Mark LeVine

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By Steven Plaut

Over the past decade the University of California at Irvine has become a center of Israel hatred and Jew bashing. It hosts countless radical Islamist events, many openly supportive of terror and jihad. Its chapter of the Muslim Student Union may be the most openly jihadi and pro-terror in the country. Its anti-Israel and anti-Jewish events have included a conference on the “Holocaust,” the one its organizers claim Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians. UCI holds regular events in which anti-Semitic speakers call for Israel’s annihilation. Moslem students walk about campus with signs that read: “Death to Infidels. Death to Israel.” Faculty and students attend UCI rallies that openly support the Hamas. Anti-Semitism at UCI has been so blatant that it was the subject of an official investigation by the US Office for Civil Rights. The atmosphere at UCI is so rancid that few eyebrows were raised when an impersonator of a Holocaust Survivor brought in to bash Israel.

And right in the center of all this is UCI Professor Mark LeVine, who claims to be an expert in Middle East history. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I myself taught at UCI for a while in the late 1990s. Back then UCI was a calm apolitical campus consisting of students, with a large percentage of Asian-Americans, mainly interested in advancing their careers. But in the years since, UCI has become a den of Islamist extremism, a development in which LeVine has been deeply implicated.

Mark LeVine was made full professor by UCI in record time, in an unprecedented rush after he finished his PhD at NYU in 1999 and then did a post-doc at Cornel. He was hired in large part on the basis of publications that would not be considered bona fide research at many institutions. Some of his writings about the Middle East should be shelved in the library’s fiction section. Others are just plain wacky, like his book and articles claiming that Heavy Metal rock and roll music is in the process of converting Moslem civilization into peace loving societies.1
LeVine’s “academic record” consists largely of churning out Bash-Israel books and articles, together with numerous Bash-America and Bash-Capitalism diatribes. Many of these have been mocked savagely by serious Middle East scholars. Martin Kramer dismisses LeVine as little more than a fringe figure.

While hardly the only Israel-hating extremist at UCI, LeVine has built an academic career on it in a way that others have not. There are few anti-Israel or pro-jihad events at UCI in which he is not somehow involved. LeVine regularly addresses the anti-Semitic Hate Rallies at UCI organized by the student supporters of Hezb’Allah and al-Qaeda, in which Jews are denounced as “Zio-nazis.” LeVine rationalizes and defends the UCI intifada, and blames violence and tensions at the UCI campus on the malevolent Zionist Lobby. The local Orange County Register cites his view that “The only thing that would satisfy the critics now would be if they expelled every Muslim student and painted stars of David on all the buildings.” ‘

For LeVine Israel is entirely to blame for ALL of the violence in the Middle East conflict. Israel also constitutes a “belligerent,” “autocratic,” and “violent” regime that should receive no support at all from the West. LeVine is a leading voice in the call for a so-called “One State Solution,” in which Israel will cease to exist altogether and will be enfolded within a larger Arab Islamic Palestinian state. LeVine has not only led the movement to boycott and divest from Israel, but has insisted that it does not go far enough. Unsurprisingly, LeVine insists that he takes his positions for Israel’s own good.

When not turning out anti-Israel propaganda, misrepresented as academic research, LeVine plays his electric guitar He named his own home web page (and we are not making this up!) www.culturejamming.org. Years ago he rearranged his family name, Levine, into the pseudo-French “LeVine,” evidently because he is ashamed at being a descendent of the Biblical tribe of Levi. His “scholarly” writings include all the fringe venues that combine 60s hippy nonsense with far-left politics, and so they range from Mother Jones to ZNET to Tikkun Magazine He has published in the “Journal of Palestine Studies,” which is a propaganda magazine controlled by the PLO. In his bio he claims that he “lived next door to Hamas mosques, stood against bulldozers, dodged terrorist bombs, and uncovered damning files in dusty archives. He knows the history, politics, religions and most important, the peoples of the region as a friend, but with a highly critical eye.”

