Former NYT Editor Bill Keller Mansplains to Cancer Patient Lisa Bonchek Adams to Shut Up and Die the Right Way. By Katie Halper.

Former NYT editor mansplains to cancer patient to shut up and die the right way. By Katie Halper. Feministing, January 14, 2014.

Emma Keller Wonders: Does This Cancer Patient Tweet Too Much? By Hamilton Nolan. Gawker, January 9, 2014.

Bill and Emma Keller Wish You Would Just Shut Up About Your Cancer Already, Lisa Adams. By Snipy. Wonkette, January 13, 2014.

A note to Bill and Emma Keller: Tweeting about cancer isn’t over-sharing if it helps someone. By Mathew Ingram. Gigaom, January 13, 2014.

Lisa Bonchek Adams and the Problem with Criticizing a Woman Who Documents Her Cancer Treatment Online. By Lisa Belkin. The Huffington Post, January 13, 2014.

On Live-Tweeting One’s Suffering. By Megan Garber. The Atlantic, January 13, 2014.

No Shame: Bill Keller Bullies Cancer Patient. By Greg Mitchell. The Nation, January 13, 2014.

Bill and Emma Keller Write Matching Cancer Columns, Face Internet Wrath. By Joe Coscarelli. New York Magazine, January 13, 2014.

Bill and Emma Keller’s bizarre pieces about cancer patient Lisa Adams. By Daniel D’Addario. Salon, January 13, 2014.

Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness? By Emma G. Keller. The Guardian, January 8, 2014. [cached at the Internet Archive.]

Heroic Measures. By Bill Keller. New York Times, January 12, 2014.

Why an article on Lisa Bonchek Adams was removed from the Guardian site. By Chris Elliott. The Guardian, January 16, 2014.

Lisa Bonchek Adams, Tweeting Cancer and Loneliness. By Francesca Kaplan Grossman. The Huffington Post, January 16, 2014.

Lisa Bonchek Adams website.

Lisa Bonchek Adams Twitter.

Lisa Bonchek Adams Facebook.

Lisa Bonchek Adams

Hillary’s Hit List. By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

Hillary’s Hit List. By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Politico, January 12, 2014.

How I Gave Up on Snark to Become a Canadian Politician. By Chrystia Freeland.

How I Gave Up on Snark to Become a Canadian Politician. By Chrystia Freeland. Politico, Jan 14, 2014.

Abandoning “snarky” media for politics. Video. Chrystia Freeland interviewed by Howard Kurtz. Media Buzz. Fox News, January 19, 2014. YouTube.

Colbie Caillat: Hold On.

Colbie Caillat: Hold On. Video. ColbieCaillatVEVO, January 15, 2014. YouTube.

Israel/Palestine: Who’s Indigenous? By Ryan Bellerose.

Israel/Palestine: Who’s Indigenous? By Ryan Bellerose. Israellycool, January 9, 2014.

Bellerose:

I am a Métis from Paddle Prairie Metis settlement. My father, Mervin Bellerose, co-authored the Métis Settlements Act of 1989, which was passed by the Alberta legislature in 1990 and cemented our land rights. I founded Canadians For Accountability, a native rights advocacy group, and I am an organizer and participant in the Idle No More movement in Calgary. And I am a Zionist.

 

Indigenous status

 

To begin, let us acknowledge that there is no rule that a land can have only one indigenous people; it is not a zero sum game in which one group must be considered indigenous so that therefore another is not. However, there is a very clear guideline to being an indigenous people. It is somewhat complex but can be boiled down to the checklist below, as developed by anthropologist José R. Martínez-Cobo (former special rapporteur of the Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities for the United Nations).

 

This list was developed because indigenous rights are beginning to be respected across the planet. This recognition is incredibly important, so we as indigenous people cannot allow non-indigenous people to make false claims, which ultimately would harm our own rights. Israel is the world’s first modern indigenous state: the creation and declaration of the sovereign nation of Israel marks the first time in history that an indigenous people has managed to regain control of its ancestral lands and build a nation state. As such, this is incredibly important for indigenous people both to recognise and to support as a great example for our peoples to emulate.

 

The actual working definition of “indigenous people,” (not the Wikipedia version, nor Merriam Webster, both more suited to plants and animals) for purposes of this essay is that developed by aforementioned anthropologist José R. Martínez-Cobo. With this as my foundation, I will detail why Jews are indigenous to Israel, and why Palestinians are not.

 

Martínez-Cobo’s research suggests that indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.

 

This historical continuity may consist of the continuation, for an extended period reaching into the present of one or more of the following factors:

Occupation of ancestral lands, or at least of part of them.

