Woefully Ignorant or Willfully Misleading?

From FrontPageMag.com, 26 July 2010, by Martin Sherman:

left-wing journalist Peter Beinart

In a polemic published last month in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” the left-wing journalist Peter Beinart argued that American Jews, especially the younger generation, are turning their backs on Israel. In Beinart’s estimation, this is a most understandable and inevitable development. Beinart expounded on the points of his original essay during a recent lecture at Los Angeles’s Temple Beth. Just as in the original article, Beinart’s argument was profoundly flawed.

For anyone with a modicum of knowledge of Israeli society and the larger picture of the Middle East, the lecture was an astonishing display of ignorance and arrogance.

The following analysis of the lowlights of his talk shows how Beinart, like other Israel-bashers, rides roughshod over the truth in an effort to portray Israel as violent and inhumane and deserving of the increasing suspicion in which it is held by American Jews.

The “Radical Settlers”
Beinart stated as a matter of fact: “The same radical settlers who used violence against Palestinians used violence against an Israeli prime minister [Rabin].”

Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin was not assassinated by a “radical settler,” but by a law student from Herzilya, a coastal town adjacent to Tel Aviv.

Beinart gave no evidence in this part of his talk that he knew what percentage of the settlers were involved in violence against Palestinians. Or who has been subject to greater and more lethal violence. Is it Palestinians by settlers? Or settlers by Palestinians?

Nor did he mention that Palestinian movements have proven all too ready to use violence. Not only is this violence directed toward “radical settlers” and innocent Israeli citizens, but Palestinians have also embarked on a frenzy of fratricidal fury against themselves.

The Eviction of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah Quarter in East Jerusalem
On this matter, Beinart posed this rhetorical question:

Is what is happening in Sheik Jarrah, where Palestinians who were living in their homes for 50 years were forcibly evicted and are now living in the street, “kosher”?

This mirrors his claim in his New York Review of Books article that:

[In] the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, … a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers.

In fact, the Palestinians’ eviction was not a politically motivated initiative to dispossess hapless, helpless Palestinians as Beinart implies, but the result of a court ruling.

The courts (including the Israeli Supreme Court, which often — indeed more often than not — rules against the “radical settlers”) determined that the property in which the Palestinians were living in fact belonged to Jewish owners. In 1967, the court awarded the Palestinian families “protected tenant” status, whose right to reside in the homes was guaranteed as long as they paid rent to the legal owners.

In 1982, the legal owners sued 23 families for nonpayment of rent. According to an agreement reached between the lawyer representing the Palestinian families and the authorized representatives of the owners, the Palestinian families were indeed recognized as “protected tenants” whose occupancy in the buildings was ensured as long as they paid rent. However, most of the families refused to do so.

Does Beinart believe that Israel would be looked on more favorably if the rule of law was flouted, and legal property rights violated because of the ethnic identity of those ruled against?



Pikuch Nefesh and Reverence for Life Over Land
Beinart lamented:

One of the things that bothers me is [the undermining of] the great reverence for Pikuach Nefesh [preserving lives] and the recognition that it is acceptable to withdraw from land if it meant saving lives.

This is a statement that can only be explained by either total ignorance or total insincerity. For as anyone who follows the news or reads the papers must know, a dramatic inverse relationship exists between Pikuach Nefesh (preserving lives) and withdrawal from land.

Indeed, since the doctrine of “land-for-peace” was introduced into Israeli policy, fatalities have soared to unprecedented levels on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. To suggest otherwise reflects a massive deficit of either information or integrity.

Double Standards
Regarding the conduct of his like-minded Israel-basher peers, Beinart pontificated: “There is something frankly silly to me about a Jewish community that feels so self-confident in how our values apply in Bosnia, the former Soviet Union, and Darfur, but is so timid in talking about how our values apply in the place we care about most [presumably Israel].”

