It's come to this: 'Jewish' university slammed for anti-Israel bias by Fox
Mr. Justice Brandeis has just taken another turn over in his grave. The 'Jewish' university that bears his name has just been
slammed for anti-Israel bias by Fox News, and justifiably so.
Boston's Brandeis University may have been founded by American Jews, but
it has become a hothouse of anti-Israel sentiment, according to Fox
News.
The TV news channel was referring to thousands of
electronic messages from Brandeis faculty that were obtained and
published by conservative students.
The messages, which were
distributed to academics on a closed mailing list known as a ListServ,
"reveal a long-standing and vehement anti-Israel bias and anger at Fox
News and a human rights advocate who renounced her Muslim faith,"
according to Fox.
The messages, Fox continues, "were hyperbolic
in their condemnation of Israel, regarding the recent fighting in Gaza
and prior conflicts with the Palestinians." They also include
"accusations that Israel has committed war crimes and 'holocaustic
ethnic cleansing' against Palestinians," Fox says.
...
Fox comments that the "one-sided view of the Middle East is not new
at the school, founded in 1948, the same year Israel was established,
with funding from the American Jewish community."
The ListServ in
question, titled “Concerned,” was started by faculty members in 2002
“out of concern about possible war with Iraq.” It has more than 90
subscribers and is used to correspond about current news, Israel, Jewish
people, America and world affairs in general.The messages also
include attacks on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist who survived
genital mutilation as a child in Somalia, renounced her Muslim faith
and now crusades against radical Islam, Fox writes. Ali was slated to
receive an honorary doctorate at Brandeis in April before the ceremony
was canceled amid campus protests.
Fox quotes a message from
Brandeis Professor of English Mary Baine Campbell, who apparently
described Ali as “an ignorant, ultra-right-wing extremist, abusively,
shockingly vocal in her hatred for Muslim culture and Muslims, a
purveyor of the dangerous and imaginary concept, born of European
distaste for the influx of immigrants from its former colonies… To call
her a ‘woman’s rights activist’ is like calling Squeaky Fromm an
environmentalist.’”
Brandeis president Frederick Lawrence
commented: “While we maintain our staunch support of freedom of
expression and academic inquiry, some remarks by an extremely small
cohort of Brandeis faculty members are abhorrent. Such statements, which
include anti-Semitic epithets, personal attacks, denigration of the
Catholic faith and the use of crude and vulgar terms in discussions
about Israel, do not represent the Brandeis community,” he wrote. “I
condemn these statements under no uncertain terms.”
Ah, but will Lawrence bring them up on disciplinary charges? Is there anyone to whom he could bring them up if he wanted to? Just yesterday, the University of Illinois voted to
deny a faculty position to someone who expressed similar sentiments. Is there any hope of this 'Jewish university' doing the same?
Read the whole thing. Shabbat Shalom everyone.
Labels: anti-Israel obsession, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Fox News, liberal academia, Louis Brandeis
Caroline Glick: American Jews have forgotten what freedom means
Caroline Glick rips the New York Jewish Federation and Brandeis University for their respective roles in the news this week. Caroline argues that the two incidents - Federation's insistence on allowing BDS groups to march in the Salute to Israel parade, and Brandeis' decision to cancel an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali - are symptomatic of American Jews having forgotten the main lesson of Passover:
what freedom means.
More and more, every day we see American Jews embracing intellectual
bondage. We see American Jewish leaders embracing the intolerant, who
seek to constrain freedom, and shunning those who fight for freedom and
the rights of Jews and other threatened peoples and groups.
To a large degree, this rejection of the lessons of the Exodus among the
American Jewish community reflects the growing intolerance and tyranny
of the political Left, to which most American Jews pledge their
allegiance.
With increasing frequency, leftist groups and leaders in the US are
openly acting to deny freedom of expression to their political and
ideological foes, and to destroy the lives of people who oppose their
dogma.
...
In Israel, the public understands that boycotts are about
mainstreaming hatred and bigotry just as much as they are about economic
strangulation. That is why in 2011 the Knesset passed the anti-boycott
law which allows all Israeli entities to sue groups calling for boycotts
against them for civil damages, and bars such groups from participating
in state tenders.
But in the American Jewish community, these groups are defended and legitimized.
Disgusted at their community leadership’s double standard of tolerance
and support for foes of Israel and intolerance for supporters of Israel,
a consortium of organizations and synagogues organized a protest
against the inclusion of anti-Israel organizations in the Israel Day
Parade.
After weeks of protests in the press and on social media sites, on
Tuesday some 200 people demonstrated outside the UJA-Federation building
in New York and demanded that the boycott supporters and abettors be
shunned.
It was an important act of defiance.
The group includes such stalwart organizations as Americans for a Safe
Israel, Americans for Peace and Tolerance, the Endowment for Middle East
Truth, JCC Watch, the National Conference on Jewish Affairs, and the
National Council of Young Israel.
These groups have joined together in the past to protest against
UJA-Federation funding of institutions such as the 92nd Street Y and the
New York JCC, which have provided platforms for Jew-haters and BDS
supporters.
Their protest was vital. It would be a tragedy if the thuggish behavior
of the Jewish community leaders went unopposed. But it is hard to see
how the protesters can change the situation.
The rot runs deep.
Consider Brandeis University’s craven and intolerant administration.
