. What would Hezbollah do were Israel to disarm? The repeated pronouncements of their leadership leave no doubt: those Jews who were not butchered would be drowned in the sea. This asymmetry finds expression in a chilling fact which never ceases to bother me: every kindergarten in Israel has and needs an armed guard to protect it from Palestinian terrorists. Not a single Palestinian school has or needs such a guard (unless it is to protect the children in the school from rival Palestinian factions).[x]


The Israeli view of the world has room for Lebanon, for Jordan, for Egypt, for Saudi Arabia, and even, for the majority of Israelis, for a free and independent Palestine. For more and more Palestinians, there is no room in the world for Israel.


Finding Israelis (Jews and Arabs) to criticize Israel is no problem for Mr. Barghouti — Israel is indeed a lively democracy. In contrast, one can occasionally find a Palestinian who will admit that terror attacks against Israeli citizens are counter-productive but finding a Palestinian willing to condemn the out and out murder of children, when the murderers are Arabs and the children are Jewish, is next to impossible — Another asymmetry.


Asymmetries exist in the way that outsiders view the conflict too.
Israel is held to standards of behavior to which no other country in the world is held, and when it fails to live up to those standards, it is condemned in absolutist, Manichean terms as thoroughly depraved and corrupted. In the eyes of its enemies,[xi] the Israeli cup must be brimming over with goodness; otherwise it is empty of all redeeming value. Palestinians, on the other hand, are consistently forgiven their excesses. Often this forgiveness is on the grounds that the Palestinians, being militarily inferior, have no choice but to use means which, if used by any other group in the world, would be condemned (and rightly so) as uncivilized war crimes and crimes against humanity. For all its faults, Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which Arab citizens are truly free and safe to criticize their government, being protected by law and by a court system well-known for forcing the government to back down when it infringes upon their rights. It is also the only country in the Middle East in which Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims and Christians of every persuasion are free to worship without discrimination. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have created a form of government unique in the world, a kind of kleptocratic thuggocracy.
In the eyes of those who support Mr. Barghouti, Israel gets no credit, Palestinians gets no blame.




RACISM?


Mr. Barghouti's argument rests upon a number of incendiary claims, not one of which can stand examination. Barghouti opens by accusing the "overwhelming majority of Jewish-Israelis" of "unbridled racism." How does he know this? Because of their "fervent support" for recent IDF "atrocities" in "occupied Palestinian territory" and in Lebanon. It is rather rich for a man who gives at least tacit support for a truly racist organization (Hamas[xii]), to accuse others of the same crime.[xiii] Certainly horrible things have happened to innocent Palestinians in Gaza and to innocent Lebanese.[xiv] But were the deaths in Kfar Kana[xv] last summer and in Khan Yunis last month tragic accidents of war or the result of callous calculation on the part of Israeli planners?[xvi] To demonstrate the mendacity of the latter claim, let us start by examining the context in which these events took place.
Barghouti ignores the fact that after Israel withdrew from every square centimeter of the Gaza Strip and announced its intention of making further withdrawals from the West Bank, Hamas continued its rocket and guerilla attacks on the Western Negev, culminating in the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit on June 25, 2006 and the murder of 2 of his comrades. Two weeks later, Hezbollah, in a wholly unprovoked assault, crossed the internationally recognized border from Lebanon to attack Israeli reservists on routine patrol, killed 8 and kidnapped two, whose fate remains unknown to this day. Hezbollah simultaneously launched deadly rocket attacks on Israeli towns near the Lebanese border. That is the context ignored by Mr. Barghouti, but without which one cannot judge Israeli reactions to subsequent events.[xvii] Hamas and Hezbollah both like to place their rocket launchers in civilian areas,[xviii] in the hope of either protecting them from Israeli attack, or, and this I take to be more likely, in the expectation that Israel's attempts to protect its citizens (my children among them) will result in Arab casualties, so that cynics can use this in their propaganda war against Israel.[xix] Terrible things happen in war-time. If Israelis are racists for deploring but failing to condemn unfortunate and unplanned tragedies, what does that make of Palestinians who enthusiastically enshrine as martyrs and national heroes people who calmly walk in to restaurants, pat little children sitting there with their families on their heads, and then blow them up?


Let us look at this a little more deeply. Mr. Barghouti claims that it is racist for Israelis not to condemn their army when it accidentally brings about the death of Palestinian civilians while in his view it is not racist for Palestinians publicly to applaud the purposeful murder of Jewish children. Underlying this claim is the assumption that while Palestinian nationalism is a legitimate expression of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, Jewish nationalism must be racism.[xx] One can applaud nationalism or deplore it, but for the life of me I cannot understand why Palestinian nationalism is appropriate and Jewish nationalism is not. That smacks of racism![xxi]


APARTHEID?