LeVine is a proud groupie of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Scholar Robert Spencer describes him as being “guilty of the very crime that his revered Said leveled so devastatingly against the genuine scholars he smeared as racist “Orientalists”: he sees America and the West as the only real actor on the world stage, and discounts or overlooks altogether (even as he chats with them in their native tongues) what the indigenous peoples are saying — except insofar as it confirms the Leftist caricature of America victimizing the world for its economic benefit.” LeVine’s sources in his “research” consist in large part of citations from other anti-Israel hate propagandists, including radical anti-Israel academics from Israel, whom LeVine routinely celebrates. This is a bit like doing research on United States history and politics that consists entirely of citations from Ward Churchill and Michael Moore.

LeVine routinely organizes anti-Israel “scholarly conferences” at UCI, which are little more than anti-Israel indoctrination camps. No dissident pro-Israel opinion may be expressed in them. The standard LeVine format is to include Arab haters of Israel alongside Israeli far-leftist anti-Israel radicals, and then present the invariable bashing of Israel as the consensus position of both Jews and Arabs seeking peace. Among the Israelis who have been included in LeVine “panels” have been Oren Yiftachel, a geographer and fanatic anti-Zionist from Ben Gurion University, best known for his endless rants against Israeli “apartheid,” and Yoav Peled, a hard-core Stalinist Israeli professor of Political Science from Tel Aviv University.

For LeVine, Israel is a vicious fascist monstrosity that randomly beats and murders people, and not just Palestinians. He writes, “Not just Palestinian activists, but foreign peace activists and even Israelis are routinely beaten, arrested, deported, or even killed by the IDF, with little fear that the Government of Israel would pay a political price for crushing non-violent resistance with violent means.”

LeVine compares Israel’s military defense of its civilians from Palestinian rockets to the German demolition of the Warsaw Ghetto. LeVine has even discovered concentration camps in the Middle East run by Israel. He writes in Aljazeera: “The Gaza ghetto is a `concentration camp’ – as Cardinal Renato Martino, the Vatican’s justice and peace minister, termed it – intended to force Palestinians to accept a rump state with a few trappings of sovereignty, bisected by huge Jewish settlement blocs, severed from East Jerusalem, and without hope for returning anything but a miniscule percentage of refugees to their homeland.” He claims that Israel conducts a “slave trade” and one of his graduate students (Vanessa Zuabi) composed an entire dissertation devoted to that theme under LeVine’s careful direction.

Not surprisingly, Levine’s books have been mocked savagely by serious Middle East scholars. Writing in the Middle East Quarterly, Prof. Fred M. Gottheil says that LeVine got just about everything wrong in his book, “Overthrowing Geography.” He adds: “LeVine, … believes that Arab peasants in 1920s Palestine had it good until the Zionists sneaked in, bringing with them modern technology and loads of cash. The end result was the destruction of Arab economic well-being. LeVine does not mince words: In the setting of Jaffa and Tel-Aviv, Zionists `pulverized’ the Arabs with `the power of penetrating modernity.’ The founding of Tel Aviv, he claims, `erased’ numerous surrounding villages. He provides maps, tables, figures, posters, poems, drawings, and archival excerpts to make the point. Except that he fails to make his point. The maps he offers, in fact, undermine his contention.”

In his pseudo-history of Tel Aviv written for Aljazeera.net, LeVine writes, “Despite its image of diversity and vibrancy, Tel Aviv has long been a site of significant intercommunal violence. The first major Jewish-Palestinian riots erupted along the border between the two towns in 1921, as did the Arab Revolt of 1936-39.” Leave it to LeVine to obfuscate about the fact that those riots were Arab pogroms against Jews, and not Jewish violence against Arabs. Elsewhere, LeVine describes the 1929 pogroms against Jews as “riots” caused by the racist evil of Jews, who dared to pray at the Western Wall: “An attempt by Jewish worshippers to change religious protocol at the Western or Wailing Wall was the spark for the `riots’ of 1929. The underlying cause for the conflict was, however, the increasing competition for land between the burgeoning Zionist population and Palestinian peasants.”