 

Common ancestry with the original occupants of these lands.

 

Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.).

 

Language (whether used as the only language, as mother-tongue, as the habitual means of communication at home or in the family, or as the main, preferred, habitual, general or normal language).

 

Residence in certain parts of the country, or in certain regions of the world.

 

Religion that places importance on spiritual ties to the ancestral lands.

 

Blood quantum – that is, the amount of blood you carry of a specific people to identify as that people. The concept was developed by colonialists in order to eventually breed out native peoples.

Let us now look quickly at the Jews. How do they fit this definition?

Their lands were occupied, first by the Romans, then by the Arabs in the seventh century.

 

They share common ancestry with previous occupants as determined by several genetic studies.

 

Their culture can be traced directly to the Levant, where it developed into what is now known as “Jewish culture.” While different Jewish communities have slightly different traditions, they all share the same root culture, and it remains unchanged. They have resurrected their traditional language, and while many still speak Yiddish and Ladino, Hebrew has become the primary language again.

 

They have spiritual ties to the land, which plays a large role in their traditions as a people.

Despite all the arguments about “European” Jews, they in fact meet all the criteria set forth by Martínez-Cobo. Even though Israel is the first modern indigenous state, it still has lands that are occupied by foreigners in Judea and Samaria. Those are ancestral lands and, many feel that they should be returned to the indigenous peoples for self-determination.

 

Now, for the flip side.

 

Palestinians have what are called “rights of longstanding presence;” and although these are legitimate rights, they do not trump indigenous rights. The very nature of “longstanding presence” means that although they lived somewhere a long time, they do not have the right to occupy indigenous peoples and control them.

 

The argument that Palestinians are indigenous is incorrect for several reasons.

Approximately 50% percent of Palestinian Arabs can track their ancestors back farther than their great-grandparents. Many are descended from Arabs brought to the Levant by the British to build infrastructure after World War I.

 

The vast majority of Palestinians are Arabic speaking Muslims; the Arabic language is indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula, as is the Muslim religion. The Muslim religion’s holiest places are not in the Levant, but in the city of Mecca, located in the Arabian Peninsula. They have no specifically Palestinian culture that is completely Palestinian dating before the 1960s; in fact, prior to that, the majority identified as “greater Syrians.”

 

Some Palestinians share common ancestry with indigenous peoples, but they neither follow indigenous traditions nor do they self-identify as those indigenous peoples. They share neither religion nor language with them. Blood quantum alone is insufficient to transmit indigenous status.

 

The Arabs of the Middle East subsumed several indigenous populations, but no group can become indigenous through subsuming indigenous peoples. Rather, they conquered the entire region and spread their own language, customs, and religion. This is historical fact.

Now you might ask, why is this important? It is important to indigenous people because we cannot allow the argument that conquerors can become indigenous. If we, as other indigenous people, allow that argument to be made, then we are delegitimising our own rights.

 

If conquerors can become indigenous, then the white Europeans who came to my indigenous lands in North America could now claim to be indigenous. The white Europeans who went to Australia and New Zealand could now claim to be indigenous. If we, even once, allow that argument to be made, indigenous rights are suddenly devalued and meaningless. This is somewhat peculiar, as those who are arguing for Palestinian “indigenous rights” are usually those who have little grasp of the history, and no understanding of the truth behind indigenous rights.

 

If you should encounter the argument that conquerors may themselves become indigenous to a region by virtue of conquering, direct those who assert the argument to this article, and help them understand not only is the argument wrong – it is dangerous to Indigenous people everywhere.

The Death of Expertise. By Tom Nichols.

The Death of Expertise. By Tom Nichols. The Federalist, January 17, 2014.

When Ignorance Begets Confidence: The Classic Dunning-Kruger Effect. By Daniel R. Hawes. Psychology Today, June 6, 2010.

Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflatedself-assessments. By Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 77 No. 6 (December 1999).

Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence. By David Dunning, Kerri Johnson, Joyce Ehrlinger, and Justin Kruger. Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 12, No. 3 (June 2003).


Nichols:

I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.

 

I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.

 

But democracy, as I wrote in an essay about C.S. Lewis and the Snowden affair, denotes a system of government, not an actual state of equality. It means that we enjoy equal rights versus the government, and in relation to each other. Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge.  It assuredly does not mean that “everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.” And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense.

 

What’s going on here?

 

I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all. By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other specialists in various fields. Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live.

 

This is a very bad thing. Yes, it’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us. But mostly, experts have a pretty good batting average compared to laymen: doctors, whatever their errors, seem to do better with most illnesses than faith healers or your Aunt Ginny and her special chicken gut poultice. To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly.