Of course, Mr. Barghouti needs to claim that Israelis are racists, in order to justify his claim that Israel pursues a policy of apartheid. I always have to scratch my head over that one. I live in a city (Haifa) in which Jews and Arabs live in the same neighborhoods, in the same blocks of flats, frequent each other's businesses, and cheer the home town football team together. The week that I am writing this Haifa is celebrating "the festival of festivals," marking Hanukkah and Christmas.[xxii] I live next door to an absorption center for black immigrants to Israel from Ethiopia. I swim every day in a pool at the Technion with, I assume, Arab colleagues and students. I often eat out in (kosher!) restaurants owned and operated by Arabs.[xxiii] One of my physicians is an Arab and were I to be hospitalized it is likely that I would be treated by Arab physicians and nurses. The pharmacist at my local branch of an Israeli drugstore chain has an Arabic name. Last night on the TV news I watched the Vice-Speaker of the Knesset (Israel's
parliament) commenting on recent events (Palestinians killing each other over political power and division of spoils in Gaza). Who was that Vice-Speaker? Dr. Ahmad Tibi, one-time personal advisor to and spokesman for Yasir Arafat. I teach at a university of about 17,000 students, over 20% of whom are Arabs (more than their relative population in the country as a whole). A quarter of the students in the university dorms are Arabs, and a similar percentage of the student body receiving student aid are Arabs. Until recently, the chair of one of the most prestigious departments on our campus was an Arab, and now the most powerful Dean at our university (the person responsible for all research
funds) is an Arab. Neither of these gentlemen, it hardly needs saying, is an enthusiastic Zionist; but they are both fair-minded individuals who earned their posts through distinguished academic work. All this in an "apartheid" state![xxiv]


Pots seem to enjoy calling kettles black. If I were to look for truly apartheid societies in the world, it is not to Israel that I would look, but to many countries in the Arab world. The genocide in Darfur, the fact that not a single Jewish community exists in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, the fact that no Christians or Jews can be citizens in Saudi Arabia[xxv] (or even bring a bible into the country temporarily)[xxvi], the persecution of Copts in Egypt, the persecution of Christians in Bethlehem,[xxvii] the list goes on and on, but of course, it is only Israel which is tarred with the apartheid brush.


In order to make his implausible charge look prima facie reasonable, Mr.
Barghouti quotes anti-Zionist Israelis like Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart. Ilan Pappe has made a career of ignoring evidence inconvenient to his theses, of promising but never actually providing evidence to back up his wild accusations, and of simply lying whenever the spirit moves him.[xxviii] Pappe has the gall to make reference to Israel's "killing fields" — in one shot, both lying cynically about Israel and diminishing the horrors of Pol Pot's regime.


COLONIAL WALL?


Just as the accusation of apartheid bursts apart at the merest glance, so also the claims about "Israel's colonial Wall, built mostly on occupied territory and condemned as illegal … by the ICJ." Mr. Barghouti is nothing if not a clever controversialist. Note the insertion of the world "colonial,"[xxix] the capitalization of the word "Wall,"[xxx] and the failure to mention that the ICJ ruling, rejected as politicized by many European states,[xxxi] was predicated upon the prima facie absurd notion that Israel has no right to defend itself against non-state actors.[xxxii] Why is this barrier being built? Did the government of Israel simply decide one day to invest billions of dollars in the construction of a fence (97% of the barrier is chain linking fencing, not concrete walls) in order to make life difficult for Palestinians?
Reading Mr. Barghouti, one would think so. Not a word about the endless stream of mass murderers flowing across the Green Line in order to wreak havoc and death among Israelis (Jews, Muslims, and Christians); it is to stem that tide that the barrier is being erected and so far, thank God, it seems to be working pretty well.[xxxiii]


REFUGEES


An important element in Mr. Barghouti's call for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel focuses on "Israel and Palestinian Refugee Rights." No decent human being could fail to be moved by the plight of Palestinians living in slums in Gaza. But the question which must be asked, and which Mr. Barghouti carefully ignores, is: why are they confined to those camps and slums? Palestinian spokespersons have found it useful to present themselves as the ultimate victims of the Twentieth Century — in this way they garner support from well-meaning people in the West who have an admirable tendency to support the weak and down-trodden. This strategy has been extraordinarily successful (and underlies the obscene use of Holocaust imagery by those Palestinian apologists who do not deny that it occurred). But it comes with a very high price: people who consistently present themselves as victims soon come to see themselves in that way alone. They take no responsibility for their own fates and blame all their misfortunes exclusively on others. Omar Barghouti appears to be a classic example of this unfortunate syndrome.


