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CounterPunch
October
23, 2002
How to Shut Up Your Critics
by ROBERT FISK
The
Independent
Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press.
For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation
of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where
else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief
of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like
a cancer--there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations.
For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."
Where else can we read that the Israeli
Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every
victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where
else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air
Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin
out the number of Palestinians living in the territories".
Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir
Dagan--a close personal friend of Mr Sharon--believes in "liquidation
units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because
"if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could
become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live".
You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv,
Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world,
a vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any journalist
or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies or those
that shape them. The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism"
is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone--people
who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every
bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing
of children--in an attempt to shut them up.
Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the
Middle East Forum now run a website in the United States to denounce
academics who are deemed to have shown "hatred of Israel".
One of the eight professors already on this contemptible McCarthyite
list--it is grotesquely called "Campus Watch"--committed
the unpardonable sin of signing a petition in support of the
Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants students to inform
on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism".
The University of North Carolina is being
targeted--apparently because freshmen were required to read passages
from the Koran--along with Harvard where, like students in many
other US universities, undergraduates are demanding that their
colleges disinvest in companies that sell weapons to Israel.
In some cases, American universities--which happily disinvested
in tobacco companies--have now taken the step of blocking all
student access to their records of investment.
Lawrence Summers, the Jewish president
of Harvard, has denounced "profoundly anti-Israel views"
in "progressive intellectual communities", that are--I
enjoyed this academic sleight of hand--"advocating and taking
actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent".
Mr Said himself has already described all this as a campaign
"to ask students and faculty to inform against pro-Palestinian
colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and seriously
curtailing academic freedom".
Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher
who teaches at University College London, tells me that Oxfam
has refused to accept lbs5,000 plus other royalties from his
new book After the Terror following a campaign against him in
the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. Now I happen to take issue
with some of Professor Honderich's conclusions and I think his
book--praised by the American-Jewish scholar Noam Chomsky--meanders.
I especially don't like his assertion that Palestinians, in trying
to free themselves from occupation, have a "moral right
to terrorism". Blowing up children in pizzerias--and Professor
Honderich's book is not an endorsement of such atrocities--is
a crime against humanity. There is no moral right to do this.
But what in God's name is Oxfam doing refusing Professor Honderich's
money for its humanitarian work? Who was behind this?
John Pilger made a programme for Carlton
Television called Palestine Is Still The Issue. I have watched
it three times. It is accurate in every historical detail; indeed
its historical adviser was a left-wing Israeli academic. But
Carlton's own chairman, Michael Green--in one of the most gutless
statements in recent British journalism--announced that it was
"a tragedy for Israel so far as accuracy is concerned".
Why Mr Green should want to utter such trash is beyond me. But
what does he mean by "tragedy"? Is he comparing Pilger
to a suicide bomber?
And so it goes on. It is left, of course,
to the likes of Uri Avneri in Israel to state that "the
Sharon government is a giant laboratory for the growing of the
anti-Semitism virus". He rightly says that by smearing those
who detest the persecution of the Palestinians as anti-Semites,
"the sting is taken out of this word, giving it something
approaching respectability". But we can take comfort that
28 brave academics have signed a petition condemning President
George Bush's build-up to war and Israel's support for it and
warning that the Israeli government may be contemplating crimes
against humanity on the Palestinians, including ethnic cleansing.
Have Mr Pipes and his chums put the names
of these good men and women on their hate list? You bet they
haven't. Because all of them are Israeli scholars at Israeli
universities. I wonder why we weren't told about this.
Yesterday's
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The Necessity of Excess
Michael O'McCarthy
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Michael Ortiz Hill
Bush's Armageddon
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Elaine Cassel
Anti-Terrorism: a history of abuses
Russell Mokhiber and
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2002
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