[Peace-discuss] Reply from Michael Shapiro

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'm sure Michael Shapiro would agree that his reference to
David Green as Jack the Ripper is hyperbole (and not character
assassination) -– but the comparison of Yossi Klein Halevi to
a serial killer is not so clearly hyperbolic.  Halevi himself
is not literally a killer, so far as I know, but the regime
that he flacks for, surely is.  He clearly and self-admittedly
is an apologist for state terrorism.  

A state with a military larger than any NATO army confronts a
stateless people with no helicopters, F-16s or tanks.  The
outcome is hardly in doubt: at least three Palestinians have
been killed for every Israeli killed since the beginning of
the second intifada.  The Israeli occupation, declared illegal
by the U.N. thirty-eight years ago this month, continues. 
Meanwhile, domestic inequality is added to the moral
corruption that oppression has brought to Israel: established
on egalitarian principles, Israel now rivals the US as the
most unequal industrialized country.

Some who heard Halevi speak found his description of the
current situation in the Middle East to be largely fiction. 
David produced an extensive leaflet outlining some of Halevi's
more egregious departures from the facts.  At least as
important was what was not said -- notably our responsibility
for Israel's brutal and racist occupation, which would be
impossible without American support.  The US government uses
Israel for its own purposes.  The country has become a
stationary aircraft carrier (with American planes), part of
the system whereby the US controls Middle East energy
resources, our primary trump card against our real
international rivals, the economies of the European Union and
northeast Asia.  And, in that connection, the US occupation of
Iraq (conducted on the Israeli pattern) might have come up...

David has done a service to the often-scanted principle, that
the university is a place of open debate, by confronting this
propagandist and by trying to supply some accuracy, against
the pieties observed in American ideological institutions.  

--CGE


On Tue Nov 1 David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> posted the
following:

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.

   ###