Barring BDS from Hillel - Both Clear and Moral

Sara Greenberg..
Times of Israel..
26 February '13..

When demonstrators in Antwerp chant “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas” and when Jewish children are shot and killed in Toulouse in front of a Jewish school, most of the world recognizes these acts as anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, it is the more subtle, nuanced manifestations of racism and anti-Semitism that often get overlooked. Natan Sharansky wrote in a 2004 essay, “Seeing Anti-Semitism in 3D,” that:

…whereas classical anti-Semitism was seen as being aimed at the Jewish religion or the Jewish people, the new anti-Semitism is ostensibly directed against the Jewish State. Since this anti-Semitism can hide behind the veneer of the legitimate criticism of Israel, it is much more difficult to expose.

A group of Harvard students recently launched a campaign protesting a local and international Hillel policy that bans partnerships with student groups that “support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel.” In an open letter to the Hillel community, the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA), lamented the fact that it was unable to hold an event at the Harvard Hillel co-sponsored by the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, a group that wholly endorses the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel. The PJA, upset by this decision, launched a campaign demanding “Hillel have no policy on the political affiliation of groups, organizations and speakers that it partners with, houses, and hosts.”

The PJA leaves room for one exception. In my conversation with the group’s leaders last week they acknowledge that while Hillel should foster “open discussion, critical thinking and debate… this, of course, does not mean that Hillel needs to provide space for the expression of racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise hateful views.” The PJA understands that while a student group can engage in a dialogue with any person or group it chooses – even if this speaker or group espouses hateful views – a University, a University Department or a campus organization like Hillel cannot be compelled and has the right to refuse to underwrite, sponsor or endorse any speaker or event.

Diana Buttu, former PLO spokeswoman, Harvard Edition

The Harvard Kennedy School provides a platform for former PLO spokesperson. The results  including a string of demonstrable falsehoods were predictable.

Samantha Rose Mandeles/Aviva Slomich..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
01 November '12..

On October 18, the Harvard Kennedy School, which recently hosted a “One State Conference” dedicated to the elimination of Israel, yet again provided a platform for a notorious anti-Israel detractor. Diana Buttu, former PLO spokeswoman and current fellow at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, delivered a lecture that purported to discuss the “reality” of the Middle East peace process, but instead disseminated lies to her audience. In her telling, Qassam rockets don’t have explosive heads and cause no casualties in Israel; Grad rockets were not fired into Israel in the years 2008 or 2009; Richard Goldstone hardly retracted any portion of his eponymous report; and not one Israeli was murdered by a suicide bombing in Israel from the years 1997-2000. Finally, she insisted, the idea of Israel as a Jewish state exists solely to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Levant.

The following are direct quotes from Buttu’s lecture:


• “Qassams don’t have an explosive head.”

Multiple press outlets throughout the world have contradicted Buttu’s bewildering claim that Qassam rockets are built and launched without explosives. In 2008, the BBC published a piece describing Qassams being “filled with explosives…Qassam and other rockets have killed 13 people inside Israel, including three children.” After initially claiming that no Israelis were injured by Qassam rockets, The New York Times published a correction in 2003 stating that the rockets in fact “have damaged several homes and factories over the last 18 months, leaving Israelis suffering from shrapnel wounds, broken limbs, smoke inhalation and shock.” Four year-old Yuval Abebeh and two year-old Dorit (Masart) Benisian were both killed in Sderot in September 2004 by a “Qassam rocket fired from Gaza while playing in the street.” In January 2005, seventeen-year-old Ayala-Haya Abukasis

was mortally wounded when a Qassam rocket landed near her and shrapnel penetrated her cerebellum, leaving her brain dead. She was struck while protecting her younger brother, who was lightly wounded. Kept on life support throughout the week, her parents agreed to stop treatment when doctors told them there was no chance of recovery. She died on January 21.

This death and destruction is a result of the fact that Qassams carry 22 pounds of explosives, an easily verifiable fact.

(Read full "Diana Buttu is at it Again, Harvard Edition")

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Marquadt-Bigman - Guess who won’t be at Harvard this weekend?

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
03 March '12..



