Proudly Singing Fidai and Waving PLO Flag on the Tel Aviv University Campus - by Sheri Oz

...If we allow haters to be in our face, they get more boldly in our faces. What will it take for us to regain our self-respect?

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
02 December '17..

Where is our self-respect?

A Druze student stands up for Israel at Tel Aviv University. Here is what he writes to “The Shadow” on Facebook:

and in English this is:

Hello Shadow, I am a Druze student at Tel Aviv University and I am sick of the contempt that goes on there . . . yesterday, to an activity for Arab students under the auspices of the Hadash Party, they brought in a Christian Arab singer, an antisemite from Nazareth, Dalal Abu Amneh, who sang the “Palestinian” anthem . . . and the entire audience and the lecturers stood and even waved the PLO flag and the truth is, as a Druze student there, I am enraged at all the contempt that goes on there . . . someone needs to wake up before it is too late. .

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. 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.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Lecturers who support academic boycott of Israel have a lot to learn

Dozens of threats. Harjo at Tel Aviv University
(Photo: Ido Daniel)

Ido Daniel..
Israel Opinion..
21 December '12..

Quietly, without anyone knowing, Tel Aviv University avoided last weekend a first of a kind academic boycott. As always, those who stood up to defend the Israeli academia against the pro-Palestinian boycott of Israel was not the university itself, nor the Ministry of Education or other governmental offices, but rather the people on the ground - the students.

The biggest sin of Joy Harjo was that she has written on her Facebook page she's on her way to visit Tel Aviv. Harjo, a Native American poet and musician, was invited to perform for students of the Department of American Studies at TAU, and provide a glimpse into the rich, indigenous culture of the American continent. But the anti-Israel activists had other plans for her: Within a few hours after her announcement, Harjo's Facebook and Twitter accounts were filled with dozens of threats and hate talkbacks. Those who posted the comments, mostly anti-Israel activists from around the world who have never heard of Joy Harjo, accused this gentle 60-year-old woman of abuse of human rights and active participation in genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Harjo was also accused of collaborating with the "apartheid university" of Tel Aviv, "because the entire city is built on occupied Palestinian territory."

Others have gone even further: Harjo received dozens of phone calls and messages from people who offered her money just to cancel her show and not "entertain apartheid." Among them was also a representative of "Coalition of Women for Peace" (CWP), an Israeli NGO that defines itself as a feminist organization that is "bringing together women from a wide variety of identities and groups" and an initiator of "public campaigns, education and outreach programs."

(Video) Solidarity with the South - Awareness Day At TAU

ImTirzu..
04 November '12..






Zvi Mehlman of the Tel Aviv University branch of Im Tirtzu explains the reality faced by the South of Israel every day. Im Tirtzu initiated Awareness Day on campus to remind students and faculty that rockets are raining down on Israeli and to show what the rockets look like.



Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. 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.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.
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Tobin - Is Wagner Worse Than the Nakba?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
10 June '12..





(As Jonathan Tobin has written here, Wagner has been, and continues to be a "touchy subject" within Israel, and while not concurring 100% with his thoughts on this matter, the question he raises, "Is Wagner worse than the Nakba?", is a powerful one. Y.)

It was probably inevitable. When the Eretz Israel Orchestra announced plans last month to hold a concert of works by Richard Wagner in Tel Aviv it was likely that somebody would find a way to cancel it. The music of the great anti-Semite has not been played in the country since the 1930s, and the ire of Holocaust survivors as well as the often-hypocritical efforts of those attempting to enforce the informal ban on Wagner was bound to generate pressure to spike the event.

The ban is hypocritical and foolish. Yet the cancellation of the concert planned by the Israeli Wagner Society is interesting not so much because preventing Wagner from being played live in the territory of the Jewish state is ridiculous, but because it was the result of a decision by Tel Aviv University, whose auditorium had been rented for the occasion. TAU revoked its permission for the concert because it claimed the sponsors had not revealed their purpose when they paid for the hall. True or not, it showed that there are just some things the university will not allow to take place on their property. But coming as it did less than a month after the same institution granted its approval for anti-Zionist students to hold a “Nakba Day” commemoration in which the founding of Israel is treated as a “disaster,” it does call into question the judgment of those at the school about what is truly offensive to Jewish sensibilities.

Harel - The Palestinian day of vengeance and retribution

Israel Harel..
Haaretz..
17 May '12..

