Love of the Land: Terra Incognita: The (ir)responsibility of the academy

Terra Incognita: The (ir)responsibility of the academy

Seth Frantzman
JPost
15 November 09

(Thoughtful with interesting points)

Recent debates surrounding politics at university have usually juxtaposed two different political viewpoints against one another. The Right argues that the academy is overflowing with extreme-leftist professors who work to undermine the existence of the state at home and abroad. The Left argues that its freedom of expression is being threatened by the Right and that its campaigns for "justice" or "human rights" are part of making the state more humane.

The Left believes that if a few of its extremist voices call for boycotts of their own universities then that might be "misplaced," but it is part and parcel of a democratic society. Perhaps both sides are right. The academy is at the forefront of anti-Israel intellectual extremism. It is also a bastion of freedom of expression in a free society.

But what both sides are missing is a third view of the academy, namely one that sees it as enshrining certain values, three of which should be responsibility, decency and maturity. The extreme-leftist antics of some faculty members should not be curtailed by laws or by dismissal from the academy. Instead there should be an inculcation of self-control.

Instead of crying "Nazi" every time the IDF does something an academic disagrees with, one could hold his tongue. Instead of requesting the boycott of one's own university, one could have some restraint. Instead of signing petitions encouraging soldiers to desert their units or calling on European powers to immediately intervene to "save" the Palestinians from a "genocide," one could show some self-control.

It is apparent that the central problem with too many of Israel's academics is that they are unsure of their place in society, they misunderstand their relevance and they are embittered and hysterical in their pronouncements to the point of having a childlike "crying wolf" mentality when discussing the conflict in the Middle East.

Consider a few examples. Prof. Ada Yonath, fresh after receiving a Nobel Prize, instead of saying a few words of praise for a society that gave her the opportunities to succeed and excel, immediately launched into a barrage of opinions about Gilad Schalit. She declared that Israel should release all its Palestinian prisoners and that holding them was the real source of all Palestinian attacks on Israel.
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Love of the Land: Terra Incognita: The (ir)responsibility of the academy

Love of the Land: Another Tack: Uri's beloved Ada'le

Another Tack: Uri's beloved Ada'le

Sarah Honig
JPost
29 October 09

Most of us Israelis were literally dumbstruck by the imbecilities which our latest Nobel laureate, Ada Yonath, spouted. No sooner had she made us proud, Yonath proceeded to slap us hard across our collective face. We're still smarting from the supposed smart one's slurs, which is perhaps why it's better to pretend that she never advised we forthwith liberate all convicted terrorists - regardless of Gilad Schalit's ongoing captivity and certainly regardless of whatever atrocity they committed and were duly tried and convicted for.

"It's unclear to me why we're holding these Palestinians - the ones we call 'terrorists' - instead of releasing everybody from the outset, without any link to a deal for Schalit," Yonath opined in an Army Radio interview. Her incisive scientific logic continued: "It's in our power to change the present situation. When one is incarcerated for years, friends and family around him grow angry. That's how we create terrorists.... If no terrorists sat in our prisons, nobody would abduct Israelis to effect their release. By holding terrorists, we give the other side an appetite to launch kidnapping operations. Once we no longer imprison terrorists, they'd have no reason to kidnap."

If taken seriously, the implications of the above babble are staggering. It's akin to suggesting that the surefire crime stopper is to empty all prisons, halt all law enforcement activities, desist from arresting, prosecuting, sentencing and punishing miscreants - no matter how heinous their felonies. A free-for-all will safeguard our freedoms.

FOR A state like ours - the only one worldwide overtly threatened with genocide - the implications are altogether scary. They plainly mandate we stop defending ourselves.

If, as Yonath contends, hopelessness is the mother of conflict, then it might well be asked why well-off British-born youths of Pakistani extraction chose to detonate themselves at a beachfront Tel Aviv club. Were they so hopeless in the Labor-led UK that they decided to take it out on us?

