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The Academy Promotes Hamas
New York University students stage a protest in Washington Square Park in Manhattan to oppose Israel and call for a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas on Oct. 25, 2023. Photo: Gordon Donovan/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
JNS.org – Do academic organizations represent intellectual values—above all objectivity? Or do they represent the current state of their communities and those communities’ prejudices and obsessions?
Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 massacre is a litmus test for human decency. So, how did academics and intellectuals react?
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has made its position known, saying, “There can be no justification for the targeting of civilians. Many of our members have been directly affected and we join them in grieving.”
But the next 845 words of MESA’s statement did not focus on Hamas, but instead excoriated Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre, accusing Israel of “indiscriminately bombarding [Gaza’s] population and infrastructure” and committing “ethnic cleansing” by calling on civilians to leave Hamas-controlled territories lest they “face certain death in a ground invasion.” MESA also emphasized Israel’s “broader political, administrative and legal system of racial discrimination and domination—regularly enforced through violence.”
No additional thoughts were spared for Israelis until the last sentence, which stated, “the only path forward on the ground is one premised on the equal rights of Palestinians and Israelis to live in dignity and safety,” which implies a magical “one-state solution” that will certainly not be called “Israel.”
MESA’s fall into moral decrepitude is emblematic of most of academia. Founded in 1966, the organization represents over 2,000 academics specializing in the Middle East. Like many academic associations, it sponsors a journal and conference.
The number of individual members has dropped, however, since MESA chose to boycott Israel in 2022. It has a diminishing number of institutional members as well, since universities do not want to be seen as adopting policies of discrimination based on racial, ethnic or national origin. George Washington University, which housed MESA until this year, was one of those that broke their association. The organization is now homeless and its conference has become biannual due to lack of interest.
But MESA is far from the only group of academics to cheer Hamas, let alone adopt Israel boycotts. At the University of Michigan, over 1,000 faculty members signed a letter blaming the “decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestine and the structural apartheid Palestinians residing both within Israel and the Occupied Territories endure on a daily basis” for Hamas’s genocidal violence. Apparently, the signatories believe that Hamas and the Gaza civilians who followed them on their rampage have no moral capacities whatsoever and can only behave like utter barbarians, including live-streamed dismemberment.
New York University’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine condemned “the brutal killing of civilians that occurred in Israel on October 7th, which constitutes a war crime,” but excoriated Israel for “occupation, expropriation, ethnic cleansing and the denial to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza of the most basic human and civil rights,” as well as “colonial racial violence.”
The statement also accused the university of bending to “immense pressure from trustees, alumni and donors to be perceived as ‘pro-Israel,’ even at the cost of tolerating or promoting violations of academic freedom and free speech rights.” The signatories appear to believe that academics can never be questioned or criticized. Such beliefs are typical of totalitarian states, but have little to do with “academic freedom” or “free speech.”
At the notoriously bigoted City University of New York, the faculty union escalated the hatred in emails to its 23,000 members decrying what it called a “Zionist genocidal campaign.” The union encouraged members “to channel your grief and rage over the nearly 1,000 Palestinians martyred, including nearly 300 children, into upcoming rallies across CUNY campuses and New York City.” The faculty, it seems, embraces the Islamic fundamentalist concept of the “martyr,” just as Hamas does.
Perhaps the most deranged statement was from Oxford University’s University and College Union, which claimed the war was “a direct consequence of decades of violent oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state” and that “only a mass uprising on both sides of the green line and across the Middle East can free the Palestinian people.” This call for a massive war that would consume the entire region is a horrific one, but has been echoed by many other academics.
Reflexively anti-Israel and anti-American biases in academia are partially the work of the tenured radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, steeped in fetishization of the Third World and vicarious admiration for hideously violent and often terrorist “liberation movements,” the “Palestinian cause” and “struggles against colonialism.” These academics have now trained generations of students who have assumed leading roles in numerous universities.
Moreover, fields like Middle East studies are increasingly dominated by individuals from communities in the US and abroad that have imbibed the prejudices of their cultures of origin, which are then confirmed by their teachers.
Thus, wide swaths of academia now see themselves as scholar-activists, saviors working for “liberation.” But who and what to “liberate” is an open question. So, for them, evil needs a specific name and location. In this Manichean theology, saving Palestinians take first place, with the Jews cast as metaphysical villains, giving license to overt antisemitism. This is not scholarship; it is political religion. It is an apocalyptic fundamentalism in which the downtrodden must be saved, evil defeated and the empty lives of activists given new meaning.
None of this has anything to do with an objective understanding of the world. It is a crusade to wrestle the future into a particular shape, one in which Israel does not exist.
It would be possible to dismiss all this if the crusaders were confined to the ivory tower, but they are not, and people are getting hurt. The consequences of their bigoted ideology have resulted in ugly demonstrations on campus and in the streets, as well as acts of antisemitic violence.
Students, along with allies on the far-left, including Antifa and BLM, have applauded Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis or denied it occurred at all. They lie relentlessly, blaming Israel for a “genocide” that is not happening and for bombing a hospital Israel did not bomb. As a direct result, Jewish individuals, institutions and neighborhoods have been targeted.
There are no easy solutions to this problem except for holding bigoted academics and their equally bigoted students responsible for their hatreds. Exposing their words and forcing them to act within the bounds of normal human decency is a good start.
The post The Academy Promotes Hamas first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel to Issue 54,000 Call-Up Notices to Ultra-Orthodox Students
Haredi Jewish men look at the scene of an explosion at a bus stop in Jerusalem, Israel, on Nov. 23, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Ammar Awad
Israel’s military said it would issue 54,000 call-up notices to ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students following a Supreme Court ruling mandating their conscription and amid growing pressure from reservists stretched by extended deployments.