Germany's surrender in World War II was commemorated on May 9 in many places throughout the world. That same day, thousands of neo-Nazis held "mourning marches" over the "day of disaster." In their own country and especially outside it they are a shunned minority. The vast majority view that period as a time of spiritual degeneration when their leaders, scholars and military commanders were gripped in an insanity that resulted in genocide, campaigns of conquest and the defeat of many nations. These are the lessons that most Germans, and most of the nations who collaborated with them, have learned from the "day of disaster."

Of all the nations that sent soldiers to aid the Nazis' deeds, only one has never expressed regret. On the contrary, it dedicates May 15 - the day Arab armies invaded the newly declared State of Israel - to mourning the failure to achieve their goal. It's not the sin of their aggression that the Arabs regret, but rather the fact that they weren't able to complete the job that Hitler left unfinished. Unlike the Germans, they aren't ashamed of their ancestors' murderousness. Instead, they're ashamed of their weakness, of their inability to execute the mission.

(+Video) Drowning Out the Protest

West Bank Mama..
15 May '12..

Yesterday there was a protest outside of Tel Aviv University, commemorating what the Arabs call Nakba (catastrophe) which we call Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence Day). The joint left wing and Arab protest was accompanied by a counter protest by pro-Zionist Jews, probably organized by Im Tirzu.

In addition to the fact that the crowd was evenly split between protesters and counter protesters, one thing stands out. The counter protest was incredibly loud. The following video gives you a an idea of what I am talking about. (At the end of the video the speaker calls for the crowd to stand for a minute of silence, which mocks the Israeli minute of silence for both Holocaust Remembrance Day and Israel Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers. The counter protest crowd then reacts with a particularly noisy response).

The strength and “vocality” of the pro-Zionist side is signficant. For years the left wing in Israel has adopted the Arab anti-Zionist narrative, and there was no counter protest. Im Tirzu is fighting this, and it is no longer considered weird to be a young college student who is pro-Zionist (in other words, patriotic). Last year Im Tirzu published a pamphlet in Hebrew called Nakba Charta (Nakba BS). I wrote about this on my blog last year and gave a summary in English of its main points.

Take a look – Israeli patriotism is alive and well.



Link: http://westbankmama.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/drowning-out-the-protest/

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. 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.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand
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Tel Aviv University's on-campus ceremony marking Nakba Day.

Yaakov Kirschen..
Dry Bones Blog..
14 May '12..





According to the Jerusalem Post:

Education minister: TAU Nakba event 'outrageous'

Sa'ar calls on Tel Aviv University president to reconsider his decision to allow on-campus ceremony marking Nakba Day.

"Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar asked Tel Aviv University President Professor Joseph Klaftner over the weekend to reconsider his decision to allow students to organize an “outrageous” on-campus ceremony to commemorate Nakba Day.

The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, is an annual commemoration when Arabs mourn the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The Palestinian narrative recounts how hundreds of thousands of Arabs were either forced or felt compelled to leave behind their homes, with many fleeing to Israel’s neighboring countries where they remain until this day.

TAU announced this week that it would allow students to organize a Nakba Day commemoration under certain provisions, including hiring six school security guards to monitor the day’s events. The school administration also prohibited organizers from using a PA system and hanging flags and banners.

Barghouti

Jon
Divest This!
14 May '10

If you’ve been on either side of the BDS debates over the last couple of years, you can’t help stumbling over Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

I’ve discussed PACBI before, and despite a name which implies that the organization’s focus is on academic and cultural boycotts (the least successful variant of BDS), the PACBI name – and Barghouti’s – tend to get invoked by participants in any BDS project (university and union divestment battles, product boycotts at US food co-ops, etc.) regardless of whether they fall into PACBI’s alleged mandate.

When the Irish trade union movement met to discuss their controversial boycott resolutions against Israel, Barghouti was on the agenda. When the San Francisco Jewish Federation was debating how to prevent BDS activists from subsidizing their project with community money, local Jewish leaders were denounced for not debating Barghouti on the subject.

Even within the Israel-de-legitimization movement, where the efficacy of BDS vs. other tactics are debated (usually behind the scenes), Berghouti’s name is used as a show-stopper, an attempt to end disputes over the subject by claiming PACBI’s 2005 academic boycott call means the BDS movement wells up purely from Palestinian civil society and is thus beyond discussion. (The fact that PACBI and Barghouti himself are late-comers to the BDS campaign, which began in 2001, seems to have fled the consciousness of anti-Israel campaigners.)

So who is Mr. Barghouti?