In order to understand this, it is necessary to present a quick survey of the history of the Palestinian refugees. In 1948 Israel was created by a UN decision; it was the Arab states which rejected that decision, invaded the nascent state, were defeated, and thus brought about the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Ilan Pappe and other propagandists to the contrary,[xxxiv] there is absolutely no real evidence that there was any general policy of expelling Arabs from their villages. Huge populations were displaced by and after World War II; in all cases but the 1948 Arab refugees those displaced were eventually resettled in new homes. These poor miserable people were forced by the very states which precipitated their catastrophe, and which were legally and morally responsible for it, to fester in squalid refugee camps, without being granted equal rights as citizens, or even as residents, of these same countries whose invasion turned them into refugees. Their Arab brethren have manipulated them for decades as pawns in their ongoing war against Israel.


At the same time that Arab refugees were being cruelly and cynically abused by their supposed protectors, close to a million Jews, driven from their homes by government-inspired or tolerated pogroms, were being welcomed and resettled in Israel.[xxxv] The majority of Israeli Jews today are the children and grandchildren of these refugees from Arab persecution.


Jordan illegally absorbed the West Bank (after 1948), consciously sabotaged the UN-mandated Palestinian Arab state, and kept its Palestinian majority subjugated to a Bedouin minority. In 1967 it was the decision of Jordan's King Hussein to join Egypt and Syria in their attempt to wipe Israel off the face of the map which led to Israel's occupation of the West Bank. It was the Arab states meeting in Khartoum after that war which rejected all negotiations with Israel, guaranteeing that Israel would continue its occupation, and condemning the local population to live under occupation. Had the Arab states been willing to negotiate with Israel after 1967, there would have been no occupation and no Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. It was the Palestinians in the 1970's who chose the route of murderous attacks aimed at civilian targets (such as airliners and Olympic athletes) as opposed to what would clearly have been a more effective route, namely civil disobedience — think of what Arafat as Gandhi could have accomplished! Repeated massacres of innocent men, women and children invite armed responses and harden positions.


In Mr. Barghouti's zeal to absolve Palestinians of all responsibility for their fate, and in his hatred for Israel, he ignores all this, and also fails to take up an interesting question. Many Palestinian Arabs live in festering refugee camps in areas from which Israel withdrew after Arafat's return to Palestine in 1994. For the following seven years, when the attacks of the 'al-Aksa Intifada' forced Israel to reoccupy much of the West Bank, these refugee camps were under an internationally recognized Palestinian government, showered with largesse by the world at large. Why were none of the billions of euros that were transferred to the Palestinian Authority used to ameliorate the lot of these people?[xxxvi] There is a simple answer. Just as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt kept Arab refugees in camps instead of absorbing them into their countries, in order to use them as pawns against Israel, so also has Palestinian leadership kept its own population in conditions of misery to use them as pawns against Israel.[xxxvii] This is cynicism of the highest order; what can one say of Mr. Barghouti's purposeful failure to even take note of it?


BOYCOTT ISRAEL?!


In closing, I would like to address those Europeans actively supporting Mr. Barghouti's call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
Such individuals have been convinced that Palestinians are passive victims, wholly innocent of any responsibility for their plight. This ultimately expresses disrespect for Palestinians, treating them like children. It encourages irresponsible behavior on their part — European supporters of the Palestinians have encouraged them to believe that political and military adventurism carries no price. No matter what Israel does (withdrawing from Gaza, uprooting 8,000 Jews from their homes, electing a government publicly committed to withdrawing from much of the West Bank), Palestinian supporters will condemn us in hysterical and outrageous terms and seek to demonize Israel and Israelis, turning us into pariahs; no matter what the Palestinians do excuses will be found for their behavior. Having been turned into entirely passive and innocent victims, with no accountability for their actions, the Palestinians behave as if they can do no wrong.


The only reason why there is no Palestinian state thriving next to Israel (to which Palestinians the world over would have the right of
return) is because the Palestinians do not want such a state: they would rather destroy Israel than build Palestine - and often well-meaning Europeans encourage them in that idee fixe.