So Israel’s attempts to defend its people are morally comparable to the wholesale slaughter in Darfur, the widespread massacres in Bosnia, and the oppressive brutality of the Soviet regime?

What a windfall for the assorted collection of Jew-baiting anti-Semites, Judeo-phobic Israel-bashers, and other hate-driven villains such thinking is. What greater endorsement could they hope for than Beinart’s exhortation that his fellow Jews relate to the Jewish State as if it were governed by the genocidal Janjaweed militias in Sudan, or by the brutish guards in the Siberian gulags, or the murderous perpetrators of the bloody events in Srebrenica.

Double Standards II
Beinart endorses double standards when they work to Israel’s detriment, and only dismisses them when they do not.

When a challenge was raised regarding the application of these double standards, Beinart’s rather glib and unoriginal response was to claim that while Israel was “far morally superior to North Korea, Syria, Libya and Iran,” these were not relevant criteria he would expect from a Jewish state. According to Beinart, he should not have to “compromise [his expectations from Israel] just because North Korea is worse.”

Such an approach might have some merit if Israel was being censured less severely, or even equally severely, for violations of liberal-democratic values similar to those perpetrated by North Korea, Iran, etc. But what is happening is altogether different. Israel is being censured far more harshly and frequently for infringements much less notable than those glossed over by the international community when committed by other nations.
Moreover, it is not only in comparison to the tyrannies in Tehran and Tripoli and the dictatorships in Damascus and the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) that Israel is being held to a double standard. Indeed, widely divergent criteria are used to judge the actions of Israel and those of the leading democratic countries that comprise NATO. This is true both with respect to military action in the Balkans and the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan.

In the Balkans, high-altitude bombing by NATO, including the use of cluster bombs, inflicted hundreds of civilian Serbian casualties during a military campaign in which not one single civilian in a NATO nation was ever threatened.

In Afghanistan, where military action was undertaken in response to a single terror attack on a single NATO member, estimates of civilian deaths caused directly by NATO military action since 2001 are in the range of 5000-8000, with additional indirect fatalities estimated at up to 20,000.

Why should the victims of Israeli actions taken to defend their citizens elicit a far greater expression of moral outrage on the part of the international community than actions taken to perpetuate regimes in East Asia, Central Africa, or in the Middle East?

Why should several families evicted because of failure to pay rent, after being afforded due process by the Israeli legal system, be more troubling to liberal Jews than the millions of victims of gender apartheid, creed apartheid, and gay apartheid across the Islamic world?


Israel’s Right to Defend Itself

Beinart magnanimously agrees that “to ask Israel to be willing to not defend itself would be wrong,” but predictably goes on to ask – rhetorically – “is every military action…does every Israeli policy contribute to Israeli defense..?”

To be sure, with the benefit of hindsight, some Israeli security measures may be criticized for one reason or another. But in a situation of such uncertainty, what would Beinart recommend as Israel’s working security policy: To err on the side of sober caution? Or on the side of reckless optimism?

Nothing could imperil liberal democratic values more than trying to foist on Israel unattainable standards of liberal democratic ideals that make the defense of these ideals impossible. These standards are not demanded or expected of any other country, much less from one faced with such grave existential threats.
Of course no one is disputing Beinart’s right to criticize Israeli policy. However, as someone who has chosen not to share the burden of living in Israel, he would surely understand that when he states that “as a Jew, I have a certain set of expectations… as to what a Jewish state might be,” some might interpret his approach as being more than a little presumptuous.

Indeed, it would be interesting to know what kind of Israeli military actions Beinart would condone as not offensive to his liberal sensibilities. Would they include the construction of the much maligned separation barrier? Targeted killings (with the lowest level of collateral casualties in military history)? Large scale campaigns (such as “Cast Lead”) to quell rocket and mortar fire on civilian populations?

Blockades and Balance
Beinart asks: “How did the Gaza blockade which banned a vast, vast number of consumer products that had nothing to do with making rockets…help Israeli security?” He added, ”It seems to me that all it did was lead to more and more and more hatred of Israel.”

