A PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY TURNS HIMSELF INTO AN OBJECT OF STUDY
by Bernice Lipkin
Micah Leshem is a professor of psychology at Haifa University.
He has long been on the Masada 2000 List of Jews who hate Judaism and especially despise Israel.[1] They write of him, "He also supported Tali Fahima,[2] views Israel as being similar to Iran and North Korea and called upon the International Community to 'pay close attention to events that unfold within Israel and in the Occupied Territories, to make it absolutely clear that crimes against humanity will not be tolerated, and to take concrete measures to prevent such crimes from taking place' and called upon 'all those who oppose occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, who are committed to justice and peace, who are willing to speak truth to power, to: that governments end military assistance to Israel, suspend economic ties, and support the prosecution of war criminals, and urge other states to do so.'" In other words, until recently, he's been a run-of-the-mill Israeli Marxist academic, committed to non-Jewish underdogs and willing to exaggerate, misinform, tell plain and fancy lies, in order to paint Israel as engaging in crimes against humanity. He hasn't seemed a bit worried about what will become of him, should the Arabs ever gain their objective of destroying Israel and all the Jews in it.
A student of the impact of trans-generational stress in mice, he has now made himself into an object of study for those interested in examining severe cognitive impairment.
His bias against Jews appears to have reach the point where it affects his sense of reality. His prejudices have affected other aspects of life. We don't know whether his conclusions from his scientific work are now unreliable. But it is clear that in his state of reconstructed reality, he attributes goodness only to the Arabs and only evil to Jews, and he doesn't mind sharing his lack of good judgment with everyone with access to the internet.
This is a cartoon executed by him that makes clear his mental aberration. His cognitive dysfunction is manifested in this obscene product of irrational and inverted reasoning.[3]. It appeared on Rete-Eco, a website devoted to articles that are comforting to 'Hebrews against the Occupation'. Predictably, Rete-Eco sides with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; it sees Hassan Rouhani's election as Iran's president as a new beginning in Iran's stated quest for energy for domestic use. It is indignant that "Israel will build a new settlement 'neighborhood' in the heart of occupied East Jerusalem." It condemns the ADL for pointing out that East Jerusalem is in Israel. It believes the Palestinian Authority is entitled to East Jerusalem as its capitol — for starters. Heshem's bizarre cartoon appeared there July 18, 2013 and was apparently updated June 24, 2013.
Ignore the poor technical construction and lack of artistry of the
"cartoon". The text reads, "We have no preconditions for peace
negotiations, why do the Palestinians ask for preconditions?" It
portrays four smirking Jews having a grand time hacking up a
defenseless human — presumably an innocent Palestinian Arab. It is a
classic case of misassigned associations, in that subject and object
are exchanged.
THE PSYCHOTIC PATIENT MAY ACCUSE OTHERS OF THINKING EVIL THOUGHTS about him. If he harms someone, the other person fostered or forced the bad behavior he exhibits. It is never his fault, even if it means laboriously rewriting events and distorting what actually did happen.
A talent for inversion can characterize a culture. The Palestinians had made inversion an art form. Though they blow up pizza parlors and desecrate Jewish holy places, throw rocks at cars driving by and stab children sleeping in their beds, they insist they are the victims. Shamelessly, they have appropriated Jewish history and have convinced themselves it's theirs. They insist it is the Arabs that have an ancient attachment to the Temple Mount, not the Jews. And to help the story along, they have been destroying Jewish artifacts from the First and Second Temple. Though most of them — starting with their (great) grandparents — came into Israel, Samaria and Judea after 1900, they are convinced this was their country from time immemorial. With that fantasy to sustain them, it becomes easy for them to believe Israel is occupying their land.
In fact, the entire propaganda campaign of the Arabs and their groupies is based on an inversion of the facts. Professor Paul Merkley put it this way:[4]
"The latest breakthrough in the PA's propaganda offensive has been its success in establishing in the minds of our scholars, our leaders of opinion and, with truly resounding success, our churchmen the counter-factual theorem that Palestine is ancient and distinguished while Israel is a fraud. Here is the syllogism:
Palestine is real; Palestine has always been here; the Palestinian People have always been here.
Israel is not real. Israel is an invention of the mid-Twentieth century AD, the product of European imperialism, foisted upon the world by a Zionist conspiracy in control of international diplomacy.
"The contempt for Zionism in the company of opinion elites in the West, where all lines of argument that belittle Israel's right to exist are accepted as authentic without examination, explains the great success that Mahmoud Abbas and his fellow Palestinian statesmen have encountered with this syllogism.