If, according to Yonath, violence is triggered by sending murderers to prison, how is it that Arab massacres began many decades before we gained sovereignty and attendant authority to apprehend anyone?

How did Jews nettle Palestinian idol Haj Amin al-Husseini to induce him to join Hitler in Nazi Berlin and became an active accomplice in the "final solution?"

Does Yonath believe the masterminds of the Park Hotel, Sbarro Pizzeria, Maxim Restaurant and many more suicide bombings deserve no reckoning? Would she let off scot-free executioners, like those who shot (at point-blank, one-by-one) expectant mother Tali Hatuel and her four tiny daughters (as well as the fetus she carried to nearly full-term)?

If even legal action is illegitimate, how do we safeguard ourselves? By surrendering?

The so-called political right and center fear vocalizing their indignation, lest they thereby amplify Yonath's delegitimation of Israeli self-preservation. The embarrassment caused by so honored an Israeli echoing enemy rhetoric is too bitter a pill. Even our ever-voluble left-of-center crowd seems embarrassed. There's no exultant crowing, no "we told you so."

Yonath isn't even on the fringes of our consensus. Unbeknownst to most Israelis, who hadn't heard of her until the Nobel committee lifted her from anonymity, she is one of Uri Avnery's loyal sidekicks, a true disciple, even a quasi-protégée.

Read what he himself wrote: "Our table celebrated with Ada Yonath. This 'table' just had its 50th anniversary. It started by accident in California, the café established at the time by Abie Nathan, who later became famous as the Peace Pilot. Afterward, we met for many years at the legendary artists' café Cassit." Then "the table wandered to several other places and became known as the 'Cassit exiles' table." The "House of Lords," one newspaper nicknamed it.

"The habitués of the table come from different walks of life. There is a former director of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, several senior journalists, a linguist and Bible expert, a film producer, a professor of medicine, a psychiatrist, a town planner, an industrialist, a translator of literature, a radio program producer. And a scientist." The latter is Yonath.

AVNERY CONTENDS that "the table is not political. But all its habitués tend, as it so happens, to lean toward the Left. For years, Ada Yonath has been our candidate for the Nobel Prize. I recount all this not only in order to boast about the fact that Ada 'belongs to us.'"

In radio interviews, Avnery was downright fatherly and called Yonath "our Ada'le." He couldn't stop boasting that she indeed "belongs to us." In this context it's instructive to note that Avnery asserted in a recent op-ed that Schalit wasn't kidnapped, that he's a POW, that Israeli government propaganda claims otherwise to foil a swap, that it's wrong to classify "Palestinian candidates for release" as "terrorists with blood on their hands, criminals beyond the law, lowly murderers." Doesn't Ada'le sound like her mentor?

Said mentor, it needs be stressed, had long ago crossed the lines - physically, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. He identifies with the enemy and subscribes to its perspective. Nevertheless, Avnery parades as the preeminent freethinking Israeli and is the darling of Israel-bashers for doing their dirty work. He's incidentally the single most popular Israeli in his native Germany.
(Full Article)

Love of the Land: Another Tack: Uri's beloved Ada'le

Love of the Land: A new internet joke you might find amusing

A new internet joke you might find amusing

Here's a satire on all the scam emails that might make you laugh.
TY to Barry Rubin

Most respected Sir and/or Madame,

We are most honored to inform your honored self that YOU have been selected for this year's Nobel Peace Prize in respect of your tremendous potential.

Please forward us your credit card information so that we may afford you the CASH PRIZE!!!

Yours,
Thorbjorn Jagland,
Chairman, Nobel Committee

Love of the Land: A new internet joke you might find amusing

Love of the Land: Was the Nobel a Down Payment for More Pressure on Israel?

Was the Nobel a Down Payment for More Pressure on Israel?

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
12 October 09

While the rest of the world still stumbles for an adequate reaction to Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the president’s envoy to the Middle East met Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, following an equally fruitless stop in Cairo.