Can Beinart really be unaware of the fact that the imposition of the blockade was a result of, not a reason for, Palestinian enmity; that it is a consequence, not a cause, of Palestinian hatred for Israel?
Is he really ignorant of the fact that whenever Israel has turned the other cheek, it has been resoundingly slapped by the Palestinians; that whenever Israel extended the hand of friendship, it has been brusquely brushed aside by the Palestinians?

Why should Israel be condemned by liberal democrats for imposing a blockade on Gaza, when the international community imposed a UN Security Council-sanctioned blockade against Iraq and its despotic ruler?

Why is the Gaza blockade more reprehensible than the U.S.-led, UN sanctioned Iraqi blockade that caused infant mortality to sky-rocket and banned importation of over 300 items – including painkillers, pencils, hearing aids, musical instruments, and shampoo?

Peter beinart: another “celebrity liberal Zionist” Israel basher

From Commentary, 4 June 2010, by Jonathan Tobin:

Peter Beinart weighed in today with another column at the Daily Beast designed to bolster his standing as a “liberal Zionist” rather than as merely another member of the pack of jackals attacking Israel for trying to enforce the blockade against the Hamas regime in Gaza.

Of course, Beinart has not changed his mind about the attempts to isolate the Islamist terrorists who seized power in a bloody coup and who pose the biggest obstacle to the two-state solution to the conflict, which he says he wants. He still buys into the Palestinian myths about the situation in Gaza. And he is equally resolute in his determination to ignore everything that has happened in the Middle East  ...Because it is only by pretending that  ...Israeli concessions never happened that can he hold on to the falsehood that the lack of peace is due to Israeli intransigence aided and abetted by American supporters.

But, at least to his partial credit, Beinart hasn’t forgotten the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held captive by Hamas for four years. Beinart thinks the “Free Gaza” movement of foreign cheerleaders for Hamas ought to embrace Shalit’s cause and draw a moral equivalence between his plight and that of Palestinians trapped inside Gaza. He urges “Free Gaza” activists and others who are trying to aid Hamas by breaking the blockade to think of Shalit “as a Gazan — a caged, brutalized, Gazan Jew.” In doing so, he theorizes that they could gain the sympathy of Israelis who support the blockade in part because of Hamas’s refusal to free Shalit or even to allow the Red Cross to visit the prisoner. Beinart endorses Israeli journalist Eitan Haber’s proposal that the next ship that heads for Gaza be allowed through by the Israelis on the condition that it bring food to Shalit. That would, Beinart agrees, put the pro-Palestinian crowd to a test that would prove whether they are genuine humanitarians or merely Israel-haters.

Yet unfortunately for Beinart — and Shalit — the “Free Gaza” crowd has already been put to such a test.  ...before the flotilla that Israel intercepted was launched in Turkey, the family of Gilad Shalit begged the organizers to take a package of letters and food to the Israeli being held in Gaza. In return, they promised to lend their voices to a call for lifting the blockade. Accepting this offer would have cost “Free Gaza” nothing and would only have given them good publicity and probably would have caused the Israeli government to seriously consider letting them through the blockade. But, in a decision that Beinart and other critics of Israel seemed to ignore, they refused the Shalit family.

Why? It’s not that hard to figure out even if your grasp of the Middle East is as dim as that of Peter Beinart.

First, they don’t care about Gilad Shalit. Like his Hamas kidnappers, the “Free Gaza” group is composed of anti-Zionists — people who don’t think there ought to be a Jewish state and that Jewish soldiers who defend it are, by definition, criminals who deserve what they get from Hamas. Most think the same about Israeli civilians who live under the threat of rocket fire and terrorist attack from Hamas.