Dozens of LeVine diatribes against Israel and against the United States have been published on the pro-jihad pro-terror Aljazeera.net web sit. In one, LeVine calls for an international indictment of President Bush before the International Criminal Court alongside Sudan’s genocidal president. In others he denounces the United States for an endless list of “war crimes” and human rights abuses In LeVine’s words:

“While the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – for which Bush, and along with him, the American people who twice elected him, are responsible – is tragic, it should not be understated that the invasion itself was a crime against humanity. The war and invasion were in clear breach of the UN charter, which prohibits invading other countries except when an attack on one’s sovereign territory is about to occur or has just occurred. Add to that US torturing of prisoners, illegal secret renditions, and a host of other human rights abuses, and you have a long list of actions that are prohibited and outlawed by US federal law.”

It is not surprising that LeVine is a charter member of Iraq Occupation Watch. In the Huffington Post he let readers know what he thinks about Americans in his review of the Borat movie: “It’s that he reveals to Americans just how brutish and ugly we can be underneath our veneer of civility and hospitality. Of course, Iraqis have already discovered this the hard way, while the rest of the world has looked on in disgust. Let’s hope Americans get the message.” In yet another recent “cultural” diatribe, LeVine attacks the Toronto Film Festival in which films about Tel Aviv were screened. Evidently LeVine considers Tel Aviv to be occupied Palestinian territory, and so its very existence is a war crime against Arabs, unworthy of being celebrated in Toronto. He writes, “The festival narrative of Tel Aviv will make it harder for attendees to begin the much-needed conversations – within themselves as much as with others – about why Israel is rushing headlong into a future of full-blown apartheid that other former settler colonial societies have worked hard to escape.” Naturally, he routinely refers to Israel’s security barrier, built to keep Palestinian suicide bombers and other mass murderers away from Israeli civilians, as Israel’s “Apartheid Wall.” Intifada violence and terrorism are “symbolic” and little more than a muscular form of protest in LeVine’s view.

LeVine defends his own Marxism-in-the-classroom thus: “As for teaching Marx, I’ve been known to do it on occasion, but so do most business schools.” He is addicted to infantile theories about cabals of capitalists plotting to control the world: “War and occupation are wonderful opportunities for corporations to make billions of dollars in profits, unchecked by the laws and regulations that hamper their profitability in peace time.” As Tzvi Kahn pointed out in Frontpage Magazine: “Not surprisingly, in many of his writings, LeVine deliberately places “war on terrorism” in quotation marks – the evil of airplanes destroying skyscrapers can hardly compare with the evil of capitalism destroying, well, communism.”

Soon after 9-11, LeVine’s expressed his real concern that the attacks might lead the United States to defend rather than blame itself. He wrote on the ultra-Marxist ZNET that he feared that “Americans would never face the causes of the extreme violence perpetrated against us by those whose oppression we have supported and even enforced, and engage in the honest introspection of what our role has been in generating the kind of hatred that turns commuter jets into cruise missiles.”

LeVine’s Muslims justly despise America because it is a criminal nation, but at the same time they do not dislike the Christian West or the United States at all, according his book Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil published by the obscure Oneworld Publications. There he argues that Muslims mainly don’t like globalization, just as he himself does not. Remember those subway train bombing in London? They were protests against globalization also, insists LeVine. He adds:

“Most Americans have never experienced globalization physically, materially, and spiritually, in the way that the majority of citizens of the developing–and especially Muslim–world have felt its effects. Globalization’s consequences for Muslims–massive politically and economically motivated population migrations, economic marginalization of the Muslim world, and intense cultural penetration and even military occupation by the forces of globalization in their home countries–all have created a potentially poisonous brew of alienation and rootlessness that groups like Al Qaeda expertly exploit to recruit new followers.”

Moreover, in bombing London al-Qaeda was just adopting and copying what large corporations do: “As a brand with its own `lifestyle’ and image attached to it, Al Qaeda is using the strategy developed by many of the biggest corporations in the global era. While in the 20th century, major industrial corporations such as General Motors or General Electric actually made the products they sold in their own factories, today, global corporations such as Nike or Microsoft are primarily brand-producers, engaging in research and development of products that are manufactured by others (mostly subcontractors in the developing world).”

In 2003, LeVine called for the United States to end its “war” against radical Islamofascism: “It is time for the United States to declare a truce with the Muslim world, and radical Islam in particular.” He frequently denounces the United States as a “criminal nation.”