 

Worse, it’s dangerous. The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself. Yes, I said “Western civilization”: that paternalistic, racist, ethnocentric approach to knowledge that created the nuclear bomb, the Edsel, and New Coke, but which also keeps diabetics alive, lands mammoth airliners in the dark, and writes documents like the Charter of the United Nations.

 

This isn’t just about politics, which would be bad enough. No, it’s worse than that: the perverse effect of the death of expertise is that without real experts, everyone is an expert on everything. To take but one horrifying example, we live today in an advanced post-industrial country that is now fighting a resurgence of whooping cough — a scourge nearly eliminated a century ago — merely because otherwise intelligent people have been second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine. (Yes, I mean people like Jenny McCarthy.

 

In politics, too, the problem has reached ridiculous proportions. People in political debates no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to insult. To correct another is to be a hater. And to refuse to acknowledge alternative views, no matter how fantastic or inane, is to be closed-minded.

 

How conversation became exhausting

 

Critics might dismiss all this by saying that everyone has a right to participate in the public sphere. That’s true. But every discussion must take place within limits and above a certain baseline of competence. And competence is sorely lacking in the public arena. People with strong views on going to war in other countries can barely find their own nation on a map; people who want to punish Congress for this or that law can’t name their own member of the House.

 

None of this ignorance stops people from arguing as though they are research scientists. Tackle a complex policy issue with a layman today, and you will get snippy and sophistic demands to show ever increasing amounts of “proof” or “evidence” for your case, even though the ordinary interlocutor in such debates isn’t really equipped to decide what constitutes “evidence” or to know it when it’s presented. The use of evidence is a specialized form of knowledge that takes a long time to learn, which is why articles and books are subjected to “peer review” and not to “everyone review,” but don’t tell that to someone hectoring you about the how things really work in Moscow or Beijing or Washington.

 

This subverts any real hope of a conversation, because it is simply exhausting — at least speaking from my perspective as the policy expert in most of these discussions — to have to start from the very beginning of every argument and establish the merest baseline of knowledge, and then constantly to have to negotiate the rules of logical argument. (Most people I encounter, for example, have no idea what a non-sequitur is, or when they’re using one; nor do they understand the difference between generalizations and stereotypes.) Most people are already huffy and offended before ever encountering the substance of the issue at hand.

 

Once upon a time — way back in the Dark Ages before the 2000s — people seemed to understand, in a general way, the difference between experts and laymen. There was a clear demarcation in political food fights, as objections and dissent among experts came from their peers — that is, from people equipped with similar knowledge. The public, largely, were spectators.

 

This was both good and bad. While it strained out the kook factor in discussions (editors controlled their letters pages, which today would be called “moderating”), it also meant that sometimes public policy debate was too esoteric, conducted less for public enlightenment and more as just so much dueling jargon between experts.

 

No one — not me, anyway — wants to return to those days. I like the 21st century, and I like the democratization of knowledge and the wider circle of public participation. That greater participation, however, is endangered by the utterly illogical insistence that every opinion should have equal weight, because people like me, sooner or later, are forced to tune out people who insist that we’re all starting from intellectual scratch. (Spoiler: We’re not.) And if that happens, experts will go back to only talking to each other. And that’s bad for democracy.

 

The downside of no gatekeepers

 

How did this peevishness about expertise come about, and how can it have gotten so immensely foolish?

 

Some of it is purely due to the globalization of communication. There are no longer any gatekeepers: the journals and op-ed pages that were once strictly edited have been drowned under the weight of self-publishable blogs. There was once a time when participation in public debate, even in the pages of the local newspaper, required submission of a letter or an article, and that submission had to be written intelligently, pass editorial review, and stand with the author’s name attached. Even then, it was a big deal to get a letter in a major newspaper.

 

Now, anyone can bum rush the comments section of any major publication. Sometimes, that results in a free-for-all that spurs better thinking. Most of the time, however, it means that anyone can post anything they want, under any anonymous cover, and never have to defend their views or get called out for being wrong.

 

Another reason for the collapse of expertise lies not with the global commons but with the increasingly partisan nature of U.S. political campaigns. There was once a time when presidents would win elections and then scour universities and think-tanks for a brain trust; that’s how Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others ended up in government service while moving between places like Harvard and Columbia.

 

Those days are gone. To be sure, some of the blame rests with the increasing irrelevance of overly narrow research in the social sciences. But it is also because the primary requisite of seniority in the policy world is too often an answer to the question: “What did you do during the campaign?” This is the code of the samurai, not the intellectual, and it privileges the campaign loyalist over the expert.

