[Peace-discuss] Reply from Michael Shapiro

[David Green]

       I'm inclined to agree with Carl's assessment of
the situation. My letters to the DI regarding the
Halevi visit were not published. Today I submitted the
following:

	The Daily Illini (11/10) reports on the observance of
Kristallnacht, quoting a student who “cited Sudan and
Rwanda as modern examples of how today's world is not
free of oppression.” He continued: "There are many
events that remind us of the Holocaust. We live in a
world where this stuff can happen, and we have to be
aware of it." 

	Unfortunately, these examples are selected in order
to avoid parallels that implicate the United States
and Israel, such as East Timor and Guatemala, where
arms and advisement were provided for ongoing
government-sponsored genocides. Also studiously
avoided is the ethnic cleansing of 700,000
Palestinians by Israel in 1948, or its 1982 invasion
of Lebanon which killed 20,000 Palestinian refugees,
ending with Ariel Sharon’s complicity in massacres at
Sabra and Shatila. A guiding moral principle is that
we hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold
others.

	The DI’s naive coverage is consistent with that of
recent events promoted by our campus’s neoconservative
“Program for Jewish Culture and Society.” Yossi Klein
Halevi (11/3), an Israeli journalist, appeared in the
guise of “reconciliation” in order to advocate
collective punishment of Palestinians, while claiming
that journalists who promote social justice are
blinded to the truth.

	Judea Pearl (11/9), promoting “tolerance”, declared
that “no topic is taboo” while ignoring Israel’s
occupation of Palestine, the American occupation of
Iraq, and the CIA’s 1980s support for the Islamic
radicals who eventually murdered his son. Pearl labels
opposition to Zionism as racist, indeed: “I submit
that anti-Zionism is a form of racism more dangerous
than classical anti-Semitism. Framing anti-Zionism as
racism is precisely the weapon that our (Jewish)
students need for survival on campus.” So much for
dialogue, and for the pretense that local Jewish
bureaucrats value the truth more than their
neoconservative political agenda.



--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

> 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.
> 
>    ###
> > _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>
http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
> 



		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com