Israel Matzav: Hypocrisy at UCSD

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Hypocrisy at UCSD

Many of you remember the David Horowitz tape in which a Muslim student at the University of California at San Diego admits that she would like to see all the Jews in Israel so that they can (God forbid) be wiped out together. This week, an attempt to call out anti-Israel groups at UCSD nearly fell apart when the local campus newspaper, the UCSD Daily Guardian, refused to publish an editorial that was signed on by 28 professors on the campus. Fortunately, StandWithUs and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East came up with the money to pay for the editorial to be published as an advertisement.

Here's some of that editorial (the full editorial is at the previous link).

The current maelstrom in the Mideast has laid bare for all to see the reality that, by any objective measure, the greatest human rights abuses suffered by the greatest number of Muslims and Arabs have been inflicted by the despotic regimes of the Mideast’s 17 Arab countries and Iran, and not, as the MSA, ASU and SJP would have us believe, by Israel, the only country in the entire region consistently rated by Freedom House International as bestowing full civil and political liberties upon its Jewish and Arab citizens.

So, if hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims have suffered severe, long-standing repression throughout the Mideast, as is now highly evident, why then have those students who relentlessly pounce on every action and policy of Israel—which comprises 0.04% of the Mideast—been deafeningly silent all these years regarding the egregious injustices occurring in the other 99.96% of the Mideast? Why haven’t the websites and Facebook pages of the MSA, ASU and SJP been abuzz with plans for social activism and moral outrage over the murder of civilians who are fighting to gain liberty in Arab countries as they always are when Israel exercises self-defense by striking at Palestinian terrorist groups who launch rockets at its civilians from Gaza or when it erects barriers to block suicide bombers? Are those students simply less moved by injustices carried out by Arabs and Muslims against their own people? Or is it possible that human rights and social justice have been hijacked by these groups for use as expedient intellectual weapons in the service of a culturally driven agenda—to bludgeon the Jewish state? In this regard we do well to heed the assertion of Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, “What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state” and “ending the existence of Israel.”

Critical debate is a cherished mainstay of universities, and Israel should, by no means, be above reproach. As a small and isolated democratic nation in a highly volatile geopolitical environment, some of its actions and policies will surely be considered misguided by fair-minded citizens of other nations, as they are by many Israeli citizens—a fact reflected in Israel’s vibrant free press. However, as pointed out by Natan Sharansky, the respected Israeli human rights activist and former Soviet political prisoner, one test of malevolently motivated criticism of Israel is the “double standards” test—criticism of Israel that is applied selectively.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: BDS, Israeli apartheid week, University of California at San Diego