The Tripod - Opinions
Issue: 4/20/04

Israel Not the Enemy in Mid-East
By Ron Kiener

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz formulated the problem best in a column he wrote in 2002: "If a visitor from a far away galaxy were to land at an American or Canadian university and peruse some of the petitions that were circulating around the campus, he would probably come away with the conclusion that the Earth is a peaceful and fair planet with only one villainous nation determined to destroy the peace and to violate human rights.

"That nation would not be Iraq, Libya, Serbia, Russia or Iran. It would be Israel."

For many observers of the American campus, there is something neurotically obsessive in the common fixation on Israel as the source of all the world's injustices.

Two years ago, in the wake of a horrific suicide bombing of an Israeli resort hotel's dining hall on Passover eve - a "martyrdom operation" approved by Shaykh Ahmad Yassin and which claimed more than 20 Jewish celebrants of the Passover dinner - the Israeli Army was ordered into the Palestinian West Bank in an operation dubbed "Defensive Shield." In one town, Jenin, rumors soon appeared in the western press of a "massacre," with Palestinian sources reporting over 500 innocent dead civilians, and entire neighborhoods bulldozed into rubble, with innocent occupants mowed down in their own homes.

The hue and cry from Europe and the campus activists of America constituted an orgasm of anti-Jewish vitriol. On this campus the e-mails were fast and furious. VOID was outraged.

Two months later, after a United Nations team investigated Palestinian claims, the U.N. issued a report saying there was no massacre in Jenin. All told, 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians - half of these armed militants - died in Jenin, and no neighborhoods were razed.

No VOID e-mails then.

Two weeks ago, a U.N. human rights organization pronounced that the 14-month old methodical campaign against non-Arabs by Arab Sudanese in the Western Sudan to be an act of "ethnic cleansing."

No e-mails, no hand wringing, and no campus forum to discuss the slaughter of Sudanese by Arabs.

Last week, the U.S. Army entered Fallujah to "avenge" the barbaric murder of four contract civilian U.S. citizens, whose bodies were mutilated and then hung on a bridge. Reports indicate that over 600 innocent Fallujis have been killed in the pitched urban battles between Sunni insurgents and American forces.

No e-mails. No VOID events.

When Israel assassinated Shaykh Ahmad Yassin - the visionary feminist who granted women the right to blow themselves up (as long as they killed Jews) - our campus leftists were beside themselves transmitting e-mails declaring that Yassin (who once called Jews "the brothers of apes") was a great Palestinian leader, a visionary, a hero, and a resistance martyr.

Wrote Professor Dershowitz about our intergalactic traveler: "Our visitor would be perplexed to hear the excuses made by university professors and students for why they are prepared to delegitimate Israel while remaining silent about the far worse abuses committed by other countries. If he were to ask a student about the abuses committed by other countries, he would be told (as I have been): "You're changing the subject. We're talking about Israel now." This reminds me of an incident from the 1920s involving then-Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell. Lowell decided that the number of Jews admitted to Harvard should be reduced because "Jews cheat." When a distinguished alumnus, Judge Learned Hand, pointed out that Protestants also cheat, Lowell responded, "You're changing the subject; we're talking about Jews."

My colleague Sam Kassow has been castigated recently for making a simple observation: if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck -- it is a duck. I applaud my colleague Sam Kassow for identifying the anti-Semitic duck of Trinity's self-righteous leftist community for what it is. To single out Israel against the backdrop of all these other human tragedies is plain and simple Judeophobia.