 

I have a hard time, for example, imagining that I would be called to Washington today in the way I was back in 1990, when the senior Senator from Pennsylvania asked a former U.S. Ambassador to the UN who she might recommend to advise him on foreign affairs, and she gave him my name. Despite the fact that I had no connection to Pennsylvania and had never worked on his campaigns, he called me at the campus where I was teaching, and later invited me to join his personal staff.

 

Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James Schall, once wrote many years ago that “students have obligations to teachers,” including “trust, docility, effort, and thinking,” an assertion that would produce howls of outrage from the entitled generations roaming campuses today.) As a result, many academic departments are boutiques, in which the professors are expected to be something like intellectual valets. This produces nothing but a delusion of intellectual adequacy in children who should be instructed, not catered to.

 

The confidence of the dumb

 

There’s also that immutable problem known as “human nature.” It has a name now: it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which says, in sum, that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. And when you get invested in being aggressively dumb . . . well, the last thing you want to encounter are experts who disagree with you, and so you dismiss them in order to maintain your unreasonably high opinion of yourself. (There’s a lot of that loose on social media, especially.)

 

All of these are symptoms of the same disease: a manic reinterpretation of “democracy” in which everyone must have their say, and no one must be “disrespected.” (The verb to disrespect is one of the most obnoxious and insidious innovations in our language in years, because it really means “to fail to pay me the impossibly high requirement of respect I demand.”) This yearning for respect and equality, even—perhaps especially—if unearned, is so intense that it brooks no disagreement. It represents the full flowering of a therapeutic culture where self-esteem, not achievement, is the ultimate human value, and it’s making us all dumber by the day.

 

Thus, at least some of the people who reject expertise are not really, as they often claim, showing their independence of thought. They are instead rejecting anything that might stir a gnawing insecurity that their own opinion might not be worth all that much.

 

Experts: the servants, not masters, of a democracy

 

So what can we do? Not much, sadly, since this is a cultural and generational issue that will take a long time come right, if it ever does. Personally, I don’t think technocrats and intellectuals should rule the world: we had quite enough of that in the late 20th century, thank you, and it should be clear now that intellectualism makes for lousy policy without some sort of political common sense. Indeed, in an ideal world, experts are the servants, not the masters, of a democracy.

 

But when citizens forgo their basic obligation to learn enough to actually govern themselves, and instead remain stubbornly imprisoned by their fragile egos and caged by their own sense of entitlement, experts will end up running things by default. That’s a terrible outcome for everyone.

 

Expertise is necessary, and it’s not going away. Unless we return it to a healthy role in public policy, we’re going to have stupider and less productive arguments every day. So here, presented without modesty or political sensitivity, are some things to think about when engaging with experts in their area of specialization.

 

1. We can all stipulate: the expert isn’t always right.

 

2. But an expert is far more likely to be right than you are. On a question of factual interpretation or evaluation, it shouldn’t engender insecurity or anxiety to think that an expert’s view is likely to be better-informed than yours. (Because, likely, it is.)

 

3. Experts come in many flavors. Education enables it, but practitioners in a field acquire expertise through experience; usually the combination of the two is the mark of a true expert in a field. But if you have neither education nor experience, you might want to consider exactly what it is you’re bringing to the argument.

 

4. In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count. Remember: having a strong opinion about something isn’t the same as knowing something.

 

5. And yes, your political opinions have value. Of course they do: you’re a member of a democracy and what you want is as important as what any other voter wants. As a layman, however, your political analysis, has far less value, and probably isn’t — indeed, almost certainly isn’t — as good as you think it is.

 

And how do I know all this? Just who do I think I am?

 

Well, of course: I’m an expert.

The Impossible Standard. By Steve Apfel.

The Impossible Standard. By Steve Apfel. Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2014.

How Iran, Putin and Assad Outwitted America. By David Keyes.

How Iran, Putin and Assad Outwitted America. By David Keyes. The Daily Beast, January 16, 2014.

The ASA, NYU, and the Shame of Academia. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

The ASA, NYU, and the Shame of Academia. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, January 16, 2014.

Open Letter to NYU’s President: Why the American Studies Assn.’s Israel Boycott Makes Me Ashamed to Be an Alumnus. By Richard Behar. Forbes, January 14, 2014.

Homophobic, Racist, Sexist, “Take Xanax”: Reactions To My Open Letter To NYU’s President On ASA’s Israel Boycott. By Richard Behar. Forbes, February 4, 2014.

Exposing the Israel Bashers: Opinions Without Facts, Facts Without Context. By Abraham H. Foxman. The Huffington Post, January 15, 2014.