Palestinians are playing a zero-sum game while Israeli governments have finally become reconciled to the reality of Palestinian national aspirations and are thus not playing a similar game. That is the true asymmetry of the conflict here in the Middle East — not primitive kassam rockets vs. F-16's, but Israeli Jews willing to live with and next door to Palestinians vs. Palestinians unwilling to live with or next door to Israeli Jews. If I considered myself a friend of the Palestinians, as do those who support boycott calls, I would not encourage delusions of victimization by crudely misusing terms like 'apartheid'; I would remind them that barriers and checkpoints are Israeli responses to a terror campaign initiated on their behalf and with their overwhelming support; I would urge them to build rather than to destroy; I would remonstrate with them for creating a regime of unparalleled sleaze and violence in which billions of euros of aid money have been squandered on corruption and murder instead of on construction and education. I would treat them as equals.


Well-intentioned people often paint Israel in the darkest of colors (and, by implication white-wash every really murderous regime on the face of the planet), condemn us in the harshest of terms for every sin - real or imagined - which we commit, minimize anything right which we might do. What message does this behavior transmit? To myself, and people like me, this automatic response to Israel and to Israeli behavior, good or bad, squelches any tendency we might have to criticize our own faults and our own government more loudly. To the Palestinians it reinforces the message: be as corrupt and as murderous as you like, treat every Israeli withdrawal or peace overture as a sign of weakness
-- whatever you do, we will find ways to justify it while blaming Israel for it. Is this the behavior of a true friend of either side? I hardly think so.


Like many apologists for the Palestinians, Omar Barghouti argues as if the end justifies all means, and truth must be sacrificed; thus the Nazi analogy.[xxxviii] But beyond that, by telling Palestinians that Israeli Jews are Nazis, he tells them that the fight against Israel is a Manichean struggle against ultimate evil, a fight which justifies all means, and a fight against an enemy who must be destroyed before it destroys them; in other words, he tells Palestinians not to negotiate, not to compromise, not to seek to live with and next to Israeli Jews, but to kill and kill and kill. Just as he is no friend of truth, he is certainly no friend of the Palestinians. Indeed, for the reasons I have just outlined, he is a greater danger to the Palestinian people than any Israeli. It is a tragedy that he and his supporters abroad do not channel their considerable energies and talents into activities which might conceivably lead towards peace, rather than towards more war.


Mr. Barghouti wants to boycott Israeli academic institutions, institutions in which Jews and Arabs work together for the common good, and for the good of all humankind. There is one sanction already in place, to which Mr. Barghouti would rather not draw attention: upon entering any Israeli university campus, one must surrender one's bags for inspection (like at an airport) — for fear that someone influenced and supported by Mr. Barghouti might set off a bomb on campus.[xxxix] To join in a boycott of these institutions is literally to add insult to injury.

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[i] My thanks to Paul Bogdanor, Harvey Chisick, Ofir Frankel, Linda Montag, Jonathan Rynhold, Wendy Sandler, Edwin Slonim, and especially Amy Rosenbaum.

[ii] I write "launched" and not "broke out" because of the widely accepted Palestinian claim that Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount (the holiest site for Jews as well as the location of the Al-Aksa mosque, third holiest site for Muslims) on September 28, 2000 was deliberately provocative, triggering the subsequent violence. Less well known is that Sharon's visit occurred after assurances were made by Yasir Arafat to then-Prime Minister Barak that the visit would go smoothly as long as Sharon did not attempt to enter the mosques.
Further, in a speech made in December 2000 by Imad Falouji, PA Communications Minister, Falouji explains that the violence had been pre-planned since Arafat's return from Camp David in July, months before Sharon's visit. (The speech can be viewed at
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qb5flP-MfAc.) The day before Sharon's visit, IDF Sgt. David Biri was killed, arguably the start of the Intifada.
Further on this, see Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.
203-207.

[iii] For an account of the changes in my thinking, see my essay, "Daniel Boyarin and the Herd of Independent Minds," in Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor (eds.), The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006): 167-176. Other essays in this book refute charges brought against Israel by many of the people whom Mr. Barghouti cites as authorities, such as Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart, and Noam Chomsky, among many others. See also:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyquotes.html

