Greenfield - The Chutzpah of Omar Barghouti

Daniel Greenfield..
frontpagemag.com..
09 February '12..

The classical definition of the Yiddish word Chutzpah is a man on trial for killing his parents who asks for leniency because he is an orphan. Next to that definition is a picture of Omar Barghouti, a Qatari-born Muslim who moved to Israel and enrolled in Tel Aviv University to obtain a Masters Degree in Philosophy while conducting an academic boycott campaign against Israel.

Omar Barghouti is promoting a boycott of a service that he makes use of as a platform, and explains the contradiction between calling for a boycott of Israeli universities while studying at an Israeli university by saying that his studies are a “personal matter.” This is a privilege only enjoyed by Omar the Boycott Maker, while ordinary Jewish and Arab students and faculty have their personal academic studies politicized by him and his leftist cronies.

Two years ago when his alma mater was going to hold a series of lectures at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Barghouti’s Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel denounced Tel Aviv University for the “oppressive and criminal activities fostered, facilitated and celebrated by that institution” that PCABI alleged were taking place there. Presumably Barghouti didn’t mean his own activities, which certainly met that standard and were facilitated by Tel Aviv University.

It’s not as if this Qatari and Egyptian immigrant didn’t have any other options. Qatar and Egypt have their own universities. So does the United States. Barghouti knows that quite well since he also has a degree from Columbia. Instead Barghouti moved to Israel and set up shop denouncing a country that he wasn’t born in and did not grow up in and can leave any time he wants to.

With a PhD in Philosophy, Barghouti has the perfect background for a parasite whose only real career is political activism on behalf of terrorists. Had he stayed in Egypt, he would have had to live off the family money or get a real job. But in Israel he has a rewarding career of promoting a boycott that he doesn’t actually participate in, while conducting a world lecture tour denouncing Israel.


Barghouti does not just call for a boycott of Israel, what he is really promoting is a one state solution destruction of Israel. And his “passion” for the subject is not the random parasitism of another activist looking for a cause. Omar Barghouti is a distant cousin of Marwan Barghouti and Mustafa Barghouti. Marwan Barghouti is a major terrorist leader serving five life sentences for numerous murders. Mustafa Barghouti was a Soviet-educated Communist leader and a candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority.

The Barghouti clan, that part of it which is still hanging out in Israel, tends to have a lot of PhDs and their own agenda aiming for power in the Palestinian Arab movement. Bashir Barghouti, was a leading Jordanian Communist who served as the Minister of Industry in the Palestinian Authority. Another of the bunch, Mohammed Barghouti was the Minister of Labor.

But the grip of the Barghoutis on power has been a tenuous one. While they do control a few towns in the West Bank, mostly they have had to settle for being academics, whiny writers and poets penning turgid denunciations of Israel. Some of the bunch has made it to America, others linger in Egypt and Jordan, and anywhere else pretentious parasites can find a warm academic nook to crawl into.

With that background, Omar Barghouti’s campus Jihad combined with a campus outpost is unsurprising, he is only following the family tradition of burrowing into academia and building a career denouncing Israel. The boycott program has opened a new front in the war against Israel by giving terrorist sympathizing leftists in Europe an excuse to reject papers from Israeli academics and bar the door against students with Israeli diplomas, not including Barghouti of course. It is also building a power base for the new generation of the Barghouti clan.

The BDS movement, which aims for a boycott of Israel, has never been accused of fielding a coherent argument. Barghouti’s own articles and speeches are equally incoherent. Playing the professional Palestinian, Barghouti insists that Jesus was a Palestinian. Aside from the absurdity of retroactively assigning a 20th century Arab nationalist identity to a figure who lived in the twilight days of a Jewish state, Barghouti’s own Palestinian identity seems rather shaky considering that he only stopped by the area as an adult.

Why a Qatari-born immigrant like Omar Barghouti should have more legal and civil rights than a Jewish child born in Israel cannot be defended in any way except by an appeal to the racial and religious superiority of the construct of a Palestinian identity. A fraud that the Barghoutis have done a good deal to perpetuate in academic life.

In a recent op-ed promoting the Penn State BDS conference taking place in February, Omar Barghouti tried to latch on to Occupy Wall Street by claiming to represent “the global 99 percent.” Considering how much money and power the Barghoutis have, they are the 1 percent, both locally and globally. Anyone who has seen the mansions of the ruling elite in the West Bank can only laugh at Omar’s assertion that Israel is part of the 1 percent exploiting the rest of humanity, while the influential clans like the Barghoutis are the 99 percent.

While it is easy to ridicule Omar Barghouti’s shopworn anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, his boycott tours enable leftist bigotry by dressing up the racism of their academics and activists in the fringed scarves and t-shirts of a national liberation movement. And yet Omar has already made his own argument against the existence of a Palestinian state.

Omar Barghouti has asserted that Israel is a racist apartheid state and accordingly has no right to exist, but that would be a far more accurate description of the goals and purposes of Palestinian Arab nationalism, which has set out to not only ethnically cleanse the Jews, but which has also managed to ethnically cleanse much of the Arab Christians from the territories under their control.

While Israel has a multiethnic and multi-religious population that encompasses the refugees of many nations, from Vietnamese boat people to Sudanese refugees, the Palestinian Arab nationalist vision is obsessed with the supremacy of the Arab Muslim clans like the Husseinis and the Barghoutis who want to preserve their tribal privileges and feudal power. The only refugees they care about are their own uncles and cousins.

Omar talks about equality, but it isn’t equality that he is after; it’s power. And in his chutzpah he accuses Israel of the crimes of his family and the Palestinian Arab supremacist national movement.

Link:http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/09/the-chutzpah-of-omar-barghouti/

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.


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