Obama’s peace prize has launched a thousand parodies as well as lickspittle tributes from his political allies on the left like J Street. But Israelis — who have rightly pegged the president as anything but a friend of the Jewish state — have good reason to fear the award will encourage him to devote even more effort to ginning up a peace process with no chance of success. They know that more peace processing means only thing: more pressure for Israeli concessions, on top of all those already made, to appease Palestinian leaders who actually have little or no interest in real negotiations.

Abbas and the P.A. are locked in a desperate duel for the allegiance of their people with the Islamists of Hamas. That means that even if Abbas were truly interested in accepting a two-state solution with Israel, which is doubtful, there is no deal he can sign that Hamas will not paint as a betrayal of Palestinian nationalism. That is why Abbas refused Ehud Olmert’s offer of a state including parts of Jerusalem and virtually all the West Bank and Gaza in 2008. His predecessor Yasir Arafat did the same eight years earlier.

Abbas continued his race to the bottom with Hamas by reversing his previous stand; he called for the United Nations to take up the bogus Goldstone Commission’s accusations of war crimes over Israel’s counterattack against Hamas terrorists in Gaza last December. Playing off the latest riot-sparking lies about Israeli threats to Muslim shrines in Jerusalem, Abbas also said in Ramallah on Sunday: “There will be no Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty until the occupation of Jerusalem ends. We are determined to safeguard the Aksa Mosque and Jerusalem.”

But the conceit of the peace processers is that a new round of Israeli generosity will always sweep away the realities of Palestinian politics. Such delusions have destroyed the Israeli political Left. But elsewhere, the realism informing Israeli voters is viewed as intransigence. The Nobel Committee believed that Obama was deserving of their prize specifically because of his Cairo speech, which espoused a moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies and which picked a fight with America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East. There is little doubt that Obama’s undeserved prize will motivate him to continue along the same path. Obama and Mitchell know there is little or nothing they can do to sway the Palestinians, so their only option will be more pressure on Israel. That was the logic of the pointless dispute between Washington and Jerusalem over settlements earlier this year. And with the president now endowed with the halo that the Nobel grants him and with a faithful cheering section of left-wing American Jews to encourage him, more such pressure is surely on the way.

Love of the Land: Was the Nobel a Down Payment for More Pressure on Israel?

Love of the Land: Some facts appear to be more sacred than others at the Guardian

Some facts appear to be more sacred than others at the Guardian

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
09 October 09

Here is a little quiz. The Guardian has posted up a list here of everyone who has won the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception.

Q: Which three names are omitted from the Guardian list ( even though they do appear on theNobelprize.org list which the Guardian has purportedly reproduced)?***

A: Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

And what is the common link between these three names? Precisely.

It appears someone at the Guardian actually went to the effort of removing the names of the three Israeli statesmen who won the prize. Facts are sacred?

Here’s a further curiosity. If you look at the years 1978 and 1994, although the Guardian has air-brushed out the names of Begin,Peres and Rabin it has apparently added in the name of their country, Israel, which is given in a neighbouring column – thus managing to suggest that Sadat and Arafat represented Israel along with Egypt and ‘Palestine’ in winning the prize in those years. So what happend? Did the hand typing in the name of the country accidentally hit the keys three times so that the names that went with it were coincidentally all deleted?

Tsk – standards of censorship on Planet Bigotry are clearly slipping.

***Update, 1650: Lo and behold, the three Israeli names have now been added to the Guardian list.

Love of the Land: Some facts appear to be more sacred than others at the Guardian

Love of the Land: Guardian uses Obama Nobel prize award to advance anti-Israel narrative

Guardian uses Obama Nobel prize award to advance anti-Israel narrative

Robin Sheherd
Think Tank Blog
10 October 09

Even the Guardian had to admit that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was “ludicrously premature”. I prefer the version I offered to Forbes Magazine yesterday who quoted me as describing the move as “infantilism” and “soft-bellied adoration of an untested president”.