Tobin:

The vote last month by the American Studies Association to join a boycott of Israel’s colleges and universities generated a firestorm of criticism of the group, and justifiably so. The willingness of an academic organization to participate in an effort to single out the Jewish state in this manner is an appalling instance of prejudice. The vote illustrated the way the far left has seized control of such scholarly groups and the insidious nature of a campaign which is not designed so much to help the Palestinians—the alleged objects of the ASA’s concern—but to aid an economic war on Israel that is rooted in a desire to wipe the one Jewish state on the planet off the map. But in addressing the efforts of the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement, it isn’t enough merely to scrutinize this and other groups of pseudo-scholars bent on politicizing their fields of study. The time has come to hold their enablers accountable, as well.

 

That’s the thrust behind a lengthy piece published in Forbes this week by journalist Richard Behar in which he lets loose with a cri de coeur directed at his alma mater New York University, and its president, John Sexton, for his indifferent response to the ASA.

 

As Behar makes clear, responsibility for this disgrace doesn’t belong solely to the radicals intent on demonizing Israel. It also should be placed on those institutions that are supporting these hatemongers as well as resisting efforts to hold them accountable. As Behar notes, NYU falls into both categories.

 

While Sexton has stated his disagreement with the ASA’s vote, as Behar rightly notes, the NYU president’s statement was perfunctory, especially when compared to more passionate denunciations of this subversion of academic integrity made by the presidents of other universities–such as the University of Connecticut, Wesleyan, Middlebury College, or the University of Indiana–that Behar cited. But if that sounds like nitpicking, it isn’t. NYU has a special responsibility to speak up about this issue because its faculty is neck-deep in the ASA’s decision-making process. The incoming head of the group is NYU’s Lisa Duggan and fully 25 percent of the national council that first promulgated the anti-Israel resolution is based at the school. Moreover, as the home to what Hillel International reports is the largest number of Jewish students at any American institution of higher learning, NYU should also be mindful that giving platforms to scholars that promote an ideology that is indistinguishable from classic anti-Semitism places them under a particular obligation to avoid creating a hostile environment for Jews.

 

A key element of this controversy is the fact that many schools are themselves institutional members of the ASA and are thus compromised by its participation in the boycott. NYU is one such university. But unlike other schools that have moved to sever their connections with the ASA and thus remove this taint from themselves, it has neither done so nor clarified the nature of its connection with the group.

 

As Behar also notes, NYU bears a special responsibility for speaking about discrimination against Israel, because of its decision to open a campus in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. While that principality has welcomed business with the West and its leaders have been showering NYU and other American partners with generous donations, it has also been notorious for its discrimination against Israel, Israelis and Jews. Just this past a month a Dutch soccer team invited to play in the country was forced to leave one of its members at home because he was an Israeli citizen if the team was to be permitted to play in Abu Dhabi.

 

The need to raise money may be offered as an excuse for an institution like NYU getting into bed with a nation that boycotts Israel. But even if we are to grant them a pass on that egregious connection, that should make Sexton and NYU even more eager to distance the univeristy from the ASA’s attack on academic freedom.

 

Also discouraging is NYU’s public opposition to the proposal in the New York State legislature, by its Speaker Sheldon Silver, that would block colleges and universities from using state aid money to fund groups that promote discriminatory boycotts like the ASA. While more a symbolic measure than anything else, it is still a way for the state of New York to register its disgust at the ASA. Yet rather than sever its ties with the ASA, NYU to condemn the proposal as an affront to academic freedom.

 

Behar, whose piece contains a lengthy defense of Israel against the specious charge that is an apartheid state, understands the realities of the conflict and the plight of Palestinians better than the ASA’s members. In a Forbes cover story published last August, he wrote about the way Israel’s growing high-tech industry was seeking Palestinian partners. But as he reported in a follow-up article, the Arab businessmen who were working with Israelis in partnerships that stood to benefit the Palestinian economy were subsequently forced to disavow any interest in working with the Jews. The dynamic of the conflict is such that anyone who seeks to create common ground with Israelis is branded a collaborator. Rather than working to promote peace, groups like the ASA are, instead, backing those forces that are intent on perpetuating and worsening the situation.

 

Behar is to be applauded for speaking out in this manner. But he should not be alone. It is time for alumni of other schools that are also implicated in the ASA scandal to pressure them to draw a line in the sand against anti-Israel hate. A good place to start would be by withholding contributions that alumni are endlessly asked to make from universities that foster anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli sentiment on their campuses under the spurious guise of academic freedom.

Obama’s Messianic and Obsessive Foreign Policy. By Michael Weiss.