If the name rings a bell, Omar Barghouti is related to a pair of older Barghouti’s, Mustafa Barghouti (the man who ran against current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) and the more notorious Marwan Barghouti who is currently serving five consecutive life sentences for his involvement in terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Like the Husseini’s, a clan which includes PA negotiator Faisal Husseini, the late Yassir Arafat (whose real name is Abd al-Rahman abd al-Bauf Arafat al-Qud al-Husseini), and the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini (the George Washington of Palestinian nationalism who spent World War working for the Nazis in the Middle East), the Barghouti’s are major players in regional Arab politics.

(Read full post)

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'TAU restricts freedom of speech'

Zoe Fox
JPost
12 May '10

A Tel Aviv University board member is set to resign Wednesday following university President Joseph Klaffter’s refusal to bring a proposal he drafted to a vote. Mark Tanenbaum had proposed a resolution to the board of governors, requesting that the university senate investigate the political activity of professors who use the school’s name.

Tanenbaum’s proposal comes as a response to outspoken TAU professors advocating an academic boycott of Israel and the university. The proposal cites faculty bylaws “Breach of Discipline” restriction on faculty listing their affiliation with TAU on any document or statement of a political nature when participating in any domestic or international forums of political nature.

Tanenbaum described Klaffter yelling into the microphone that he would not tolerate any infringement on academic freedom within the university immediately after the proposal was read. Klaffter’s decision not to bring the proposal to a vote came at the end of a heated debate between the board members concerned about the university restricting freedom of speech.

“While he was blathering on about the right to free speech, he ironically denied me, a member of the board of governors, a former student, whose late father was one of the founding members of Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University the right to free speech, and that is absolutely unacceptable,” Tanenbaum told The Jerusalem Post.

Tanenbaum on Wednesday will announce his resignation from all of his posts at TAU and his decision to join Bar-Ilan University. Until Tuesday, Tanenbaum had been a member of the TAU Board of Governors, the board of directors for the American Friends of Tel Aviv University, and the board of international Overseers of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University.

He is involved in a number of other philanthropic Israel-oriented organizations, both in Israel and in Miami. He describes himself as an “ardent Zionist who’s not embarrassed to use the word Zionist.”

(Read full story)

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Omar Barghouti’s academic terrorism

Fresnozionism.org
10 May '10

In honor of Yom Yerushalayim, a very special video - Jerusalem Day: Reflections by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel

Omar Barghouti (not to be confused with convicted murderers Ahmed Barghouti or Marwan Barghouti) is a graduate student in Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is also a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the leaders of the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Some have suggested that Barghouti, a ‘Palestinian citizen of Israel’ is behaving hypocritically by continuing to study at a university that he urges others to boycott; but as we will see, he’s no stranger to double- or even triplethink. There is a petition (in Hebrew) here which has been signed by almost 143,000 people who want to see him kicked out of Tel Aviv University.

Barghouti is often referred to as ‘moderate’ and ‘nonviolent’, which he is compared to Ahmed and Marwan, for example. But although he doesn’t launch terror attacks or even give speeches calling for Arabs to rise up and slaughter Jews, his goal is the same, to end the state of Israel.

Omar Barghouti is a man at home in the academic world who spins the ugly core that underlies all of Palestinian Arab ‘culture’ — burning hatred and a drive for bloody revenge — into perfectly formed academic English, providing a theoretical basis for educated Westerners to tap into their own darker impulses in the guise of an enlightened pursuit of justice, and in terms of the most modern post-colonial thought.

(Read full post)

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Dr. Klafter’s dilemma

Fresnozionism.org
16 February '10

Dr. Joseph Klafter has a problem. He’s president of Tel Aviv University (TAU), where Dr. Anat Matar and Prof. Rachel Giora are members of the faculty, and Omar Barghouti is a graduate student.

Matar, a professor of Philosophy has called the IDF a ‘criminal army’, agrees with the conclusions of the Goldstone report that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting the civilian Palestinian Arab population for violence, and supports the boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) movement — including the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. She was arrested at a violent demonstration against the security barrier in Bili’in in 2005.

Giora, about whom I wrote previously, also a stalwart of the BDS movement, is member of the Linguistics Department. Her name appears first (followed, of course, by Matar’s) on a petition calling for “civil society institutions as well as concerned citizens around the world” to

Integrate BDS in every struggle for justice and human rights by adopting wide, context-sensitive and sustainable boycotts of Israeli products, companies, academic and cultural institutions, and sports groups, similar to the actions taken against apartheid South Africa;

(Read full post)
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TAU scholar to advocate Israel boycott

Jonny Paul
London/JPost
21 January '10

A Tel Aviv University academic will call for a boycott of Israel, speaking at a London university event next month to commemorate "one year since Israel's attack" on Gaza.