The Supreme Court ruling last year overturned a decades-old exemption for ultra-Orthodox students, a policy established when the community comprised a far smaller segment of the population than the 13 percent it represents today.
Military service is compulsory for most Israeli Jews from the age of 18, lasting 24-32 months, with additional reserve duty in subsequent years. Members of Israel’s 21 percent Arab population are mostly exempt, though some do serve.
A statement by the military spokesperson confirmed the orders on Sunday just as local media reported legislative efforts by two ultra-Orthodox parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to craft a compromise.
The exemption issue has grown more contentious as Israel’s armed forces in recent years have faced strains from simultaneous engagements with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, and Iran.
Ultra-Orthodox leaders in Netanyahu’s brittle coalition have voiced concerns that integrating seminary students into military units alongside secular Israelis, including women, could jeopardize their religious identity.
The military statement promised to ensure conditions that respect the ultra-Orthodox way of life and to develop additional programs to support their integration into the military. It said the notices would go out this month.
The post Israel to Issue 54,000 Call-Up Notices to Ultra-Orthodox Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Influential Far-Right Minister Lashes out at Netanyahu Over Gaza War Policy
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich sharply criticized on Sunday a cabinet decision to allow some aid into Gaza as a “grave mistake” that he said would benefit the terrorist group Hamas.
Smotrich also accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of failing to ensure that Israel’s military is following government directives in prosecuting the war against Hamas in Gaza. He said he was considering his “next steps” but stopped short of explicitly threatening to quit the coalition.
Smotrich’s comments come a day before Netanyahu is due to hold talks in Washington with President Donald Trump on a US-backed proposal for a 60-day Gaza ceasefire.
“… the cabinet and the Prime Minister made a grave mistake yesterday in approving the entry of aid through a route that also benefits Hamas,” Smotrich said on X, arguing that the aid would ultimately reach the Islamist group and serve as “logistical support for the enemy during wartime”.
The Israeli government has not announced any changes to its aid policy in Gaza. Israeli media reported that the government had voted to allow additional aid to enter northern Gaza.
The prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The military declined to comment.
Israel accuses Hamas of stealing aid for its own fighters or to sell to finance its operations, an accusation Hamas denies. Gaza is in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe, with conditions threatening to push nearly a half a million people into famine within months, according to U.N. estimates.
Israel in May partially lifted a nearly three-month blockade on aid. Two Israeli officials said on June 27 the government had temporarily stopped aid from entering north Gaza.
PRESSURE
Public pressure in Israel is mounting on Netanyahu to secure a permanent ceasefire, a move opposed by some hardline members of his right-wing coalition. An Israeli team left for Qatar on Sunday for talks on a possible Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.
Smotrich, who in January threatened to withdraw his Religious Zionism party from the government if Israel agreed to a complete end to the war before having achieved its objectives, did not mention the ceasefire in his criticism of Netanyahu.
The right-wing coalition holds a slim parliamentary majority, although some opposition lawmakers have offered to support the government from collapsing if a ceasefire is agreed.
The post Influential Far-Right Minister Lashes out at Netanyahu Over Gaza War Policy first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Australia Police Charge Man Over Alleged Arson on Melbourne Synagogue
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to the media during a press conference with New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Aug. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tracey Nearmy
Australian police have charged a man in connection with an alleged arson attack on a Melbourne synagogue with worshippers in the building, the latest in a series of incidents targeting the nation’s Jewish community.
There were no injuries to the 20 people inside the East Melbourne Synagogue, who fled from the fire on Friday night. Firefighters extinguished the blaze in the capital of Victoria state.
Australia has experienced several antisemitic incidents since the start of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023.
Counter-terrorism detectives late on Saturday arrested the 34-year-old resident of Sydney, capital of neighboring New South Wales, charging him with offenses including criminal damage by fire, police said.
“The man allegedly poured a flammable liquid on the front door of the building and set it on fire before fleeing the scene,” police said in a statement.
The suspect, whom the authorities declined to identify, was remanded in custody after his case was heard at Melbourne Magistrates Court on Sunday and no application was made for bail, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported.
Authorities are investigating whether the synagogue fire was linked to a disturbance on Friday night at an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne, in which one person was arrested for hindering police.
The restaurant was extensively damaged, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an umbrella group for Australia’s Jews.
It said the fire at the synagogue, one of Melbourne’s oldest, was set as those inside sat down to Sabbath dinner.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog went on X to “condemn outright the vile arson attack targeting Jews in Melbourne’s historic and oldest synagogue on the Sabbath, and on an Israeli restaurant where people had come to enjoy a meal together”.
“This is not the first such attack in Australia in recent months. But it must be the last,” Herzog said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the incidents as “severe hate crimes” that he viewed “with utmost gravity.” “The State of Israel will continue to stand alongside the Australian Jewish community,” Netanyahu said on X.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese late on Saturday described the alleged arson, which comes seven months after another synagogue in Melbourne was targeted by arsonists, as shocking and said those responsible should face the law’s full force.
“My Government will provide all necessary support toward this effort,” Albanese posted on X.
Homes, schools, synagogues and vehicles in Australia have been targeted by antisemitic vandalism and arson. The incidents included a fake plan by organized crime to attack a Sydney synagogue using a caravan of explosives in order to divert police resources, police said in March.
The post Australia Police Charge Man Over Alleged Arson on Melbourne Synagogue first appeared on Algemeiner.com.