Obama’s Messianic and Obsessive Foreign Policy. By Michael Weiss. Real Clear World, January 16, 2014. Also at NOW Lebanon.

The Israel Double Standard. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Israel Double Standard. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, January 16, 2014.

Hanson:

An obscure academic organization called the American Studies Association not long ago voted to endorse a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. The self-appointed moralists were purportedly outraged over the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians.

 

Given academia’s past obsessions with the Jewish state, the targeting of Israel is not new. Yet why do the professors focus on Israel and not Saudi Arabia, which denies women the right to drive and only recently granted them the right to vote? Why not Russia, which has been accused of suppressing free speech, or Nigeria, which has passed retrograde anti-homosexual legislation?

 

The hip poet Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Everett LeRoi Jones) recently died. He was once poet laureate of New Jersey, held prestigious university posts, and was canonized with awards — despite being a hateful anti-Semite.

 

After 9/11, Baraka wrote a poem that suggested Israel knew about the plan to attack the World Trade Center. One of his poems from the ’60s included this unabashedly anti-Semitic passage: “Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. . . . I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured.” Yet that did not preclude the New York Times and NPR from praising him after his death.

 

Trendy multicultural French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is known for his anti-Semitic provocations and for making a gesture that has been described as an inverted Nazi salute. He recently quipped of a Jewish journalist: “When I hear him talk, you see . . . I say to myself, gas chambers . . . a pity.” Auschwitz is now a joke?

 

Loudmouth multimillionaire hip-hop artist Kanye West recently suggested in an interview that President Obama’s approval ratings have waned because “black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people.” In the mind of Mr. West, Obama’s current unpopularity has nothing to do with the IRS, Benghazi, the Associated Press and NSA scandals, or with the Obamacare disaster.

 

In politics, Israel often finds itself at the wrong end of a troubling double standard.

 

Secretary of State John Kerry seems to be camped out in Israel these days. The Obama administration hopes to pressure Israeli leaders to offer concessions that will lead to an elusive Middle East peace. Yet even if Israel gave this administration what it wanted, how would the United States guarantee reciprocal commitments from the notoriously corrupt Palestinian Authority, which has no democratic legitimacy among those in the West Bank? Terrorist-affiliated Hamas wants no part of any such settlement.

 

It is hardly anti-Semitic to focus on problems between Israel and the Palestinians, or even to pressure the Israelis. But it becomes so when problems elsewhere are simply ignored and Israel alone is singled out to be chastised.

 

Is the U.N. focused on the 13 million Germans who were ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe about the same time that thousands of Palestinians left what became Israel? Would the American Studies Association boycott Chinese universities over the absorption of Tibet?

 

Is the world really troubled about divided capitals like Jerusalem? If so, why not an international conference on the Turkish occupation of a divided Nicosia?

 

Can Kerry not use shuttle diplomacy to settle who owns all those disputed rocky islands that have led China and Japan to the brink of war?

 

Nazis and racists used to spearhead Jewish hatred using ancient crackpot defamations that date back to the Jewish diaspora into Europe after the Roman destruction of Judea. But lately, anti-Semitism has become more a left-wing pathology. It is driven by the cheap multicultural trashing of the West. Jewish people here and abroad have become convenient targets for those angry with supposedly undeserved Western success and privilege.

 

Aside from the old envy, and racial and religious hatred, I think cowardice explains the new selective anti-Semitism. Kanye West would not dare slander radical Muslims, given the violence and threats against European cartoonists and filmmakers who have dared to create work perceived as insulting to Islam. The American Studies Association would not call for a boycott of Russia despite its endemic persecution of gays. After all, Russian president Vladimir Putin is as unpredictable as Israeli politicians are forbearing.

 

Kerry is not rushing into Damascus to stop the bloodletting that has claimed far more lives than all the Palestinians lost in 70 years of conflict with Israel. Syrian president Bashar Assad, Shiite terrorists, and al-Qaeda would not listen politely to Kerry’s pontificating sermons.

 

The sort of anti-Semitism we see from buffoons like Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is appalling, but the double standard to which Israel is held in matters of foreign policy by those who should know better is in many ways even more galling.

Palestinian Incitement and the Endless War. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Palestinian Incitement and the Endless War. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, January 15, 2014.

Palestinians Move to Breach Process. By Tom Wilson. Commentary, January 14, 2014.

Netanyahu: Jew Free Palestinian State Would Be Ethnic Cleansing. By Joshua Levitt. The Algemeiner, January 15, 2014.

Europe’s Unhinged Assault on Israel. By Tom Wilson. Commentary, January 17, 2014.