LeVine is a supporter of the pro-terror “International Solidarity Movement” or ISM, which openly advocates Palestinian “armed resistance.” Writing in the far-left anti-Israel “Jewish” magazine Tikkun, he joined the lobby of disinformation after ISM terrorist-supporter Rachel Corrie committed suicide by diving in front of an Israeli bulldozer destroying terrorist smuggling tunnels: “She and the other human shields, like their colleagues in Iraq, are true soldiers of peace.” LeVine has endorsed the shallow wacky “Politics of Meaning” invented by Tikkun’s pseudo-rabbi editor Michael Lerner.

For LeVine, Hamas is simply misunderstood and its leaders are actually interested only in peace: “The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.”
For this “scholar,” the enemy of his enemies (Israel and the U.S.) is always a friend.





Front Page magazine

Neve Gordon

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By John Perazzo

The campus war against Israel and the Jews is led by a group of anti-Semites, many of them faculty members, who have made a career for themselves by traveling from one university to another supporting Arab terrorism. They invariably pretend that they are promoting peace. But in the Orwellian bubble where they live, Arab aggression and terror become self-defense, and Israeli self-defense becomes aggression and terror. Similarly, Israeli democracy is apartheid, while Arab genocide is liberation.

One of the most bizarre aspects of this campus war against the Jews is how numerous self-hating, anti-Semitic Jews are in the ranks of the movement to achieve the annihilation of Israel. For reasons that only a psychiatrist could fully understand, these people use their birthright to give authenticity to the campaign of delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. Today the leading promoters of “divestment” and of boycotting Israel are academic Jewish leftists, some of them from Israel itself. In a few extreme cases, this detestation of Israel is combined with a fawning courtship of Islamic terrorists, American and European Neo-Nazis, and even Holocaust Deniers.
One of these anti-Semitic Jews is Dr. Neve Gordon, chairman of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev. During the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1991), Gordon served as director of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, an organization that consistently condemns Israeli military reprisals against Palestinian terrorists while turning a blind eye to the homicidal atrocities committed by the terrorists themselves. In 1999 Gordon earned a Ph.D. from Notre Dame University. Before joining the BGU faculty, he worked variously as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the Watson Institute at Brown University.

Though he is an Israeli citizen, Gordon invariably sides with Israel’s enemies in the ongoing Mideast conflict. During the siege of Ramallah in 2002, for instance, he barricaded himself with Yasser Arafat, the terrorist responsible for the deaths of more Jews than any human being since Adolf Hitler. For years, Gordon has been referring to Israel as a fascist, terrorist, “apartheid” state that “resembles Nazi Germany.” He has posted numerous writings on Holocaust-denial websites. And he has repeatedly advocated a “one state” solution, in which Israel, by way of the so-called Palestinian “right of return,” would be inundated with Arab “refugees” whose inevitable political supremacy would spell the de facto end of Israel.

Recognizing that Israelis are highly unlikely to ever agree to such an arrangement, Gordon concedes that “the two-state solution is more realistic.” As Gordon explains it, that option “entails Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders,… the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel.”

Gordon was formerly a regular columnist for the Hamas media apologist, AlJazeera.com, where he regularly accused Israel of seeking to sabotage the peace process and steal Arab lands. Last December, when Hamas rockets and missiles were raining down on much of southern Israel — some of them hitting the BGU campus — Gordon did not denounce the Hamas terrorists. Instead he condemned the Israeli military for “targeting” the building called “Gaza University,” a structure used as a repository for the rockets intended to kill Israelis.

In January 2009, when Israel was engaged in its Operation Cast Lead campaign to diminish the strength of Hamas and put an end to the latter’s relentless rocket bombardment of Israeli towns, Gordon sneered at claims that the Israeli military was taking pains to avoid inflicting civilian casualties:

“The fact that the Israeli military could have razed the entire Gaza Strip, but instead destroyed only 15% of the buildings does not make its actions moral. The fact that the Israeli military could have killed thousands of Palestinian children during this campaign, and, due to restraint, killed ‘only’ 300, does not make Operation Cast Lead ethical.

“Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government uses to support its actions during this war are empty. They actually reveal Israel’s unwillingness to confront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas, but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Absent from Gordon’s condemnation of the Israeli “occupation” is any mention of the way that occupation came about in the first place. David Horowitz explains:

“In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked Israel for a second time and were again defeated. It was in repelling these aggressors that Israel came to control the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as the oil-rich Sinai desert. Israel had every right to annex these territories captured from the aggressors — a time-honored ritual among nations, and in fact the precise way that Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan had come into existence themselves. But Israel did not do so. On the other hand, neither did it withdraw its armies or relinquish its control.”

On August 26, 2009, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Gordon titled “Boycott Israel,” which depicted Israel as “an apartheid state” wherein “[t]he Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights.” “[T]he only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel,” said Gordon, “is through massive international pressure” in the form of a boycott beginning with divestment from companies operating in Judea and Samaria, and later moving on to firms that “help sustain and reinforce the occupation.”

Before submitting the foregoing article to the LA Times, Gordon gave his department at BGU advance knowledge of what he intended to say in the piece, and offered to step down as department chair if his colleagues thought his words would prove too embarrassing to them. Yet those colleagues decided unanimously not to let him step down; rather, they stood firmly behind him.

Clearly, the Jewish collaborators in the campus war against Israel are not waging their battle alone. They enjoy a wealth of tactical and ideological support from their fellow faculty members.





Front Page Magazine

Sara Roy

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By Steven Plaut

Sara Roy, who holds a non-tenured “research” position at Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), claims to be a “political economist,” although she apparently has no training in economics or political science. She also claims to be an expert in Middle East Studies, but has no degree in that either. Her PhD is in Education.

Roy claims to be an expert on the political economy of the Gaza Strip, but her real expertise is in anti-Israel leftist political propaganda. She worked on her doctoral dissertation in education part of the time while living for a while in the Gaza Strip, and got paid as a a research assistant by the West Bank Data Base Project, a propaganda project directed by anti-Israel radical Israeli non-academic leftists.

Roy’s Middle East studies publications are by and large propaganda diatribes, and many appear in non-academic anti-Israel propaganda magazines, some of which appear in openly anti-Semitic web magazines, at least one having intimate ties to the PLO. Phyllis Chessler calls her one of “the most savage critics—of America and Israel.” Roy is a prolific writer of newspaper op-eds and spends much of her time giving “expert” lectures about the Arab-Israel conflict.

Sara Roy was born Jewish, and she uses this circumstance as a lever to better support Israel’s enemies. She refers frequently to something she calls a “Jewish ethical perspective” whenever bashing Israel and cites her “Jewish roots” when promoting the Hamas on anti-Semitic web sites such as the Neo-Stalinist Counterpunch.

Roy is, in fact, arguably the leading apologist for Hamas in American academia today. She is the inventor of an imaginary “New Hamas,” a fictional group that seeks peace and social wellbeing for Palestinians, unlike the real Hamas, which seeks to carry out a second Holocaust of Jews. Roy has been described as “the ringmaster of Harvard’s bash Israel circus.” According to Middle East scholar Martin Kramer:

‘Her current project is the whitewashing of Hamas, but she’s best known for invidious comparisons she drew in April 2002 between the Israeli occupation and the Holocaust. (She thinks being the child of Holocaust survivors gives her a license.) “There is no let-up,” Roy moans about the criticisms of Middle Eastern studies. She’s right about that. Permanent contention: get used to it.’
Roy is so goofy that she was invited to give the Edward Said Lecture at the Australian University of Adelaide in 2008. The entire lecture was devoted, with frequent invocations of “Edward,” to showing how the only lesson from eons of Jewish suffering is that everyone must support the Palestinian war against Israel.

While enjoying unrestricted exposure in the media, she simultaneously claims that she is being censored by the Right Wing Conspiracy. A case in point is the locally famous case of a book review which was rejected by Tufts University’s Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. In this essay she tried to trash Matthew Levitt’s Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (2006) because it said mean things about the terror group. When the journal refused to run the piece, she pouted that this constituted a “blatant…case of censorship.” She has denounced Campus-Watch as well for its exposure of extremist propaganda in Middle East studies. In her words, “What all this boils down to is an attempt to silence criticism of US policy, and put an end to disagreement with the neo-conservative agenda. It is not diversity that is being sought but conformity.”