Second, they are not humanitarians. They are Israel-haters. The goal of their Mediterranean cruise was not to help Gazans but to embarrass Israel. After all, if foreign sympathizers of the Palestinians really wanted to help the people of Gaza, they might oppose the rule of a tyrannical Islamist terror group, advocate for peace, not the destruction of Israel, and support efforts to resettle and absorb the descendants of the 1948 Arab refugees elsewhere rather than keep them in place in Gaza, where they can serve to continue to fuel the conflict.

Beinart needs to understand that the “Free Gaza” movement won’t lift a finger for Shalit for the same reason that the Palestinian leadership has refused to make peace ... they aren’t interested in compromise or peace; they want to destroy Israel.

Like the “Free Gaza” organizers, the Palestinian leadership has already been put to the test and failed. But I guess ignoring inconvenient facts is one of the membership requirements if you want to join Peter Beinart’s elite club of “liberal Zionist” writers who bash Israel.

An Open Letter to treacherous European Jews

From the Jewish Press (US), May 12 2010, Rabbi Yaakov Spivak:

My Dear Brothers and Sisters:

There is nothing more pitiful than a condemned man asking his executioner for the sword so that he may do his work for him.

As anti-Semitism rages once again in the blood-soaked lands that contain the ashes of your families, you have committed an act of potential suicide.

Three thousand of you, in a traitorous, backstabbing moment, have signed a petition condemning the State of Israel for its "actions" against the Palestinians.

By that act alone, you have strengthened the hand of the Iranian Hitler and all his cohorts in the Middle East who promise their constituents that they will wipe out every man, woman and child in Israel.

"You see," they now say, "even the Jews themselves agree with us!"

None of our enemies over the last two thousand years could have asked for more justification for their murderous plans than that which you have given Ahmadinejad and Al Qaeda.

After the loss of six million of your brothers and sisters in the lands you foolishly choose to live in, you have learned nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Your blood is on your own heads.

If ever there was a Divine Message to leave the European Galut/Exile, it was delivered between 1939 and 1945.

Fools! The God of Israel has given you a place of refuge, and you do everything you can to undermine it.

In the lifetimes of many of you, you have seen Europe go from a Hitlerean Kristallnacht to synagogues in Berlin now requiring armed guards for the High Holidays.

You French Jews who signed the petition condemning Israel have suddenly forgotten that not so long ago your chief rabbi begged Orthodox Jewish youngsters not to wear their yarmulkes in the street. All around you, Islamic extremists fling Jewish products off the shelves of Parisian stores and throw rocks at Jewish schoolchildren.

One can almost see Herzl walking home at night from the Dreyfus trial with the words "Mort pour les Juife!" - "Death to the Jews!" - ringing in his ears.

Sleep peacefully, Jews of Paris and Berlin. Certainly the countries in which you reside - countries long marinated in murderous anti-Semitism - will provide protection for you the day the Islamic extremists overrun them.

Of course they will.

The lesson of the 1930s screams out to you: The great Revisionist Zionist leader Jabotinsky went from town to town in Europe proclaiming "Jews! My hair is gray with worry over you. You are sitting atop a volcano. Run for your lives!"

The Jews of Europe did not listen then, but they never tried to block their own escape route as you do now.

The economic instability of Europe glares from headlines around the world as rioters rock the streets of Greece while Spain shakes in its boots. It was just this kind of economic crisis that paved the way for Hitler. The Islamofascists living near you see this as their moment. With help from their oil-rich cousins in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, they will offer economic "relief" to the financially strapped European countries to which they have migrated. There will, of course, be strings attached.

While you sign petitions condemning your fellows Jews in Israel, these thugs will be taking out contracts on your lives.

How dare you!

The world has not let up against us for two thousand years, and now you aid and abet the hand of the enemy by signing a document they can point to in order to justify sending homicide bombers into Israeli pizza shops to murder Jewish children in cold blood.

One day you will beg Israel to grant you refuge from a Europe whose message to you should have been clear seventy years ago. Who knows? Maybe the Haifa harbor will be blockaded once again. Maybe your refugee ships will be turned away as others were in the past.

