Harvard, Jew haters, motherhood and Israel
by Caroline Glick
February 19, 2012
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.
Consider the long list of "professors" who will be speaking at the conference.
My sense is that the reason the Holocaust was more successful in
killing Jews on a genocidal scale than say the Russian czars' pogroms
is because the Holocaust was fuelled from above - from elitist
anti-Semitism and elitist xenophobia. It wasn't the feudal lords who
organized the murder machine. Those lords just let their Cossacks
murder couple hundred Jews to get their bloodlust satisfied for the
year. Most of the surviving Jews were permitted to pack their
suitcases and run away.
The Holocaust was different. It wasn't the peasant class or their
landed gentry lords that instigated the crime. And the Holocaust
wasn't perpetrated principally to satisfy their taste for Jewish
blood.
In the decades before the Holocaust, an evil wind blew through
academia and other elite quarters throughout the Western world. The
doctrines of race and eugenics became all the rage of the anointed
intellectuals. Even an otherwise liberal thinker like Oliver Wendell
Holmes was drawn to the fashionable concept of killing mentally
disabled in the name of eugenics.
These doctrines gave the German intellectuals the philosophical
underpinning for their so-called "anti-Semitism." That itself was a
pseudo-scientific term for regular old Jew hating just like
"anti-Zionism" is a progressive, politically correct term for regular
old Jew hating today. That is, anti-Semitism was an elitist way of
masking intolerance, even genocidal intolerance for Jews and making it
socially acceptable to seek our annihilation. And this is the precise
function that the term anti-Zionism serves today.
The worker bees of Europe in the mid-20th century had been marinated
in Christian Jew hatred for centuries. But they were mere commoners.
They would never have made an Auschwitz or held a Wanssee Conference,
but they were more than willing to fill Jewish babies with lead when
given a chance. And the German intellectuals and their counterparts
from Boston to Paris to London gave them the intellectual foundation
of racism to kill Jews on a scale they could never have dreamed
possible.
Likewise, today's crop of corrupt intellectuals of the Walt and
Mearshimer variety with all their allies in academia and the media and
the blogosphere and politics are seeking to delegitimize Israel - the
collective Jew -- intellectually. Like the work of the eugenics
champions of the late 19th and early 20th century, their work will
provide Muslim Jew haters with the political leeway to murder Jews on
a scale they could never have dreamed possible. Hence you'll never
find a so-called "anti-Zionist" like Walt lose sleep over the prospect
of a nuclear-armed Iran, but rather over the prospect of Israel
preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
And this brings me to the second point. I read the CAMERA alert on my
Iphone as I was feeding my newborn son. I looked out the window at
Jerusalem and all I could feel was thankful to be living in the
independent, free Jewish state of Israel. I am thankful that these
pseudo intellectuals no longer can determine the future of my people,
as they could in the 1930s. I am thankful that my children will in all
likelihood not study in US universities but in Israeli ones that are
not as demented as their American counterparts.
And here's a couple of disturbing thoughts for all the parents in the
US who are about to put themselves in the poor house to pay for their
children's university education.
The embrace of the cause of Israel's destruction by so many celebrity
professors today is part and parcel of the destruction of the US
higher education system.
At the Harvard conference, not a drop of truth will be spoken by any
of the eminent Jew hating participants. Students who attend will be
presented with lies dripping with moralistic gobbledygook and be told
that they are enlightened for embracing this sewage.
The absence of truth from academic discourses is not limited to
discussion of Israel. Rather, the ability of professors like Walt and
his pals to prosper with their lies is a function of the general
deterioration and corruption of academic institutions.
This general decline and indeed failure was highlighted last week by
Prof. Peter Berkowitz in an article he published in the Wall Street
Journal about Yale's totalitarian system of "informal justice" that
allows the university to effectively destroy young male students'
future by blackening their reputations on the basis of unsubstantiated
and even anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct. The policies in
place deny young male Yalies due process and enable witch hunts.
In his conclusion Berkowitz wrote that the abandonment of even the
semblance of due process for male students on campuses is in line with
the general deterioration or even disappearance of educational
standards. As he put it:
"At its best, university education has deteriorated into little more
than random forays into the sciences, social sciences and humanities.
But traditionally, and for good reason in a democracy, liberal
education at its heart involved instruction in the principles of
freedom.
If Yale and other institutions across the country were fulfilling
their promise to educate students, then their faculties would teach
that riding roughshod over due process shows ignorance of or contempt
for the rule of law. Professors would be teaching that the presumption
of innocence is rooted in a commitment to treating individuals as ends
in themselves and not as a means to advancing some social goal or
another, even if that goal is given the name of equality or justice.
And students would be learning that our established and legitimate
justice system does not presume guilt, because to do so is to fail to
appreciate the limits of human knowledge and the propensity of those
who wield power to abuse it."
Let's not forget that this is the same Yale University that saw fit to
close its interdisciplinary center for the study of anti-Semitism last
year because YIISA had the unmitigated gall to highlight contemporary
"progressive" Jew hatred and its unwashed cousin Islamic Jew hatred.
CAMERA has launched an email campaign to try to fight Harvard's
descent into Jew hating insanity. I think that it is good for what
it's worth. But I have no expectations from that institution. The
madness that has taken control of America's elite educational
institutions is a threat to the US because it is robbing a generation
of young people of the ability to think freely and critically about
the world.
For me, the message is clear enough, as a Jew, a Jewish mother and a
person who clings to my freedom, guns and religion, my job is to do
everything I can to ensure that Israel remains strong and gets
stronger so that today's corrupted elites can't touch us.
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