The real McCarthyism is coming from those who accuse Isracampus and other campus watch groups, but it's...Charlie McCarthyism!

We have come to the conclusion here at IsraCampus that there is indeed a type of McCarthyism going on in Israel's taxpayer-supported academic community, but it's not the type suggested by the late Joseph McCarthy or what our opponents are suggesting about us.

It is, in fact, Charlie McCarthyism! For Israelis not familiar with him, Charlie was a famous ventriloquist's dummy who entertained Americans with his wooden head.

Charlie McCarthy[1] was very big on radio and spoke wisdom to the entire world. He was the dummy sitting on the lap of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's voice. Israeli academic bashers of Israel remind me of the wooden dummy. The academic fifth column in Israel's universities is also made up of dummies like Charlie McCarthy, whose words are more often than not inspired and led (or paid for) by an arm full of funding up the rear end.

A leftist non-academic named Benjamin Pogrund recently writing in Ha'Aretz[2] about IsraCampus said, "Israeli academics are being watched. Vigilantes check what they say or write - and, if they are judged 'anti-Israel,' incite donors to the universities and colleges where they teach to act against them. Students are encouraged to spy on their teachers and to report what they say." Pogrund then quotes Professor David Newman,[3] a geographer pretending to be a Political Scientist at Ben-Gurion University: "The academic McCarthyism of the right endangers Israeli democracy and society. It threatens the very basis of freedom of speech."

Pogrund and Newman are incensed that IsraCampus and other campus watch groups might expose to the public Israeli professors who promote the academic boycott of Israel's universities, or who work to support the dissolution of the Jewish state. Pogrund quotes David Newman in an interview on an Arab website[4] based in the EU: "I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign. What they are doing is very dangerous."

The term "McCarthyism" according to the dictionary is "the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, especially of pro-Communist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence." Named after the late US Senator Joseph McCarthy,[5] it referred to McCarthy's use of innuendo and false accusations of treason against his political enemies, whether they were based on facts and evidence or not.

IsraCampus' goal is let the world know about some of Israel's academics using the pretense of scholarship and academic freedom to aid Israel's enemies in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state. We do this by using what scholarship used to mean: the presentation of facts and citations. Including about the sources of funding of Israel's academic Fifth Column.

David Newman is hysterical and concerned that students tell administrators what their professors are saying in class, indoctrinating them[6] with seditious messages. He does not want the public to know about academic faculty members who support Arab terror groups, often in class. After all, today's student is tomorrow's college professor. Mathematician Koby Snitz, for example, seems to have learned how to be an anarchist when he studied at a Canadian university where anarchists were active against the war in Iraq. Today, back in Israel, he is a leader in "Anarchists Against the Wall" and has been arrested as a violent "human shield" for terrorism.

In the same Ha'Aretz article, Pogrund continued, "Academics on the left are the targets. They are vilified as 'Israel's academic fifth column' and 'our inner scourge.' They are called 'traitors' and are accused of 'treasonous betrayal' and of wanting 'to suck up to and be accepted by the enemy.'"

Of course, when these academics repeatedly support Hamas, while ignoring its charter to annihilate world Jewry and destroy Israel, or when they fabricate atrocities by IDF soldiers that didn't occur, or when they encourage boycotting Israel and Jews, just like the Nazis did, or when they openly call for the killing of Israeli soldiers, just what part of "treason" does Pogrund not understand?

Recently another accusation of "McCarthyism" against IsraCampus was printed in a German student newspaper.[7] The Germans, of course, have earned the moral right to criticize the Jews given their own track record in fighting occupation in Europe. Anat Matar, a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University provided this paper with a quote, claiming there that Israeli society "has become fascist" because groups like Isracampus point out to the Israeli public the antics of people like herself and Professor Newman. Matar also just wrote in Ha'Aretz[8] that Israel needs to release all terrorist murderers in its jails. In the past she was arrested for violently attacking Israeli soldiers.[9]

Senator Josephy McCarthy (www.fanpix.net/images)

We at Isracampus think that the real McCarthyists in Israeli academia are those who insist that sedition must always be protected speech while criticism of sedition must be suppressed. We think the real McCarthyists are the ones who insist that groups like Isracampus and NGO-Monitor be silenced, and that sanctions be imposed on those academics who work with such groups. The real McCarthyists insist that no one should be allowed to call traitors ...traitors, and no one should be allowed to refer to people who hate Jews ...as anti-Semites.