Dr. Anat Matar of TAU's Philosophy Department will be speaking on February 17 at London University's School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) - a campus renowned for anti-Israel activity.

Matar's talk is to be titled "Supporting the Boycott on Israel: A View from Within."

She is taking part in a series of events over the coming weeks organized by the Palestinian societies at five University of London campuses - University College London, SOAS, Imperial College, Kings College and Goldsmiths - as well as at the University of Westminster.

In an article in Haaretz in August, Matar accused her own university of being complicit with the "occupation" and questioned Israel's stance on Palestinian academic freedom and basic education.

A mother of a conscientious objector, on her profile page on the university's Web site Matar lists her main nonacademic activities as "movements against military service" and the "Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners."

(Read full article)
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Dexia Israel Denying Economic Rights to Jewish Applicants

Manhigut Yehudit Blog
31 December 09

In the Dec. 30th, 2009 Jerusalem Post, the following headline appeared, "Belgian bank won't lend to settlements". The Belgian bank, Dexia, has a special branch in Israel that works with municipalities. Dexia has recently decided to refuse loan requests coming into the bank from local councils in Judea and Samaria. They are arguing that the loans are too risky because if Israel agrees to abandon the Jewish heartland, they will not be able to collect on their loans. Hmmm. Does anyone else smell something not so nice here? Click here for the full story. I decided to do a wee bit of research on this and it took only one google search to find out who is behind this actuarial attack on the Jewish people -- take a guess -- you got it! Omar Barghouti: founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

Now this fellow, Omar, calls himself a "Palestinian". He was actually born in Qatar and grew up in Egypt but nevermind ... he says he is a "Palestinian". From his perspective "Palestinian" is probably a "state of mind" and he really feels it in his bones. After all he is a graduate of Columbia University which Caroline Glick (also a grad) calls "Bir Zeit University on the Hudson". Omar is one of the most successful activists working to demonize and delegitimize Israel - so it is a good idea for us to get to know the enemy a bit. He is a key force behind the Belgian bank loan refusal policy.

In addition to Mr. Barghouti's efforts to generate economic attacks on Israel - more about this shortly - one of his most clever tactics was to enter Tel Aviv University as a student hoping that they would expel him. Well no such luck! Despite the seeming contradiction his study there presents to his organization's stated purpose "Academic Boycott..etc" ; and contrary to the hopes of tens of thousands who signed a petition to have him expelled (65,000 people) - he will remain. Tel Aviv University has no plans to expel him. Of course he is disappointed by this. As he explained to his fellow activists,

(Read full post)
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Tel Aviv students afraid to challenge leftist professors

Or Kashti
Haaretz
09 November 09

Tel Aviv University students are hesitant to express their political views in class, lest lecturers perceived to have left-wing political views penalize them with lower grades, the head of TAU's Department of Curriculum and Instruction wrote in an internal memorandum last month. Prof. Nira Hativa's comment in the faculty memo ignited controversy among professors, with some declaring that her sentiments should not be made public.

Hativa wrote: "There are no small number of students of lecturers with left-wing views who complain bitterly that they are extremely offended by the presentation of materials that oppose their views, but are fearful of expressing contrary viewpoints in class, lest it harm their grades."

In response to the uproar, Hativa, who is currently abroad, wrote Haaretz this weekend that "the things I wrote in the context of an internal disagreement are based on intuition and my personal impressions."

The chair of the university's students' union, Shahar Botzer, said his organization receives a number of complaints each year from students dissatisfied with what they view as lecturers' biased portrayal of material in favor of left-wing positions. He said that such complaints are the exception, however, rather than the rule.

"If lecturers express their views in class in a way that makes it illegitimate to express contrary views - that is inappropriate and unacceptable to us," Botzer said. "This university is founded on pluralism and on the ability to express a variety of opinions."

Hativa's statements were prompted by a story in the Haaretz English Edition on rightist activists monitoring lecturers who are considered to have leftist views, as well as an article in Maariv on what it described as the right-wing views of Daniel Schueftan, deputy director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa.

"At the end of each semester, I read comments from several hundred students on the teaching they receive," Hativa wrote on October 23. "I have come across many complaints from students about a small number of lecturers in various fields, who express radical left-wing opinions in their classes - that they are lashing out at the State of Israel, the army, the Zionist movement and worse."

TAU said in response that "informal discussions are held frequently on controversial issues, and people feel 'at home' in expressing opinions based on their understanding and intuition. The university is an institution where pluralism is a guiding principle."
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