You are disconnected from reality, and if you do not act now by standing up for your people, you are doomed. You have damaged Israel in the eyes of the world.

May Heaven have mercy on your souls.

Jewish "Academic" Agitators to Watch

From Ynet News, 6 May 2010, byYitzhak Benhorin:

... Boston Science Museum's  ...week-long exhibit surveying ground-breaking Israeli innovations and inventions in the fields of clean energy, medicine, and technology ...known as Israel Innovation Week (IIW) ...opened ...on Sunday with an event attended by many members of the city's heavy-hitting academic community. Many were also invited to speak alongside Israeli experts.

The exhibit included displays on Better Place, an Israeli company responsible for manufacturing electric vehicles and displays presented by the Foreign Ministry detailing its agricultural aid programs offered to developing countries.

However, this display of Israeli pride was received with little enthusiasm among some members of the academia, including Jewish linguist Noam Chomsky, and faculty members hailing from Israeli institutes of higher education – Dr. Kobi Snitz from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Prof. Rachel Giora and Dr. Anat Matar, both from Tel Aviv University.

"IIW is far from an innocent educational endeavor. It is part of a propaganda campaign by the State of Israel to present itself as a beacon of progress in a desert of backwardness and deflect attention from its atrocious human rights record and fundamentally discriminatory policies," [their] letter claimed.

The letter protested the show of Israeli technology in part because it is, according to the signatories, inseparable from what they call Israel's aggression.

For instance, they labeled the Technion, a source of many of Israel's technological innovations, "an institution with a long track record of developing technologies of death used by Israel’s military. These include remote-controlled bulldozers for demolishing Palestinian homes and drones for picking off Palestinians from the air."

...The Consul General of Israel to New England Nadav Tamir responded to the letter: "From our perspective, this is proof of the event's success and the importance of such an exhibit in a location so central to science and technology."

Expose and Confront Jews who defame Jews

From a posting by Isi Leibler on February 10th, 2010:

The time has come to draw red lines between legitimate criticism and initiatives seeking to demonize Israel.

Richard Goldstone's infamous role as the token head of the UNHRC report accusing the IDF of war crimes is only one example of prominent Jews who exploit their origins as a way to defame their people....

...most Jewish renegades were driven by desperation to unburden themselves from what they regarded as their repressive ethnic and cultural roots. Historian Jacob Talmon described such deviant behavior as “a Jewish neurosis” in response to centuries of oppression and pariah status.

The purported commitment of these Jews to universal and humanitarian values was usually belied by extreme attacks on their own people and association with sponsors who were outright anti-Semites.

Streams of such Jews emerged during the 19th century in the wake of emancipation. A classic example was Karl Marx ...In czarist Russia, some Jewish social revolutionaries even endorsed pogroms against their own kinsmen, hoping that by venting their frustrations on Jews, the masses would ultimately turn on the czar.

Their successors, the Yevsektsiya, the notorious Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party, became the most vicious persecutors of their own people, frenziedly suppressing all manifestations of Jewish cultural and religious life. Ultimately they too were liquidated in Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns.

Many Jews outside the Soviet Union joined the Communist Party out of a mistaken conviction that it represented the most effective way to combat Nazism. But once in the party, they became brainwashed, and applauded as the evil Soviet regime executed their kinsmen and institutionalized state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

AFTER THE Holocaust and the struggle to create the State of Israel, most Jewish anti-Semites hibernated. As the plight of Soviet Jewry became a rallying call uniting Jews throughout the world, the few remaining Jewish communists were marginalized.

...Today, despite representing a small fringe, the disproportionate influence of anti-Zionist Jewish extremists in global campaigns demonizing Israel has reached an all-time high.

Ironically, the worst elements emanate from Israel.

