Joel Beinin Whines about Israeli Airport’s “Harassment”

Steven Plaut
FrontPagemag.com
01 December 09

Being a leftist Anti-Zionist means not only never having to say you are sorry, such as when you get your facts all wrong. It also means that you have an obligation to represent yourself as a victim of harassment. Armchair martyrdom is as fundamental a part of leftist ideology as anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel.

In his now-famous essay from July, 1976, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Thomas Wolfe wrote about how desperately American academics wish to feel persecuted. A pretense of being persecuted today seems to do wonders both for their ego and for their web traffic. The entire “Zionist Lobby” is largely an invention by these same people, anxious to show that they are being oppressed by an evil nefarious conspiracy. You just need to wave your stigmata and denounce the “Neo-Conservatives,” the “Rightwing McCarthyists,” and – of course the Jews. Whining about being persecuted seems to be the leading participation sport of today’s far Leftists and the radical armchair postureurs.

As documented recently on this web site, Joel Beinin, the Israel-hating pro-Hamas sometimes-Maoist professor of Middle East Studies at Stanford University is just such a persecution whiner. Here is what we wrote:

‘“McCarthyism” seems to be Beinin’s third favorite “m” word, after Marxism and Mao, and he applies it liberally to anyone who dares to criticize him. Beinin wrote a 2004 article called “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” In it, Beinin denounced the Ford Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promotion of “violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state.” What worried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a “Palestinian student group [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, democratic state,” meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel.’

Beinin went on to declare that Bay Area Zionists silenced him and prevented him from giving a talk to a school in San Jose. The San Francisco Chronicle checked and reported that no one at all from the local Jewish Community had even spoken with anyone at that school.

Well, the good professor is back. Over the Thanksgiving weekend he widely circulated the following epistle, which we reprint for you here in full, spelling errors and all:

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