"Palestinian Authority TV News hews consistently to the PA policy of denying the history of Jewish presence in Jerusalem and in particular the existence at any time of a Jewish Temple. Palestinian 'historiography' (if sheer assertion without reference to any documentary or archeological evidence can be dignified by such a term) asserts that until the day before yesterday the Jews, or Israelis, call them what you will, never resided in this area, never had a Kingdom, never had a temple. Among recent lunatic examples are: 'Moses was a Muslim who led Muslims in Exodus from Egypt [which was]... the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine' ... and 'There never was a Temple.'"[5]
IN A MILDER FORM, THE INVERSION OF THE CARTOON IS EMBLEMATIC of much of anti-Israel propaganda, where the news media ignore the initial Arab provocations — which may have been allowed to run for an extended period of time — and put the eventual Israeli response at time zero. making the Israelis the villainous precipitators and attackers, not the victims. The reporters can then weep over any and all Arab dead and wounded, who of course were blameless when attacked by the nasty Jews.
As I write this on August 26, 2003, we've just learned that an undercover Border Police anti-terrorism group entered Qalandiya around 3 to 4 A.M. Monday morning with warrent to re-arrest a wanted terrorist, Yousef Al-Khatib.
To refresh your understanding of terminology: in an area in the Territories controlled by Israel, a large Jewish town, complete with functioning infrastructure, educational facilities, synagogues and business districts is a settlement. This helps us visualize the town as new, shoddy and temporary. Arab Qalandiya just outside Jerusalem is where Israeli Arabs went to wait in 1948 until their fellow Arabs killed off their Jewish neighbors. They were still there during the time the area fell under Jordanian control. When Israel gained the area in 1967, they continued to be UNRWA "refugees." Situated in an area controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Qalandiya is an Arab town with large apartment houses built of concrete, markets, etc. Calling it a refugee camp is useful in that it invokes images of destitute families living in tents.
The police were ambushed by the law-abiding citizens of the town, who got wind of their arrival. A mob of some 1500, give or take a couple of knifers and stoners, stood on the rooftops and hurled metal sticks, stone slabs, firebombs, satellite dishes and rocks at them. Outnumbered, they called in the IDF, which eventually shot live bullets to disperse the crowd, killing three. As many of the comments said, "What! Just three." It is clear that, statistically speaking, the Arabs have nothing to fear by rioting, at least not in the Israeli Territories. They are more likely to trip over one of their rocks or get crushed as the mob surges than get shot dead by an IDF soldier.
This has been presented on inagist, a re-tweet website, as "This morning, 3 Palestinians shot to death in Qalandiya - #IDF says ask Border Police about it, BP says ask IDF about it #Israel #Jpost."[6] Admittedly, telegram-length messages are limited in how much information they can convey. But as Steven Plaut pointed out[7], "If you are watching the television news on non-Israeli channels, what you will learn from them is that a group of Israeli soldiers burst into Qalandiya and for no possible reason at all started harassing and attacking innocent 'Palestinians' who were simply standing around and minding their business."
The typical headline — the one from the Ma'an News Agency as example — reads "Israeli forces kill 3 Palestinians in Qalandia camp."[8] A relatively mild report. "Palestine Negotiators Cancel Peace Talks with Israel After West Bank Killings" by Gianluca Mezzofiore[9] at International Business Times, starts with this picture:
In paragraph 4 we finally learn that "Clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians erupted after officers on a raid to catch terrorist suspects were confronted by 1,500 Palestinians who attacked them with firebombs and rocks."
The Guardian, inter alia, can always be counted on to put the worst — and usually most inaccurate — face on the news. I have read that one of the men shot, Younis Jamal Jahjouh, was a terrorist and among those released in exchange for the return of Gilad Shalit. That may be the grain that The Guardian turned into a pearl, when it asserted that the IDF shot them deliberately.[10]
And some pusillanimous Jewish newspapers[11] said the IDF fired because they felt threatened, even though the Arabs hadn't fired on them. Apparently stone slabs, metal sticks and firebombs don't count. (Actually, as we later learned, the Arabs did fire automatic rifles.) The police felt threatened because they were threatened by a very nasty bunch of people. What might have been a quiet operation to arrest a terrorist became a scene of mob violence. It isn't known who gathered so many people so late at night so quickly. But once begun, the rioting proved to be so much fun, it continued — with a short break for funerals.
Leave it to the LA Times[12] to spell out how Israeli killings have escalated. They announced that "[t]he number of Palestinians killed by Israel security forces has more than tripled this year over last; including Monday's deaths, 13 Palestinians have been killed in 2013, compared with four for the same period in 2012." Outrageous isn't it — Israel has tripled the number of killings of innocent Palestinian Arabs in only one year. Why, even the wicked Assad hasn't doubled the number of dead Syrians in months — it's only gone up from 70,000 to 100,000 — which is only a little more than a 25% increase, not the 300% rise in deaths due to evil Israel.