Abbas Denies His Authority to Make Cardinal Decisions for a Lasting Peace Agreement. By Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, January 13, 2014.

Halevi:

The Palestinian strategy has been revealed in full. The current political negotiations, or any future negotiations, cannot bring about a signed, stable, and lasting political agreement that will bring an end to the conflict and all claims. The first Palestinian objective in their order of priorities is to receive full sovereignty on the territory of 1967 – while leaving the conflict wide open.

 

The problem of the refugees is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and this is seen from the Palestinian perspective as a winning strategic card, through which the Palestinians will be able to wear down the power of the state of Israel even after the establishment of a Palestinian state, and to overcome Israel demographically and turn it over the long term into a part of a single Palestinian state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

The Palestinian Refugees on the Day After “Independence.” By Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, December 1, 2011.


Tobin:

Last week, the Israeli government sought to focus the world’s attention on one of the chief obstacles to peace in the Middle East: Palestinian incitement aimed at fomenting hatred of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. The report detailed the way the Palestinian Authority uses its official media, school textbooks, as well as the influence of many of its leaders to reinforce the notion that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state irrespective of its borders. The hate that is routinely broadcast on Palestinian television, published in its newspapers, or taught in schools seeks to demonize Jews and inculcate the notion that they are evil and have no rights to any part of the country. In doing so, the PA—which is supposed to be Israel’s partner for peace—doesn’t merely exacerbate an already tense situation but also sows the seeds of future conflict by teaching new generations to hate their Jewish neighbors.

 

Unfortunately, the reaction from the United States and much of the international media to this information was apathetic if not one of complete indifference. While some try to draw a false moral equivalence between official Palestinian government hate speech and honors for terrorist murderers on the one hand and stray comments by a tiny minority of Israelis who express hate for Arabs on the other, American officials and media pundits determined to place the blame for the lack of peace on the Jewish state simply ignore the subject. As was the case in the 1990s when both the United States and the Israeli government turned a blind eye to the incitement carried out by the newly empowered PA in the wake of the Oslo Accords, most peace processers treat talk about Palestinian incitement as a distraction from the real issues. Anything that diverts attention from attempts to pressure Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians is seen as off the point, if not a destructive effort to derail peace.

 

But the issue of incitement isn’t limited to hate speech on Palestinian TV or in textbooks. As today’s New York Times reports, the PA’s rivals in Gaza have managed to put their even more extreme program of hate into action. The Hamas government there used the winter break for its schools to enroll more than 13,000 youngsters at terrorist training mini-camps throughout the Gaza Strip. The recruitment of school-age children in this manner is child abuse on a massive scale as well as a potential war crime. But just as important, it is a sign that the issue of incitement isn’t so much a theoretical problem as a literal guarantee of endless war.

 

The Futwaa program is funded by the Hamas Education Ministry and focuses on teaching boys and young teenagers the finer points about the use of weapons, street fighting (in which civilians are used as human shields), and ferreting out Palestinians who might give information to Israel. This massive effort not only prepares children for future service in the so-called military wing of Hamas, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, which supervises the Futwaa camps, but also enables them to intensify the hate education about Israel and Jews that is already integral to public education in Gaza. As the Times notes, Hamas officials are pleased with the results and are thinking about expanding their program:

Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister of Gaza, told Futwaa participants at a graduation ceremony on Tuesday in Gaza City that theirs was “the generation that will achieve the liberation and independence” of Palestine. Suggesting that the program would soon be provided for girls as well, Mr. Haniya predicted that Israel would face “a Palestinian generation that weakness knows no way into their hearts.”

 

One participant, Osama Shehada, 15, said he wanted to study physical engineering to learn how to make bombs and explosives to target Israel.

Lest there be any confusion about what this indoctrination consists of, by “liberation and independence” of Palestine, Hamas isn’t referring to a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem that is supposed to be the solution to the conflict. When they say “liberation” that means “liberating” all of Israel, including those areas inside the June 1967 lines, from its Jewish population–which is to say exterminating the Jews. That the Times article refers to Hamas using bases evacuated by Israel in 2005 in an effort to separate the two peoples and therefore achieve peace for these camps is a cruel but telling irony.

 

Instead of ignoring Israeli efforts to focus on incitement, Secretary of State John Kerry should be paying close attention to the issue. While a solution that would create two states for two peoples regardless of the borders would be something an overwhelming majority of Israelis would happily accept, Palestinian educators, both in the West Bank governed by PA “moderates” and in Hamas-run Gaza, have ensured that most Palestinians would reject any such deal. Until a sea change in Palestinian culture occurs that would allow their leaders to make peace, all efforts to craft a compromise to resolve the conflict are doomed to fail.

