[Peace-discuss] Irit Linur

[David Green]

Linur was "artist in residence" for the Israel Studies Project on campus in Fall 2009
 
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/04/israeli-celebrity-says-she-enjoyed-video-of-idf-attacking-danish-activist-because-he-looked-like-a-nazi.html
 
"[One the one hand they say it causes] embarrassment in the IDF and that the pictures are hard to view, and on the other hand they broadcast it a dozen times in a row. [laughs]
And me - every time - first of all it’s scary, because you actually see the weapon, it’s smashed into the face of the peace activist in a really surprising way. It’s scary at first, because - my nose hurt from seeing it.
After the fifth time I say: “show me again. Can I see it again?”
Now, I want to say things precisely. People are talking about - I really want to be very precise.
First of all, there’s a certain something in the image, of the Jew wearing his yarmulke [religious hat], who looks, you know, like one of the householders in [Jewish] town, and standing against him is the golden-haired Dane, with the Hitler-Jugend look to him.
The role reversal - I really-really liked it. 
But I don’t’ want to talk about the black chasm in my soul that is haunted by anti-Semitism and Nazism. 
I want to say this: all those people who want to solve problems that they have no clue about, and that in any case, they tend to be on the wrong side of it - because they were born anti-Semites and will die anti-Semites - one of the reasons that they come here, of all places, is that it’s a kind of summer camp, they know that they’ll maybe demonstrate, they may bump shoulders with policemen, maybe they’ll get some teargas thrown at them, they’ll catch a bit of actual battle time - a kind of adventure summer camp, at the end of which they’ll go back to their privileged northern nation and homeland and feel how good they’ve been. 
They don’t go do that in Syria, nor in Iran nor in Jordan, nor in Egypt, because they know that there - they’d be shot at."
 
 
This commentary appeared in Sunday's News-Gazette:
 
 
The Israel Lobby buys public higher educational space in Illinois in order to further its political agenda
David Green
The Israel Lobby in Illinois has become an inappropriate presence on public college campuses, including the University of Illinois. The origins of this intrusiveness are in Chicago, Urbana-Champaign, and Springfield. Governor Pat Quinn travelled to Israel last summer for a “week-long educational mission where he sealed two important agreements and received briefings from high-ranking Israeli officials, academic experts and business leaders on topics ranging from high-tech development, energy, water conservation and environmentalism to disaster preparedness, Iran, and U.S.-Israel relations.”
This is reported on the website of Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. The article states: “The Governor’s educational visit was part of a JUF initiative that, for the past two decades, has brought influential leaders to Israel.” Quinn signed a “formal agreement on academic cooperation between Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba and the University of Illinois at Chicago to establish a wide-ranging partnership.”
The academic merit and social outcomes of such agreements are negated by a political and military context that provokes fundamental opposition from advocates of social justice. In relation to Motorola, this opposition relates to the use of technology to maintain Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Meanwhile, Israel’s theft of water from the occupied West Bank continues apace, as documented in a recent U.N. report “How Dispossession Happens: The Humanitarian Impact of the Takeover of Palestinian Water Springs by Israeli Settlers.
A blatant political agenda, dictated and limited by Israeli state interests and U.S. hegemonic interests in the region, is part and parcel of such academic agreements. The public university and its scholarly and scientific reputation are commandeered by the Israel Lobby in order to serve and legitimize its agenda. 
The past two decades have seen two related developments at the Urbana campus: first, the establishment of a privately-funded Program for Jewish Culture and Society two decades ago and its attendant moral emphasis on the Holocaust and Jewish victimization in general; second, the use ofPJCS as an institutional and moral umbrella for an Israel Lobby-funded and baldly propagandistic “Israel Studies Project,” which has moreover been clearly racist in its exclusion of Palestinian Israelis from its purview.
Blatant conflicts of interest regarding PJCS in relation to the Israel Lobby were obvious from the start, and dovetail with Governor Quinn’s junket. The promoters of PJCS were two professors with prominent positions in local Jewish institutions—religious, secular, and Zionist. One, Michael Shapiro, is the father of Daniel Shapiro, current U.S. ambassador to Israel.
In 2004, Michael Shapiro worked closely with Michael Kotzin, JUF Executive Vice President, to fund the Israel Studies Project as part of a statewide propaganda campaign at both public and private universities. Kotzin accompanied Governor Quinn to Israel. Quinn’s group was addressed in Israel by Ambassador Shapiro, who “called his address to the group ‘his first official duty’ after arriving the day before to assume his responsibilities as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.”
In addition the Urbana campus has procured, for the past two academic years, a visiting Jewish-Israeli professor of Israel Studies whose position is by no means disinterestedly funded by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), an extension of the organization most central to the Israel Lobby—AIPAC. It is unacceptable that a visiting professor essentially hired by the Israel Lobby is charged with teaching the only class offered at UIUC on the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
UIUC has never hired a professor of Palestinian or Arab background specifically in relation to teaching and research regarding the topic of Israel/Palestine. Regarding any other oppressed group, it would be unheard of for faculty members to be bought and paid for by interests promoting and justifying that oppression. But in the case of the Israel Lobby on campus in Illinois, it is business as usual.
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