[Peace-discuss] Reply from Michael Shapiro

[David Green]

Michael Shapiro, the head of Jewish Federation and the
Program for Jewish Culture and Society, has asked to
post this to the AWARE listserves:

David Green’s account of Yossi Klein Halevi is a
classic piece of character assassination.  It presents
outright fabrications, peddles false innuendo, and
relies on McCarthyite smear tactics.  His great
expose, that Halevi was in his youth a member of the
Jewish Defense League, is in fact the subject of
Halevi’s first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, as
has been mentioned in press releases and
advertisements surrounding Halevi’s visit.  Anyone who
actually reads the book will discover that Halevi,
then in his teens, broke from the JDL  and that the
book is an  analysis of a pathological movement, not
an affirmation of it.   Green refers to Halevi as a
novelist, intending to make the snide point that his
journalism is fiction, but in point of fact Halevi has
never written or published a novel or a short story. 
More substantively, Green ignores Halevi’s distinction
between Palestinians and the Palestianian leadership,
asserts that Halevi hates Palestinians, ignoring
Halevi’s second book which describes his close contact
with Palestinian Sufi leaders, and, reaching deep in
to his sack of slurs, claims “he doesn’t much care
about Jews living in poverty.” Presumably, that
accusation arises from the fact that Halevi is a senor
fellow at the Shalem Center, an Israeli research
center, which Green attempts to discredit through an
elaborate set of associations: he labels its founder
“the Pat Robertson of Israel,” attempting thereby to
brand him and by extension the Center and by further
extension anyone linked to it as an exponent of
far-right religious zealotry.   In point of fact, the
Center fosters a variety of educational and cultural
projects, none of them consistent with Green’s
demonizing analogy. 

After watching Green try to disrupt Halevi’s
appearance at Allen Hall last week, it is ironic and
surrealistic to see him dropping terms like “Jewish
psychopathology,” to see him referring to Halevi as a
“propagandist” and a “mentally disturbed zealot,” or
to see him suggesting that the Program for Jewish
Culture and Society, the sponsor of Halevi’s visit, is
an embarrassment to Jewish culture.   It’s sort of
like watching someone being branded as a serial killer
by Jack the Ripper.



	
		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com