Brandeis was founded as a traditionally Jewish university in 1948, the year that Israel was established.
But whereas Israel has remained faithful to its sovereign duty to
cultivate and defend Jewish freedom and engender a liberal democracy,
over the years, Brandeis has largely abandoned its mission of standing
up to intolerance, and protecting Jewish rights and those of other
threatened groups.
Case in point is its obscene treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Hirsi Ali is a former Muslim who suffered genital mutilation as a child
in Somalia and at age 21 fled to Holland to avoid a forced marriage.
After liberating herself, Hirsi Ali could have settled into a quiet
European life. Instead, she dedicated her life to championing the rights
of women and girls in Islamic societies.
For the past decade, Hirsi Ali has lived under an Islamic death sentence for her work. She can go nowhere without bodyguards.
In 2006, despite her membership in the Dutch parliament, Hirsi Ali was
forced to flee to the US, when the Dutch government refused to continue
to protect her.
In the US, as in Holland, she continues to campaign for the rights of women and girls in Islamic society.
Most recently, she was the executive producer of a new documentary film
called Honor Diaries, which describes the plight of Muslim women and
girls living in societies where they risk murder at the hands of their
family members if they refuse to live in abject humiliation and
submission to the misogyny of Islamic law.
Several months ago, Brandeis offered to confer an honorary doctorate on Hirsi Ali for her work on behalf of women and girls.
When the leftist and Muslim thought police in the Brandeis student body
and faculty got wind of the university’s plan to honor her, they joined
forces with the Council on American-Islamic Relations to force the
administration to cancel the honorary degree.
CAIR claims to be a Muslim civil rights group. And yet, the group that
purports to care about the civil rights of Muslims is waging a
nationwide campaign to bar screenings of Honor Diaries, at universities
around the country.
When Fox News’s intrepid host Megyn Kelly asked CAIR leaders this week
how they can object to a film that seeks to help Muslims, they said they
don’t have a problem with its content. They object to the fact that it
was produced by Jews (also known as “Islamophobes”).
Far from being a civil rights group, CAIR is a pro- Hamas and Muslim
Brotherhood organization. It was an unindicted co-conspirator in the
Hamas financing trial against the Holyland Foundation.
And yet, on Wednesday, Brandeis sided with CAIR and the thought police,
against Hirsi Ali. Brandeis canceled its plan to confer its honorary
doctorate on her.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, BDS, Brandeis University, New York Jewish Federation, Salute to Israel Day Parade
What Ayaan Hirsi Ali would have said if Brandeis hadn't given in to the thought police
It's a pity that Brandeis University didn't live up to its seal of truth this week. As I reported earlier, they decided to
withdraw an honorary degree from Ayaan Hirsi Ali due to her criticism of Islam. The Wall Street Journal has
published the speech that Ms. Hirsi Ali planned to give. It's quite powerful (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
You deserve better memories than 9/11 and
the Boston Marathon bombing. And you are not the only ones. In Syria, at
least 120,000 people have been killed, not simply in battle, but in
wholesale massacres, in a civil war that is increasingly waged across a
sectarian divide.
Violence is escalating in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Libya,
in Egypt. And far more than was the case when you were born, organized
violence in the world today is disproportionately concentrated in the
Muslim world.
Another striking feature
of the countries I have just named, and of the Middle East generally, is
that violence against women is also increasing. In Saudi Arabia, there
has been a noticeable rise in the practice of female genital mutilation.
In Egypt, 99% of women report being sexually harassed and up to 80
sexual assaults occur in a single day.
Especially
troubling is the way the status of women as second-class citizens is
being cemented in legislation. In Iraq, a law is being proposed that
lowers to 9 the legal age at which a girl can be forced into marriage.
That same law would give a husband the right to deny his wife permission
to leave the house.
Sadly, the list
could go on. I hope I speak for many when I say that this is not the
world that my generation meant to bequeath yours. When you were born,
the West was jubilant, having defeated Soviet communism. An
international coalition had forced Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The next mission for American armed forces would
be famine relief in my homeland of Somalia. There was no Department of
Homeland Security, and few Americans talked about terrorism.
Two
decades ago, not even the bleakest pessimist would have anticipated all
that has gone wrong in the part of world where I grew up. After so many
victories for feminism in the West, no one would have predicted that
women's basic human rights would actually be reduced in so many
countries as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.
Today, however, I am going to predict a
better future, because I believe that the pendulum has swung almost as
far as it possibly can in the wrong direction.
When
I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban
and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an
absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating
the conviction of a group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel
more optimistic than I did a few years ago. The misnamed Arab Spring has
been a revolution full of disappointments. But I believe it has created
an opportunity for traditional forms of authority—including patriarchal
authority—to be challenged, and even for the religious justifications
for the oppression of women to be questioned.
Yet for that opportunity to be fulfilled, we in the West must provide
the right kind of encouragement. Just as the city of Boston was once the
cradle of a new ideal of liberty, we need to return to our roots by
becoming once again a beacon of free thought and civility for the 21st
century. When there is injustice, we need to speak out, not simply with
condemnation, but with concrete actions.
It's a pity that Brandeis betrayed its seal and gave in to the thought police.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, CAIR, Hamas, Islamophobia, Louis Brandeis, Muslim Brotherhood, political correctness