There is the frenzied agitation by Israeli academics who abuse academic freedom by utilizing their universities as launching pads to delegitimize their own country. Neve Gordon, a political science lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and a typical Jewish defamer of Zion, published an opinion piece last year in The Los Angeles Times calling on the international community to boycott Israel. He and others like him, funded by the Israeli government and philanthropic Diaspora Zionists, exploit their academic positions to support those seeking to destroy us.

A recent study by Im Tirtzu claims that over 90% of the false allegations of Israeli war crimes originating from Israel cited in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 NGOs who received close to $8 million from the New Israel Fund, an organization purporting to promote social integration and welfare in Israel, headed by former Meretz MK Naomi Chazan. The NIF also sponsors Arab-Israeli groups promoting a bi-national state and US lecture tours by Arab Israelis on Israel Independence Day promoting the Nakba and calling on American Jews to use their influence to replace The Israeli flag and Hatikva.

Last year Haaretz highlighted reports accusing the IDF of war crimes which were subsequently proven false. These received massive global media exposure and made a major contribution toward creating the hostile anti-Israeli climate preceding the Goldstone report.

THE ROT extends to the Diaspora, where as a matter of course anti-Israeli groups now employ Jewish spokesmen to cover up their bias and double standards. In the US, the demonizers of Zion are exploiting the eroding relationship between the Obama administration and Israel. Former American Jewish Congress director Henry Siegman described Israel as “the only apartheid regime in the Western world.” Jewish students at campuses are increasingly bombarded with anti-Israel diatribes by Jewish academics such as Norman Finkelstein, who supports Iranians and terrorists, even exploiting the Holocaust suffering of his parents to delegitimize Israel.

In the UK, Jewish parliamentarian Gerald Kaufman compares Hamas to Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, disregarding the Hamas Charter which declares that the Day of Judgment will not come until all Jews are killed.

In Belgium, a Jewish playwright scripted a play in which the Philistines assume the role of Israelis and Samson emerges as a heroic Palestinian using a dynamite-loaded vest to blow up his oppressors.

Shlomo Sand, a political science lecturer at Tel Aviv University, achieved celebrity status in Europe by publishing a book titled The Invention of the Jewish People, a farrago of utter nonsense promoting the thesis that being the descendents of the Khazars from the Black Sea region who converted to Judaism in the eighth century, Jews have no historical affinity with the Land of Israel.

This was endorsed in a recent UK Financial Times article by Tony Judt, an American historian who regards the creation of Israel as a mistake and favors a binational state. Under the title “Israel must unpick its ethnic mix,” Judt expressed the hope that American Jews would detach themselves from Israel, as Irish-Americans did from Ireland.

The time has come for action - not to suppress freedom of expression, but to draw red lines between legitimate criticism of government policies and initiatives seeking to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. The first step must be to deny tenure in government-sponsored educational institutions to academics who brazenly collaborate with our enemies.

It is gratifying that opposition Kadima MKs are now calling for what will hopefully become a bipartisan investigation into the activities and sources of funding for the NIF and other NGOs.

Whenever criticized, those who call for boycotts of their own country and demonize the IDF as war criminals have the chutzpah to try to defame their critics as McCarthyites and fascists, and threaten libel proceedings. It is their behavior which is morally reprehensible, and we must not be intimidated by such hypocritical tactics.

Israelis and the global Jewish community should be under no illusions. The damage inflicted by Jews collaborating with Israel’s enemies to demonize or delegitimize their country is immense. The only way to neutralize the impact of these renegade groups is to expose and confront them.

J Street sidelined

From Israel National News, 11/12/09, by Ernie Singer:

Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the United States, has taken an unprecedented swipe at the “pro-peace” J Street lobby ...saying the two-year-old group is “significantly out of the mainstream.”

J Street, heavily funded by billionaire George Soros, has called for Israel to negotiate with Hamas and has criticized the country for the Operation Cast Lead... J Street actively campaigns for Congressional candidates who want Israel to surrender all land restored to the country in the Six-Day War in 1967.