When Roy gets bored with Harvard, she goes on anti-Israel speaking walkabouts. Her message is always the same: The Palestinians are innocent victims of Israel’s brutal oppression. Hezb’Allah and Hamas terrorism is an entirely understable response to Israeli evil. Israel gobbles up “Arab land” out of imperialist obsession. Every use of force by Israel is a brutal provocation; every act of terror by Arabs is a protest against occupation.

Writing recently in the Harvard student newspaper, Roy opined: “Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers. This context is undeniably one of mass suffering, created largely by Israel but with the active complicity of the international community, especially the U.S. and European Union, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.” Got that? Even the Palestininan opponents of Hamas and the EU are collaborators with Israel in its unspeakable crimes. (Roy was subsequently taken apart for her bias by a Harvard student writing in the paper.)

Roy is the author of two books: The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (1995), and The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment (1999). To call her viewpoint one dimension is to praise it unjustly. Her repetitious theme is that there is nothing at all wrong with Palestinian society that cannot be blamed directly on the Jews. Destroying the Palestinian economy is why Israel constructed its security fence, for instance; this decision had nothing at all to do with countless terrorist atrocities against Jews carried out by Palestinians.
Her work in recent years at Harvard has been devoted to prettifying Hamas and other Islamofascist movements among Palestinians, and to try to prove how moderate they are. In her “study” of Hamas, she displays complete ignorance as to the background of Hamas and its roots in the Islamofascist “Muslim Brotherhood” movement. She paints it as a pastoral little social welfare group. She has published at least one anti-Israel article together with someone from a notorious Hamas front group, the so-called Gaza Community Mental Health Program.

Writing in the al-Jazeera newspaper – with its intimate links to al-Qaeda – in 2003, Roy insisted that the only way to stop Hamas terrorism was to first end Israel’s “occupation.” But the following year Israel totally ended its occupation of Gaza. The direct consequence was the bloody campaign of Hamas rocket and other terror attacks from Gaza against Israeli civilians inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. This terror campaign directly lead to the “Cast Lead” military operation by Israel last year. Roy has never apologized nor repudiated her earlier false prophecy. To the contrary, the behavior of Hamas since Israel’s Gaza withdrawal has simply persuaded her all the more that Israeli “occupation” is the exclusive cause of all Middle East violence, even when it does not exist.

Roy is a nominal board member of Marc Ellis’ radically anti Israel Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University. She sits on the boards of other anti-Israel organizations. Like Norman Finkelstein, Roy uses the fact that her own parents were Holocaust survivors to grant her own hatred of Israel and work against it legitimacy. As one example, she published the following in the “Journal of Palestine Studies,” a propaganda magazine controlled by the PLO: “[I]t was perhaps inevitable [because of her parents’ experiences] that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue.” She then draws parallels between Nazi treatment of Jews and Israeli soldiers’ treatment of Palestinians which, in her opinion, “were absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize.” [Like Ellis, she argues obsessively that the only real lesson of value to be learned from the Holocaust of European Jews during World War II is that Israel has no right to exist.





Front Page Magazine

Ian Lustick

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By Steven Plaut

Three years ago, the tenured  left at DePaul was attempting to force the university into granting tenure to the anti-Semitic embarrassment Norman Finkelstein, who has no bona fide academic publications, and is well known as a collaborator with the Hezbollah terrorists.  To manipulate the tenure system, these leftists needed to recruit letters of recommendation from people at other schools  who could be counted upon to endorse and support Finkelstein out of a sense of political solidarity with his propaganda.  Two academics were willing to play ball.  One was Avi Shlaim, a former Oxford professor known as a hater of Israel despite his own Israeli heritage.  The other was Ian Lustick, a radical Jewish anti-Israel and anti-American professor at the University of Pennsylvania who also stood and delivered for Finkelstein, although his opinion was not enough to convince the DePaul to give him tenure.

Lustick used to be Associate Director of the Solomon Asch Center for Ethnic Studies at Penn, named after a famous Gestalt psychologist who must be rolling in his grave at the fact that the Center named for him has hosted radicals and published work that includes a vilification of Israel for building its security wall to keep out suicide bombers.

Lustick has made an academic career out of bashing Israel and fighting against the war on terror.  He speaks frequently before anti-Israel and pro-terror conferences and organizations.   He has also written for Michael Lerner’s goofy pseudo-Jewish anti-Israel magazine, Tikkun.