But after the weasel words of pseudo-criticism the Guardian, in an editorial today, was back to enforcing the kind of narrative which informs the thinking and prejudices of most of the world’s international institutions these days, the Nobel committee included.

Indeed in a we’ve-given-you-this-prize-now-we-own-you kind of way, the paper sought to remind the 44th president that he would still have to prove his worth as a figurehead for bien pensant pieties in a number of areas. First in the line of fire was, of course, Israel.

“Take the Middle East,” the Guardian noted in tones of fake admonishment, “where Mr Obama’s Cairo speech in June was stirring in explaining how Palestinians had “suffered in pursuit of a homeland”, but the desperate conditions in Israeli-blockaded Gaza have not since improved one jot. Indeed the president has failed to secure even a temporary pause in Israeli building in the occupied West Bank.”

So, in advancing the Guardian World View (GWV) we have a falsehood followed by a non-sequitur rounded off with a half-truth (putting it kindly) about the real obstacles to peace.

The falsehood, of course, is that Palestinians had “suffered in pursuit of a homeland”. They have not suffered in pursuit of a homeland. They have consistently rejected a homeland since 1947 and have suffered because they have given priority to destroying someone else’s.

The non-sequitur comes with the move from the falsehood to the notion that conditions in Gaza have not improved, to which the inference that this is Israel’s fault is attached. But conditions in Gaza could improve immediately if Hamas, the group that rules Gaza, were to renounce violence, anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism. Anyone serious about advancing peace would understand that. The Guardian, by contrast, is solely concerned with advancing the superficial and distorted world view that its readers and writers adhere to.

Finally, the half-truth is the BBC-approved narrative which argues that settlement building is the prime obstacle to peace. It is not, as anyone who is aware of the history and current realities of the conflict must know. But the truths about Palestinian rejectionism need to be air-brushed out of the picture if the GWV is to be sustained.

Obviously, this is all par for the course and would not be worth commenting on outside the extraordinary context of the award to Obama.

When we put the two together we just have one more illustration of how the world’s most prominent institutions have been infected with a very particular political-philosophical agenda. The people who despise Israel overlap with the people who adore Obama because the former hope that the latter shares their broader prejudices not just on Israel but on a whole panoply of issues domestic and international.

Let’s hope he disappoints them in style.

To read the Guardian editorial, click here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/10/nobel-peace-prize-barack-obama

UPDATE: I would also recommend reading Cif Watch on this. They have a piece which puts this in some useful perspective and, as Jonathan Hoffman notes below, points out the extraordinary fact that the paper initially referred to “Israeli-occupied Gaza” and then changed it without acknowledging the error, presumably to avoid making themselves look ridiculous. Click here to read the Cif Watch account:

http://cifwatch.com

Love of the Land: Guardian uses Obama Nobel prize award to advance anti-Israel narrative

Love of the Land: Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

Daniel Pipes
National Review
09 October 09

“He won what?” is the first universal reaction.

And second, at least on the Right: “Why did they do that?”

Even the Nobel committee’s citation does not pretend Barack Obama has actually achieved anything. Rather, it was given to him “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” That’s efforts, not achievements.

Reading carefully through the entire citation suggests that Obama is being celebrated for two reasons. Its chatter about “a new climate,” the United Nations, a “vision of a world free from nuclear arms,” and “great climatic challenges” points to his being the anti-George W. Bush.

Second, the prize committee hopes to constrain Obama’s hands vis-à-vis Iran. It lauds him for not using force: “Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.” This is obviously gibberish: Whereas Bush did not use force against North Korea, Obama does not rely on dialogue in Afghanistan. But the statement does pressure Obama not to use force in the theater that counts the most, namely the Iranian nuclear build-up.

So, from the Leftist Norwegian point of view, it’s a twofer — bash Bush and handcuff Obama.