As just one example, we presented Bar-Ilan University Professor of History Ariel Toaff,[10] who wrote a book where he claims the Blood Libel stories of the Middle Ages in Italy are true. Judaism forbids the use of blood, but Toaff wrote that Jews actually did use the blood of gentiles in rituals. His proof? There were Jews who confessed to this under torture, so it must have been true. Only later did we find that Toaff's book and website were being paid for and promoted by a pro-jihad Muslim web organization in the UK that calls for Israel's demise. After this became known, Toaff recanted a bit, but not enough[11] to sever support from the financial source in the EU behind promoting his career and book.

Then we have Tel Aviv University Law Professors Kenneth Mann and Sari Baschi[12] who co-run the pro-Palestinian NGO, Gisha, funded by an American NGO that gets its money from Saudi Arabia.

Along comes Tel Aviv University History Professor Shlomo Sand[13] touted for his pseudo-history claiming that the Jewish people is an "invention," a hoax. This hard-core communist insists that a Jewish people do not exist, and such a people is a 19th century fabrication designed to take land from the Palestinian Arabs (who, it goes without saying, ARE a real people!). Sand is now touring universities worldwide saying that Israel's founding was "rape." His historical "research," and we use that term here very loosely, is fantasy, leaving out things like historical facts about Jewish history. Sand has been a lifelong member of Israel's communist party since the age of 16. Yeah, yeah, we know, it is McCarthyist on our part to mention this little bit of trivia.

Political science professor Menachem Klein[14] is from Bar-Ilan University. He spoke recently in Washington at a forum of the Council for the National Interest.[15] This long-time anti-Semitic organization, founded by the openly anti-Semitic, ex-Senator James Abourezk, is funded also by Saudi Arabia. Yet Klein spoke before them in large part in order to support their propaganda activities against any "exclusively Jewish" state. 22 exclusively Arab states are not enough for them.

There is no shortage of Israeli "academics" in bed with various communist parties. Professor Moshe Machover[16] in London is so ardently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel that he even takes the breath away of the Trotskyites there,[17] who believe there's room in a communist society even for the Jews. Ilan Pappe,[18] another pseudo-scholar and former member of Israel's communist party, was involved in the fabrication of a PhD thesis that invented a massacre of Arabs in 1948 that never happened.

For some of them, stoking anti-Semitism is a way to ingratiate themselves as much as possible with the oil backed Arab movement against Israel. Why else would a Neve Gordon,[19] political science department head at Ben Gurion University, be a personal human shield for the late butcher of Jews, Yasser Arafat, serve as a sycophant marketer of Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein, or make a career of supporting the worst of Israel's enemies?[20] There is fame and money even in infamy.

Is it really "McCarthyism" to expose professors who are helping the enemies of Israel? Advocating for peace or negotiations is one thing, even in foolish and naïve ways; but issuing calls for the end of the Jewish state or for students to refuse to do military service is quite another. When they do this then they are little more than propagandists and subversives, working against their own country. "Academic freedom" should not be a ruse for totalitarian movements to destroy a democratic state.

According to the American Association of University Professors in their 1940 statement on academic freedom,[21] the term "academic freedom" has three important ideas behind it:

1. Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.

2. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.

3. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

The members of Israel's academic Fifth Column are involved in none of the above. They are involved in brainwashing in the classroom and in political activism disguised as scholarship. They pass off their hate propaganda as research and scholarship.

Any academic who rationalizes this pseudo-scholarship is undercutting academic freedom and academic standards. Consider that award given at Hebrew University for a sociology PhD dissertation[22] setting out to prove that IDF soldiers never rape Arab women because they are such anti-Arab racists. Some things are so stupid that only academics can invent them!