Israelis who insist upon rejecting the demands made upon them by Islamofascist terrorists are denounced by Lustick as “dangerous fundamentalists.”  Lustick has long campaigned for a Palestinian state and for the division of Jerusalem.  He has compared the Palestinian “suffering” to that of the Jews in the Holocaust, and he has called on Israel to teach about this Palestinian experience in its schools just like German children study the Holocaust.  Meanwhile, he denounced the President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, for claiming that the “Divest from Israel” movement is anti-Semitic.  Like his client Norman Finkelstein, Lustick likes to rant about the nefarious powers of the “Israel Lobby.”

In one of those Orwellian ironies, Lustick actually once headed the Association for Israel Studies in the United States.  He has never spent much time in Israel, although he claims that nation’s history and politics as a specialty. He is a defender of Israel’s own anti-Israel “New Historians,” who use historic revisionism to promote the agenda of Israel’s enemies. Lustick has spoken favorably of the so-called “One-State Solution” in which Israel will cease to exist altogether.  (Cynics refer to it as the Rwanda Solution.)  Lustick took part in the anti-Israel York University conference last year devoted to discovering an alternative to Israel’s continuing existence.

Lustick is almost as anti-American as he is anti-Israel.  He may be best known for his expressions of regret that America did not lose more soldiers in the campaign to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. Denying that terrorism is a valid concept, he deconstructs the term by claiming that activities can be classified as “terrorist” if they encompass any violent “actions and threats” by governmental militaries and even tax collectors, as well as insurgents.”

Lustick describes America’s relationship to Israel as “like [that of] a friend to a drug addict.”  He denounces the United States as a “neo-imperialist” power.  He likes to rant against “hegemonists,” by which he means mainly the US, the West, and Israel.  He frequently speaks about nefarious cabals – his word – notably those “of neocon warriors driving this juggernaut”  He insists that President Bush and not al-Qaeda was the true cause of world terrorism.  He has campaigned staunchly against America’s war against terrorism and expressed his hostility in his book Trapped in the War on Terror.

Denouncing America’s military efforts in “The Nation,” Lustick wrote:

‘This is a supply-side war. There is very little demand for the war, and nothing in the way of a compelling necessity for it. But the enormous supply of political capital flowing toward the President after 9/11 combines with the overweening preponderance of US military power on a global level to make the production of war in Iraq not a trivial affair but one that can be embraced with relatively little thought and almost no need to appeal to a readiness to sacrifice.”

Meanwhile, Lustick engages in equally tortured apologetics for Hamas, which he claims  “is mainly popular because one of the things it is trusted to do is probably be ready to live with Israel, even if not officially, for a very long time.”

Why is there no peace in the Middle East? Here is the Lustick answer, according to a  Campus Watch report of a University of Pennsylvania event: “Lustick expressed grave doubts about a resolution to the conflict, and said that insisting on a ‘Jewish state’ and not a ‘predominantly Jewish polity’ in the Middle East is one barrier to any solution.”  A Jewish state is the obstacle; a Palestinian state is the solution.

When it came to Afghanistan, Lustick yearned for a longer war and was concerned only to discredit the so-called “cabal.” Said Lustick: “What I wanted was a war, a Goldilocks war, not too fast and not too slow, but we didn’t get it. We got one that was too fast and it gave the whip end to the cabal.” This cabal, Lustick contended, comprised “neo-conservative warriors” who aspired to nothing less than “American-military-enforced new order in the Middle East with pretensions and fantasies of democratization of the region of an American rule, domination of the oil wealth there, establishment of large, semi-permanent military bases in the heart of the region and the elimination of all pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza.”

A few years back Lustick was in the news for what has become known as the Gil-White Affair.  Francisco Gil-White was fired by Penn at the initiative of Lustick and claims that this was because of the fact that Lustick disapproved of the pro-Israel opinions and activism of Gil-White, who alleges that Lustick’s motivation for this opposition was Gil-White’s research into the historical origins of Arab terrorism.

Such research is, for Lustick, illegitimate.  Norman Finkelstein’s pro-terror political opinions are another matter altogether.





Front P:age Magazine