Anti-Israel Agitators Target Leading Music Journal

Steven Stotsky
CAMERA Middle East Issues
01 November '10

A guest Op-Ed titled "One American’s Response to the Israel-Palestine Conflict," appearing in the September-October 2010 edition of the Juilliard Journal, the publication of the famed music school of the same name, leveled a number of serious accusations against the Jewish state. According to its editors, the column generated "so many letters to the editor, e-mails, and on-line comments that we simply do not have space to print them all in their entirety." Curiously, of the seven letters the editors chose to publish which offered praise for the article, four were from recognizable anti-Israel activists. The identities of these four individuals are worth scrutiny for what they reveal.

Three of the anti-Israel activists, Anna Baltzer, Norman Finkelstein and Firoze Sidhwa had no apparent connection to Juilliard or its music community. However, they do have links with each other through various extremist groups, and they also have a link to the author of the piece, Benjamin Laude.

Benjamin Laude, who is a graduating music student at the school, has participated in a radical left think tank called Z-Media Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The institute counts longtime anti-Israel detractor MIT Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky as one of its faculty. Among the published letters supporting the article was one from roving anti-Israel agitator Anna Baltzer from St. Louis, who is linked to Chomsky through her mentor, Tanya Reinhardt, an anti-Zionist linguist with close ties to Chomsky. Ms. Baltzer is an acolyte of the International Solidarity Movement, a fringe group that recruits young Westerners to physically interfere with Israeli military operations against terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank.

(Read full article)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.