PM Abbas ex officio immediately said he was canceling the "peace talks."[13] But John Kerry is unlikely to take kindly to have gone to bed with dreams of the sugar plum of a Nobel Peace Prize whirling around his head and waken to find the Arabs have pulled one of their most useful shtick — they let their opponents climb on the magical carpet that will transport them to peace and then they pull the rug from under them. We should be hearing soon that the Israelis have caved in and offered yet another concession for the privilege of surrendering Biblical Israel to a phony people run by an illegal coterie.
COMING BACK TO DR. LESHEM and his creation, I wonder why someone whose profession is to gather actual facts and presumably draw rational conclusions from them would draw and then publish a cartoon that is so far from reality?
On some level he must know mutilation, hacking limbs and beheading aren't a Jewish thing. They are, of course classically Arab, favored by Arab governments and the Arab man in the street. Somewhere in the bowels of his brain pan, Micah LeShem probably knows that it is the Saudis that hack off hands for minor theft, not the Jews. It is the Palestinian Authority that mutilates Arabs denounced as collaborators with Israel, not the Jews. It is the Salafist terrorists who delight in beheading their victims — it makes them feel ever so much closer to their hero, Muhammad, the perfect man, who urged his followers to strike off the heads of unbelievers.[14] Beheading is still so popular among even sophisticated Arabs that in the USA, Muzzammil Syed Hassan, CEO of Bridges TV, prevented his wife from divorcing him by beheading her.[15]
Recall what happened when two Israeli reservists lost their way and were brought to the Police Station in Ramallah. They were mutilated, their organs removed and then dragged through the street. Members of the gathered mob (AKA townsmen of Ramallah) were photographed eating the organs and exhibiting their blood-smeared hands at the window.[16] More recently, a member of the Syrian rebel force scooped out the heart of the man he'd just killed and chomped on it.[17] In another recorded incident, a head was severed and then grilled [18]
Yet in Leshem warped mind, it is Israeli Jews who mutilate, torture and salivate over their helpless victim.
Is it possible that he has no stomach for such brutality? Is there a dissonance between his pro-Palestinian commitment and their barbaric behavior? If so, is there conflict between his commitment to the Arabs and his suppressed awareness that they have a sick culture? One solution would be to use the Jews as his scapegoat, to tar them with the psychological aberrations he sees in the Arab culture. This would allow him to maintain a vision of the Arabs as pure in heart and peaceful in intent.
Maybe we should view his peculiar behavior as an intra-generation result of overwhelming stress due to loving evil people.
Not even the Arabs — whose paranoia about Israel extends to believing migratory birds are Israeli Mossad agents — have accused Israelis of such barbaric behavior. It took a Jew to think this one up. It was one of Israel's own who inverted subject and object, persecutor and victim. A Professor of Psychology yet.
Only in Israel.
End Notes
[1] http://www.masada2000.org/list-L.html
[2] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/137956#.UlJg1Kz8iJM]
[3] http://rete-eco.it/2012/en/news/israeli-opposition/38294-no-preconditions.html
[4] "Wanting it more than the parties themselves," Jerusalem
Post International edition, July 26, 2013.
http://www.cijr.com/paul-merkley-latest-me-peace-process-doomed
[5] All quotations are from recent proclamations of Palestinian imams on PATV.
[6] http://inagist.com/all/371904319785664512/
[7] http://stevenplaut.blogspot.com/2013_08_01_archive.html, item: August 26, 2013.
[8] http://blog.theheadlines.org/thehead/?m=20130825
[9] http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/501543/20130826/pa-cancels-peace-talks-meeting-israel-killings.htm, August 26, 2013.
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/26/palestinians-shot-dead-israel-funerals
[11] http://e.g., www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4422487,00.html
[12] http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-raid-israel-palestinians-talks-20130826,0,4764575.story
[13] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=624158
[14] As an example, Mohammed beheaded all the men of the Banu Quraiza tribe, a Jewish tribe living peacefully in Medina until Mohammad showed up. See Quran 47:4 "when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), strike off their heads; at length; then when you have made wide Slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives."
[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzammil_Hassan
[16] http://www.think-israel.org/freerepublic.octoberramallahlynch.html
[17] http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/world/meast/syria-eaten-heart/index.html
[18] http://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fsa-grill-officers-original.jpg
Bernice Lipkin is managing editor of Think-Israel. This article was submitted August 27, 2013.
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