When Anat Biletzki[23] as a leader of B'Tselem declared the late Hamas founder and chief Ahmad Yassin, who ordered the deaths of over 350 Israelis, was actually a "civilian" "murdered" by the Israeli government, or when she declares to her students that they should not serve in the IDF, then that is perversion of academic freedom. Why should Israeli taxpayers have to pay for such hate speech?.

When Ilan Pappe and a doctoral student under him received $6,000 from the PLO to fabricate that phony massacre in Tantura[24] in 1948, when Ariel Toaff gets free personal worldwide publicity for medieval blood libels, when Shlomo Sand travels to proclaim before crowds that the Jewish people do not exist, when the European or the Saudis fund anti-Israel "research" or pay salaries to IDF deserters to bring them to campuses, then "academic freedom" is being murdered.

There is indeed a type of McCarthyism going on in Israel's taxpayer-supported academic community. It is in the form of a McCarthyist pseudo-academic assault against Israel and against critics of fanatical anti-Zionists.
 

Footnotes

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bergen

[2] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1123061.html

[3] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ BGU%20-%20David%20Newman%20-%20Abu%20Dhabi.htm

[4] http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091116/ FOREIGN/711159922

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

[6] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ TAU%20-%20TAU%20official%20comes%20forward.htm

[7] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ BGU%20-%20David%20Newman%20-%20German%20website%20 attacks%20IsraCampus%20as%20McCarthyite.htm

[8] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU% 20-%20Anat%20Matar%20-%20pardons%20treason%20and%20murder.htm

[9] http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:UOrEas6DHxYJ:hnn.us/ roundup/entries/19086.html+Anat+MAtar+%2B+DEpartment+of+ sychology+at+TAU&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

[10] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial% 20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Ariel%20Toaff.htm

[11] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Ariel%20Toaff.htm

[12] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20%20Kenneth%20Mann%20 and%20Sari%20Bashi.htm

[13] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ Editorial%20-%20Seth%20Frantzman%20-%20Shlomo%20Sand.htm

[14] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Menachem%20Klein.htm

[15] http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6601

[16] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial% 20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Moshe%20Machover.htm

[17] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Moshe%20Machover.htm

[18] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ outside%20Israel%20-%20Exeter%20-%20Ilan%20Pappe%20-%20 book%20review.htm

[19] http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http:// www.ynetnews.com/PicServer/130102/168774/949_a.jpg&imgrefurl= http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3765612,00.html&usg= __h6oo6QugkdreYqv3k5uiyXepS-4=&h=116&w=116&sz=5&hl= en&start=58&tbnid=-MnvqHKLJ

[20] http://frontpagemag.com/2009/10/13/collaborators-in-the- campus-war-against-israel-and-the-jews-neve-gordon-by-john-perazzo/

[21] http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/ 1940statement.htm

[22] http://www.israel-academia-monitor.com/index.php?type =large_advic&advice_id=5993&page_data%5Bid%5D=7825&cookie_ lang=en&the_session_id=950ba21d507ccab05052d5abb1143c69& BLUEWEBSESSIONSID=51dcf3013206b05cffcd914a3b494900

[23] http://israel-academia-monitor.com/index.php?type= large_advic&advice_id=5732&page_data%5bid%5d=174&cookie_lang= en&the_session_id=31056e325ce64d9b95add94c6390066e

[24] http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/ Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Ilan%20Pappe%20-%20exports% 20hatred%20and%20lies.htm
 

Lee Kaplan is an investigative journalist. He is also a regular columnist for Front Page Magazine, the Israel National News and a senior intelligence analyst and communications director for the Northeast Intelligence Network. He can be reached at: leekaplan@worldnet.att.net This article comes from the IsraCampus Organization, which monitors Israel's academic fifth column and follows anti-Israel extremism on the Israeli campus. It is archived at
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20 Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Israeli%20taxpayer%20paid%20McCarthyism.htm

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