This weekend, Harvard Kennedy School is hosting a controversial “Student Conference” that has been organized to promote the so-called “one-state solution” as the best option to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to the conference program, the event will start out asserting that “’two-states for two peoples’” is no longer a viable option for Israel/Palestine,” and towards the end of the conference, participants will devote themselves to pondering how best to build a “global movement” to serve their agenda and how “academics and activists” could contribute to this endeavor.

Proponents of the “one-state solution” like to present their views in a language designed to create the impression that their primary concern lies with human and civil rights. However, it obviously takes willful blindness to overlook the fact that implementing an Israeli-Palestinian “one-state solution” would require the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state in order to subsume it in yet another Arab-Muslim majority state where Jews would have to live as a minority – and, based on the empirical record, it is only reasonable to expect that they would face the same precarious situation as minorities everywhere in the Arab and Muslim world.

Wisse: Harvard's Latest Assault on Israel

Promoting the Jewish State's destruction at a school dedicated to 'democratic governance.'

Ruth Wisse..
Wall Street Journal..
28 February '12..





In 1948, when the Arab League declared war on Israel, no one imagined that six decades later American universities would become its overseas agency. Yet campus incitement against Israel has been growing from California to the New York Island. A conference at Harvard next week called "Israel/Palestine and the One-State Solution" is but the latest aggression in an escalating campaign against the Jewish state.

The sequence is by now familiar: Arab student groups and self-styled progressives organize a conference or event like "Israeli Apartheid Week," targeting Israel as the main problem of the Middle East. They frame the goals of these events in buzzwords of "expanding the range of academic debate." But since the roster of speakers and subjects makes their hostile agenda indisputable, university spokespersons scramble to dissociate their institutions from the events they are sponsoring. Jewish students and alums debate whether to ignore or protest the aggression, and newspapers fueling the story give equal credence to Israel's attackers and defenders.

A featured speaker at Harvard's conference is Ali Abunimah, creator of the website Electronic Intifada, who opposes the existence of a "Jewish State" as racist by virtue of being Jewish. A regular on this circuit, he also keynoted a recent University of Pennsylvania conference urging "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions" (BDS) of, from and against Israel. Ostensibly dedicated to protecting Palestinian Arabs from Israeli oppression, BDS has by now achieved the status of an international "movement," some of whose branches exclude Israeli academics from their journals and conferences.

Glick - Harvard, Jew haters, motherhood and Israel

Caroline Glick..
carolineglick.com..
19 February '12..

This morning I received an e-mail alert from CAMERA that my alma mater, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is hosting a two-day conference which essentially begins with the proposition that Israel has no right to exist. This isn't surprising. After all, the Kennedy School is home to my old professor Steve Walt. No one there batted a lash when he co-published his updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with University of Chicago's John Mearshimer.

Not only did Walt suffer no recrimination from his colleagues at Harvard when he first emerged a professional Jew basher. He suffered no recrimination when he used the controversy surrounding his book into a means of transforming himself into a celebrity Israel basher.

As I wrote in my recent column about mainstreaming Jew hatred, Walt and Mearshimer's book has enabled anti-Semites to emerge from under the rocks where they had been hiding and proudly announce that it is reasonable to discriminate against the Jewish people and side either actively or passively with those like the Iranian regime and the Sunni jihadists from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood who openly call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Two thoughts on the Harvard conference.

Stotsky - Harvard Needs Some Schooling on the Middle East

Steven Stotsky..
The Algemeiner..
14 February '12..

On March 3-4, Harvard University will host a two-day conference on the “One State Solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Guests include veteran anti-Israel academics, the founder of Electronic Intifada and an ex-Palestinian official. No one sympathetic to Israel is identifiable.

This sort of anti-Israel activity, thinly disguised by a veneer of academic posing, has become commonplace at this venerable Ivy League institution. In recent years, Harvard has hosted Holocaust defamer Norman Finkelstein, accused serial fabricator professor Ilan Pappe and Naim Ateek, founder of the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish Sabeel ministry. The department sponsoring the upcoming conference is home to Stephen Walt, co-author of the error-prone The Israel Lobby.