The group supports dividing Jerusalem... [and] has taken a generally dovish issue on the Iranian nuclear threat.

Oren this week told delegates at a conservative Jewish convention that J Street “not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it [also] opposes all policies of all Israeli governments. It’s significantly out of the mainstream.”

The ambassador previously rejected an invitation to address the political lobby’s conference in Washington two months ago, stating that J Street’s policies "might impair Israel's interests."

J Street also was one of the few Jewish groups that did not condemn the Goldstone report....

”When it comes to the survival of the Jewish state, there should be no differences of opinion,” Oren staged. “You are fooling around with the lives of 7 million people. This is no joke.”

Jewish enemy and employee of the State of Israel

From FrontPage, November 30, 2009, by Paul Shindman:

Jerusalem – Dr. Neve Gordon of Israel’s Ben Gurion University is known as one of the most radical academic Palestinian sympathizers. However, his activities appear to have peaked this year with a call for an anti-Israel boycott, and revelations that he hosted a convicted Palestinian sentenced to house arrest.

Despite being the chairman of the political science department at Israel’s Ben Gurion University, Gordon wrote an L.A. Times op-ed calling for a worldwide boycott of Israel, including Israeli universities, to achieve what he calls "ending our apartheid."

Gordon’s call was widely seen as an anti-democratic attempt to undermine Israeli democracy and sovereignty and drew scathing criticism from his peers in both the academic and activist communities.

The president of BGU, Rivka Carmi, went so far as to say Gordon’s call meant the university “ is being threatened by the egregious remarks of one person, under the guise of academic freedom.” In a rebuttal editorial, Carmi had to point out that it was only Israeli labor law that prevented the university from firing Gordon. In a harsh assessment, she said his boycott call meant “Gordon has forfeited his ability to work effectively within the academic setting, with his colleagues in Israel and around the world.”

Veteran Israeli left wing anti-Zionist activist Uri Avnery was with Gordon and other Israeli extremists when they barricaded themselves in Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah compound during a prolonged siege by the Israeli army in 2002. Despite their common background, even Avnery rejected Gordon’s op-ed, saying it was an “example of a faulty diagnosis leading to faulty treatment. To be precise: the mistaken assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resembles the South African experience leads to a mistaken choice of strategy.” This was harsh criticism from a political colleague that raised questions about Gordon’s professional abilities as an academic.

Gordon is viewed in his own country as notorious for his venomous anti-Israel writings and statements. The Israeli media reported when Gordon and other activists illegally entered Ramallah in 2002 to serve as human shields inside Yasser Arafat’s headquarters. They wanted to prevent the Israeli army from arresting the suspects wanted for the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister. Gordon was shown in newspaper photos embracing Arafat. The terrorists were eventually apprehended, tried and convicted.

Gordon also has a fractious track record in his teaching career with numerous run-ins with students who hold opposing views. Gordon regularly denounces Israel as a fascist apartheid entity and admitted that his boycott call was a tactic to force Israeli concessions with the Palestinians. Gordon’s articles are so openly anti-Israel that they are often published on neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial web sites.

Around the same time as the boycott call, Gordon turned his own home into a refuge for convicted Fatah organizer Mohammed Abu Humus, a resident of the Issawiya neighborhood of East Jerusalem. As a local Fatah organizer, Abu Hums had previous convictions for several security related offenses including arson and assault. Despite the latest conviction for directing demonstrators to throw rocks, Gordon described Abu Humus as a “political prisoner” and “a Fatah leader.”

A Jerusalem district judge earlier this year convicted Abu Humus and handed down a nine-month sentence, converted to house arrest. Gordon organized a group of far-left academics to testify on behalf of Abu Humus, and Gordon offered the court to host Abu Humus in Gordon’s own home in Beersheva for the duration of the house arrest. It is evidently the only case on record of a Palestinian terrorist being released to house arrest in the home of a Jewish Israeli citizen....