Shlomo Sand (Tel Aviv Uni) promotes his anti-Semitism in New York

Fron WorldNetDaily, October 16, 2009, by By Lee Kaplan:

A... conference ...is taking place at New York University today with the principal speaker being an Israeli history professor who says the Jewish people was invented in order to justify the taking of the Holy Land from the Arabs, and that today's Palestinians are in fact the descendants of the real Jews from biblical times.

The guest speaker is a history professor at Tel Aviv University named Shlomo Sand [see this earlier posting on Sand] who recently published a book titled "The Invention of the Jewish People." Sand has been called a pseudo-historian by organizations that monitor anti-Israel academics working in Israeli universities.

The meeting has been promoted by an NYU "professor of media ecology" named Mark Crispin Miller who claims his expertise is in "modern propaganda, history and tactics of advertising." However, the Sand theory of today's Israeli Jews being part of an invention to steal Arab/Muslim land is being presented as scholarly fact and not as another form of anti-Israel propaganda.

Miller has also written books claiming the 2000 and 2004 elections of George W. Bush were "stolen" and that 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government.

...Rather than being a groundbreaking or original scholarly work, Sand's book is just a rehashing of anti-Semitic tracts distributed by a Jewish convert to Christianity in the pay of Arab interests named Benjamin Freedman who claimed the same historical nonsense from about 1946 to 1961. The only difference was that Freedman also tried to claim falsely that the Jewish Talmud encourages pedophilia and sex with animals. Freedman's career was built on first opposing a Jewish state from the U.N. and later to alienate American Christian support away from the Jews. Sand merely took Freedman's thesis and spruced it up for anti-Israel groups to use as propaganda against the Jewish state.

Sand also tries to claim today's Palestinians are the real Jews who were forcibly converted to Islam after the seventh century. This, too, is academically false, as the majority of Arabs and Muslims residing in Israel and the Palestinian Authority today immigrated to the region in the mid 20th century as a result of the Zionist movement.

"The Invention of the Jewish People" is published and distributed by Verso Books in London, a firm that used to be called New Left Books. It is a publishing house that specializes in Marxist, Communist, Maoist, anti-Israel and even pro-jihadist literature for radical groups and bookstores. Its most recent book is proudly promoted as having been written by and expressing the wisdom of Osama bin Laden.

Shlomo Sand is a lifelong communist who has run with Israel's Communist Party factions since his teens. In adhering to the old Soviet party line, most communist parties in Israel are opposed to the existence of a Jewish state.

Part of the anti-Israel campaign on U.S. campuses is to suggest that Jews in America need not support a Jewish or "Zionist" state where Israel is in order to be Jewish. The number of Jewish students at New York University is staggering in terms of the student population there, so what better place to have a Marxist professor like Miller and pseudo-historian like Shlomo Sand from Tel Aviv University come and speak to explain that the Jewish people was nothing more than an invention to justify taking Palestine from the Arabs.

However, the event is really just another form of anti-Semitism and hatred against the Jewish state masquerading as an academic discussion to indoctrinate impressionable students.