[iv] In what is arguably his most horrifically untrue statement, Mr.
Barghouti avers that “Israel treated Palestinian children as dispensable creatures.” And the horror of it is only exceeded by its hypocrisy. If any group has treated Palestinian children as dispensable creatures, it is Palestinians. USA Today correspondent Jack Kelley reported:
“Children serve as infantry in the confrontations between Israeli and Palestinian soldiers. In scenes reminiscent of Iranian children sent to the Iraqi front equipped with plastic keys to heaven, Palestinian children are sent close to Israeli positions with rocks and molotov cocktails, while the gunmen and snipers fire from positions hundreds of yards back” (10/23/00). The Jordanian newspaper “Al-Rai” (citing an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper “Al-Zaman” on June 20, 2002), quotes Abu Mazen, then deputy chairman of the Palestinian authority, who spoke of how Palestinian children are being exploited into carrying out terror attacks: ‘at least 40 children from the city of Raphah have lost their arms as a result of the explosions of pipe bombs. They received five Israeli shekels (about one US dollar) for throwing them.” The PA has provided children with military training. The New York Times reports that 25,000 children were trained in the summer of 2000 in PA camps in the use of firearms, the making of molotov cocktails, the methods of kidnapping Israeli leaders, and conducting ambushes (New York Times, 8/3/00). For other corrections to many of Mr. Barghouti's incendiary claims, see the article by Amnon Rubinstein, cited below in note 24.

[v] My language here reflects another important asymmetry: Israel is a Jewish state with a substantial minority of Arab citizens ever more assertive (and rightly so) of their rights as citizens. No one expects the Palestinian state when it comes to be to have a substantial Jewish minority, and only an inhabitant of Aristophanes' cloud-cuckoo land would believe that such a state would protect the lives, let alone rights, of a Jewish minority. Indeed, the Palestinian Authority has failed to protect the rights and security of the Palestinian Christian minority currently residing in PA-controlled territory. (See for
example: "O, Muslim town of Bethlehem...", Daily Mail, 6/16/06; "AP Reports on Arson Attacks by Muslims Against Palestinian Christians,"
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), 9/6/05; "Christians Under Cover," The Jerusalem Post, 2/23/06; "Small Christian group in Gaza threatened with elimination,"
www.worldtribune.com, 2/24/06; "YMCA warned to vacate Hamas town: After
6 years of operation, Christian organization being booted by terror group," WorldNetDaily.com, 4/21/06; "Christians Persecuted in the Holy Land," Christian Broadcast Network, Winter 2005; "Anti-Christian Pogrom in the West Bank,"HonestReporting.com, 9/6/05, "Away from the manger - a Christian-Muslim divide," The Jerusalem Post, 10/21/05.)

[vi] As evidenced by Hamas' recent rise to power.

[vii] In 1967, Israel, in consequence of an unprovoked attack by Jordan --while already fighting a two-front war with Soviet-backed Egypt and
Syria-- occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River. In the 1948 conflict, Israel, called into being by the United Nations, survived an attack from all the neighboring Arab states and by local Arabs from within.

[viii] That there are no Israeli soldiers in Gaza does not stop Mr.
Barghouti from talking about "innocent Palestinian civilians under occupation, particularly in the Gaza Strip" (emphasis added).

[ix] It is estimated that 1,000 Qassam rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza since September 2005 when the last Israeli troops withdrew. ("AIPAC v. Norman Finkelstein: A Debate on Israel's Assault on Gaza," www.democracynow.org)

[x] In the week before I wrote these words, three Palestinian children in front of their school in Gaza were gunned down by other Palestinians seeking to murder their father.

[xi] Not all critics of Israel, obviously, are its enemies (or I and every Israeli I know would be counted among its enemies), but the level of criticism in many circles is such that it is clearly motivated by enmity, not honest differences.

[xii] See the Hamas charter at:
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/hamas.htm

[xiii] In the same vein, Barghouti claims that in the light of the events of last summer, "many Palestinians, particularly in Israel, feel a true existential threat looming over [their] heads." Given the present Iranian regime's threats to wipe Israel off the map, coupled with Iran's accelerated quest for nuclear arms, Palestinians should indeed feel a true existential threat looming over their heads.

[xiv] And, I would add, as Mr. Barghouti does not, to innocent Israelis.

[xv] According to Orde Kittrie, who served in the office of the legal adviser at the U.S. State Department from 1993-2003, “at Qana, Israeli aircraft fired toward a building to stop Hezbollah from shooting rockets at its cities. The aircraft did not deliberately target civilians; but Hezbollah rockets are targeted at civilians, a clear war crime. UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland…called on Hezbollah to stop its ‘cowardly blending’ among women and children. If Hezbollah used Lebanese civilians in Qana as ‘human shields,’ then Hezbollah, not Israel, is legally responsible for their deaths.” (“A War Crime At Qana?” The Wall Street Journal, 8/6/06.)

[xvi] http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=1617

[xvii] Similarl