My prediction: The absurdity of the prize decision will harm Obama politically in the United States, contrasting his role as international celebrity with his record devoid of accomplishments. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, notes that Obama “won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.” Expert to hear much more along those lines.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Love of the Land: Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

Love of the Land: The1937 Nobel Peace Prize

The1937 Nobel Peace Prize

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky
Shark Blog
October 18, 2002

If you want to put Jimmy Carter's (Barack Obama's) Nobel Peace Prize in its proper perspective, and to see how little the Nobel committee has learned in the last seventy years, go back to the 1930s and see who was winning the Peace prizes while Hitler was preparing to conquer Europe. The 1937 Nobel Prize went to a British nobleman named Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (Lord Edgar Algernon Robert Gascoyne Cecil), who was president of the International Peace Campaign, and earlier helped found the League of Nations. Even then, The Nobel Committee was still singing the same refrains of disarmament, moral equivalence and aimless diplomacy.

The Committee explained the goals of the International Peace Campaign:

international disarmament and «establishment within the framework of the League of Nations of effective machinery for remedying international conditions which might lead to war»

The Peace Campaign apparently didn't do a lot to stop Hitler or Tojo, but not because the pacifists weren't optimistic enough.

Cecil gave his acceptance lecture on June 1, 1938, just a few months after the Anschluss, and showed us why he was the Jimmy Carter of his day, or maybe it's the other way around:

I am still convinced that with a little more courage and foresight, particularly among those who were directing the policy of the so-called Great Powers, we might have achieved a limitation of international armaments, with all the enormously beneficial consequences which that would have given us....And I am perfectly satisfied that the attempt to limit and reduce armaments by international action must be resumed and the sooner the better, if the world is to be saved from a fresh and bloody disaster.

But Hitler was happily on a roll, what conceivable incentive did he have to disarm?

Cecil had a momentary glimpse into the abyss of reality:

The Italian invasion of Abyssinia ... was, perhaps, even more indefensible internationally than the invasion of China by Japan, and unhappily it was equally successful. Here, there was no excuse for the peace-loving powers. They had unquestionably the strength and the opportunity to have stopped that defiance of the principles of the supremacy of law in international affairs, and they declined to use them.

But the realism quickly fades and he's back to wishful thinking and a call for unspecific diplomacy

Let us, rather, examine where we now stand and what steps we ought to take in order to strengthen the international system and thrust back again the forces of reaction.

And even after the Nuremburg Laws he sees no difference between life under the Union Jack and life under the Swastika, because they are morally equivalent, and investing in defense of one's homeland is a waste of money:

The civil life of every nation is deformed and weakened and obstructed by this threat of war. We are wasting gigantic sums, sums far greater than we have ever wasted before, on preparations for war, because war has again become a very present possibility and, at the same time, its horrors and dangers are enormously greater than they were before 1914. And so the world is spending some three or four thousand million pounds sterling every year on preparations for what we all know will be, if it comes to pass, a tremendous danger to the whole of our civilization, whoever wins and whoever loses.

And then Cecil's stirring finale, which you have probably never read, because it was long ago stuffed into a plastic bag and left on the doorstep of the Goodwill store of history

The acceptance of the principle of international cooperation is of immense importance for all states....May Heaven grant that the statesmen of the world may realize this before it is too late and, by the exertion of the needed courage and prudence, restore again to the position of authority which it had only a few years ago, that great institution for the maintenance of peace on which the future of civilization so largely depends. I mean, of course, the League of Nations.

The Nobel Peace Prize of 1938 was awarded to the Nansen International Office for Refugees, which was needed to assist the victims of both Hitler and the failed policies of hollow diplomacy and moral equivalence of the International Peace Campaign. In 1940 Norway fell to the Nazis. The Peace Prize was not awarded again until 1944, when it went to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Oslo was liberated in 1945 by Allied peacemakers, using guns.

The moral vacuum that is the Nobel Peace Prize inspired me to create the Sharkansky Peace Prize

Love of the Land: The1937 Nobel Peace Prize