[Peace-discuss] Two of my letters

[David Green]

Two of my letters:

The first, subsequent to my talk on Monday, submitted
as a Friday forum. The second, in response to an
commentary from last week's News-Gazette, submitted as
a guest commentary.

	Editor, Daily Illini:

Recent years have seen a national campaign against
academic freedom on campus by Zionist groups such as
Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch, and the Committee for
Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA). 

	Richard Herman’s decision last December to chastise
the editors of the DI for an offensive comic and
fabricated quote attributed to Ariel Sharon indicates
his willingness to join this campaign in order to
appease his Zionist constituency. It also shows his
complete detachment from the reality at the U of I,
where the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation and
bigoted, Jewish DI columnists (who along with much
else repeat fabricated Israeli claims with no comment
from CUJF) have combined to create a palpably hostile
climate for Arab and Muslim students, as well as
anyone promoting Palestinian rights. It is remarkable
that on a campus with this climate and a racist
mascot, Herman has chosen to beat the dead horse of
anti-Semitism in American life, which must be defined
as criticism of Israel to continue to exist at all.

	The past two years on our campus have seen a lecture
by Pipes, sponsored by the student group Illinipac
(Israel Lobby) and the Center for Jewish Culture and
Society. Pipes has retroactively supported
Japanese-American internment camps during World War II
as consistent with profiling Muslim men, just as “if
searching for rapists, one looks only at the male
population.” Illinipac also last May sponsored the
visit of Israeli Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand
Institute, who defined immigrants in terms of “gutter
cultures,” and suggested that we nuke Iran. Last
September the Center for Jewish Culture invited
Israeli historian Omer Bartov, who has been shown to
be guilty of blatant fabrication in a New Republic
article (2/2/04), in which he referred to a group
called “New Jersey Solidarity: Activists for the
Destruction of Israel,” inventing the last six words
of this title; which he claims called for an
“anti-Israel hate-fest,” a term fabricated by Bartov
of whole cloth. His talk on the “new anti-Semitism” at
the Humanities Center was consistent with his
hostility to Islamic cultures, and no Muslim was
invited to respond—as none has ever been invited by
Matti Bunzl, the Jewish director of the Center.
Bartov’s wild and broad accusations of “Hitlerism”
would be construed as satire if not made in a
“serious” publication.

	Most telling has been CUJF’s vilification of Muslim
student journalist Mariam Sobh, reproducing a column
disseminated by CAMERA in its Spring 2004 Bulletin.
This article, subsequent to Sobh’s repetition (and
retraction) of the same fabricated quote, baselessly
accused her of anti-Semitism, and DI editors of
“educating students in hatred.” The choice to publicly
demonize a U of I student and intimidate DI student
editors was made by a CUJF board that includes U of I
professors and administrators who should be
investigated by Herman for unethical behavior
regarding their commitment to the well-being of U of I
students, and to civil discourse on this campus.
Herman should replace his outrage with an honest look
at the behavior of his own employees, who are blinded
by their support for Israel’s criminality. It is here
that distinctions between rights and responsibilities,
if not truth and lies, must be drawn. While the local
Jewish establishment holds others to a high standard
of truth, it holds itself to no standard whatsoever.

Editor, News-Gazette:

Frederic Jaher (1/28) evaluates the local Presbyterian
pastors’ endorsement of selective divestment from
corporations engaging in business with Israel. He
presumes the right to judge them as a Jew among
Christians and as a historian among clerics, but
whatever Jaher’s background and credentials, his right
is only to judge whether the pastors are holding
another group to the standard to which they hold
themselves.

     But on a moment’s reflection, whether this is the
case is moot: as American citizens we all massively
support the military dictatorship that Israel has
imposed on occupied Palestine for 37 years: the
illegal settlements, the continued confiscation of
land, the “targeted killings,” the apartheid wall, and
the daily humiliations that are institutionalized only
because our government has chosen to use our tax
dollars and diplomatic power to that violent and
imperialist purpose, against a defeated people in the
process of being destroyed. The pastors are holding
not only Israel and Jews to what is arguably a
standard of basic and obvious morality, but themselves
and their congregants, while providing a much-needed
example for the rest of us in this country, Jewish or
otherwise. This is not about Jews versus Christians,
but Americans violating Palestinians.

	The rest of Jaher’s piece regarding history and
religion is transparently irrelevant and shockingly
infantile. It matters not at this point what response
was made by John Foster Dulles or any other
Presbyterian in this country during the years leading
up to and during the holocaust, when American elites
(including Grandfather Prescott Bush) overwhelmingly
supported and did business with Hitler’s Germany; when
the American leader of Reformed Judaism agreed to
silence himself regarding the holocaust at Roosevelt’s
request; when Zionist leaders in Palestine undermined
an effective boycott of the German economy; and when
the leader of the Jewish community in Hungary—a
Zionist—used his relationship with the Nazis to save
himself and 1,600 of his followers while advising
400,000 Jews to passively and obediently report for
“relocation”—which he well knew meant almost certain
death; he was later assassinated by a Hungarian Jew in
Israel.

And surely it is disingenuous of Jaher to employ
Dulles for this convenient purpose, when he knows full
well that the neoconservatives he now supports trace
their lineage to those like Dulles and Dean Acheson,
who used the “red menace” to expand the
military-industrial complex and American hegemony in
the postwar era—resulting eventually in our support
for Israel as a virtual American military base in the
oil-rich and strategically vital Middle East. Jaher
does not even seem to understand that because Saudi
Arabia is our ally, Israel is committed to use its
resources to support the corrupt royal family,
whatever the rhetoric displayed for local consumption
on either side. 

Jaher concludes with a sermon to the pastors about
judging their own house before that of Israel, but it
is he who is unwilling to look in the mirror, while
wielding the overworked and manipulative accusation of
anti-Semitism against those moving tentatively to
challenge American complicity in blatant injustice;
what Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling calls the
“politicide” of the Palestinian people. Jaher baldly
implies that speaking as a Jew confers moral authority
on his words. But none of us can make such a claim,
whether based on the accident of birth or even the
experience of victimization. Nor can he claim to speak
for a majority of Jews, and even if this were the
case, majority is no proof of morality. In the final
analysis, Jaher must make his argument with facts,
logic, and moral consistency, rather than appealing to
his person and status. On these terms he has failed
miserably, while insulting the intelligence and
integrity of others who have made a far more sincere
effort.