These anti-Zionist conclaves are an outward sign of a more insidious transformation of Harvard’s Middle Eastern studies. At the crux of this transformation is the school’s Center for Middle East Studies, which benefits from both taxpayer support and gifts from Gulf Arab donors. Harvard is one of 17 universities receiving federal Title VI funding for the purpose of increasing public knowledge about the Middle East and Islam. By targeting their donations to schools involved in the federally funded outreach effort, the Gulf Arab donors influence not only instructors at the university level but also, through them, those who will teach about the Middle East in primary and secondary schools.

The activities of the outreach center of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies are instructive. The center’s stated mission is to promote “a critical understanding of the diversity of the Middle East region.” But its activities and programming reveal a dogmatic adherence to the polemical, often counter-factual Palestinian version of the Arab-Israeli conflict, rather than the presentation of authoritative and diverse scholarly viewpoints.

Harvard BDS Hoax Update

Jon Haber
Divest This!
16 August '10

Well great, big, fat surprise: the latest divestment “victory” celebrated across the BDS ether, the Great Harvard Divestment “triumph,” turns out to be yet another hoax (the biggest one so far this year).

I was beginning to think that the divestnistas had put hoaxes behind them after spending so much time last year shredding their credibility with embarrassing frauds regarding Hampshire, TIAA-CREF and Blackrock. But given the nature of the Harvard story, I’m beginning to think that someone in the BDS world knows enough about business and finance to anticipate purely economic decisions (the turnover of assets in the Hampshire portfolio, the abandoning of collapsing Israel-Africa real-estate stock by institutional investors, the transfer of Israeli stocks out of an emerging market fund once Israel is no longer classified an emerging market) so that they can pounce and claim that these ordinary business transactions actually represent political divestment from the Jewish state.

The Harvard story reveals three things about the current state of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions “movement”:

(Read full post)

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Another Tack: If Ahmadinejad had attended Harvard

Sarah Honig

JPost

01 October 09

To avoid being mistaken for a white sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." - Barack Obama, Dreams of My Father

You can hardly blame Obama. Most folks are prisoners of their upbringing. They cannot escape the mind-set that took shape in their youth. Breaking through the bounds of early instruction/indoctrination requires a plucky character. Even then, intellectual integrity doesn't always overcome the expediency of exploiting superficial truisms and old associations for ulterior motives and political ends.

It's hard to judge precisely into which subcategory Obama fits. Does he simply lack the knack to unfetter himself from what was inculcated into him, or does he by now merely use platitudes and affiliations to further personal vested interests?

But whether it's conformity or cynicism (or a convenient combination of both), the bottom line is that Obama seems to expect all global arena players to abide by Harvard conventions - to broad-mindedly tolerate adversarial viewpoints, to submit a priori that no cause is unavoidably more just than any other, and to effectively prefer ostensible Third-World underdogs with a peeve.

My country, Obama was taught at Harvard, isn't necessarily more right, democracy isn't necessarily democratic or superior, and belligerents can be soothed with sufficient sympathy, flattery and concessions. Obama's tour de force at Cairo University epitomized the ethos of post-hippie-era Harvard.

EVERY BIT as crucially formative was the enlightenment gained by Neville Chamberlain's foreign secretary, Lord Halifax (Edward Frederick Lindley Wood), at aristocratic Christ Church, Oxford. Halifax would go on to become one of the prime architects of appeasement. After hobnobbing with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels in 1937, Halifax noted in his diary that "although there was much in the Nazi system that profoundly offended British opinion, I was not blind to what he [Hitler] had done for Germany, and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping communism out of his country." Hitler's feat involved banning the Communist Party and banishing its leaders and accused members to concentration camps.

Halifax signaled Hitler that German designs on Austria, chunks of Czechoslovakia and Poland weren't altogether illegitimate in British eyes, so long as German territorial expansion was "peaceful." And Halifax, of course, proclaimed unwavering faith in Hitler's professions of peace. Old attitudes die hard. Once reputations are staked on policies, no matter how misconstrued, it's not easy to acknowledge error.

Only after the Axis bully began misbehaving with particular impudence following 1938's Munich pact did Halifax finally figure out that this wasn't quite cricket. But to his credit Halifax did agonize, even if belatedly, and he did draw some extremely cogent conclusions. "I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage," he mused, "if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford."
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