Withdrawal to the 1967 Lines Will Not Put an End to the “Occupation.” By Yoel Ben-Nun.

Withdrawal to the 1967 Lines Will Not Put an End to the “Occupation.” By Yoel Ben-Nun. Ynet News, January 14, 2014.

Ben-Nun:

Ahead of historic decision on peace deal based on half-truths, let’s not lie to ourselves.


Against a complete lie it’s easier to defend oneself and present a truth. With half-truths, however, it’s very hard to deal.

 

1. “Two states for two people”

 

The Palestinians in Amman and the Palestinians in Nablus, Ramallah and Jenin are one people. They have different political leaderships, and most Israelis prefer justifiably, and out of years-long experience, the royal Hashemite leadership, but in the historical Land of Israel there have been two states for a long time, and there are no three people.

 

2. “Jewish state in Land of Israel, with solid Jewish majority”

 

Today’s conflict focuses on controlling Area C, where some tens of thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of thousands of Israelis (= “settlers”) reside.

 

The Palestinian struggle against the Israeli construction in Jerusalem and the settlements – which are all in Area C – shows that this is not a demographic problem at all, neither is it a problem of Palestinian citizenship and the threat on the Jewish majority. Even if Israel annexes all Area C, the Jewish majority in the Jewish state will not be affected at all, and the Palestinian civil status in Areas A and B will not change. The American demands concern a Palestinian territorial continuity, rather than their civilian status which has already been settled.

 

3. “Israeli occupation”

 

Many times I have asked decent and educated Palestinians, who have nothing to do with terror, when the “Israeli occupation” began. All, without exception, said in 1948. There are Palestinians and Israelis who I haven’t talked to, who start the “occupation” from the Balfour Declaration, and even from the beginning of Zionism. Therefore, even the 1967 borders will not put an end to the occupation. They see the entire State of Israel as “occupation.” Only in the minds of Israelis, and Europeans and Americans, “the occupation” is identified with the settlements and the 1967 borders.

 

4. “Peace”

 

The perception of peace and acceptance, in the sense of compromise, has become fixated in the Jewish culture, and there is also the justice of compromise – “justice, justice shall you pursue!” Why twice the word justice? “One for law, and one for compromise” (Sanhedrin Talmud tractate, page 32). In the Arab culture, and of course in the Palestinian culture, peace means justice, in other words “restoring the justified rights.” Compromise cannot be considered as peace in their eyes – at the most there is a partial restoration of rights, which means a “phase program.”

 

5. Security vs. terror

 

In the Israeli world of concepts, we have justified rights in this land of our forefathers, and the return to Zion is the vision of the Torah and prophets which is materializing in front of our eyes. History has also proved that the Jewish people have no other place in the world to implement their rights besides this land. We anyway have a justified right to defend our existence as a people in this land, and anyone fighting us is an enemy. The division of the land, in the Israeli world of concepts, is a strong and deep bone of contention, between a “necessary concession” and a “disaster” to faith, vision and the future.

 

In the Palestinian world of concepts, terror against women and children is a justified method of war by powerless people whose land has been occupied and robbed as part of the Zionist “occupation crimes,” which is the essence of our existence as a people and as a state in this land. Therefore, murderers and terrorists who were tried by us are, in their eyes, nothing but captive fighters who were released, or who are about to be released.

 

There is no real meeting point between the two cultures, and there is no chance to stop the Palestinian terror as long as there are Palestinian organizations which see the “Israeli occupation” as a crime of disownment, expulsion and theft. Hamas and the resistance organizations are declaring explicitly that they will not accept any agreement signed by Abbas on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and we have already seen in Gaza what is expected to happen when Hamas takes over the PA in Ramallah too. Whoever says we will then go back in – is welcome to go into Gaza.

 

Conclusions

 

In principle, I am against peace agreements based on half-truths which are worse than lies, but I am not a member of the Knesset or of the government.

 

Israeli government ministers and Knesset members, upon making a historic and legal decision on the outline of the American agreement, and on borders which will be set “based on the 1967 lines with land swaps” – if most of you are convinced that there is no other choice, that the State of Israel cannot be perceived in Israel and in the world as the side which thwarted the agreement – at least don't lie to yourselves, and set conditions which will expose the truth.

 

At least say in advance: Any Israeli agreement to permanent borders will be completely canceled if it becomes clear that the Palestinian terror against the “occupation of 1948” will continue after the agreement and if Palestinian missiles are placed on the ruins of the settlers’ communities, and under the Palestinian villages.

 

“And a Redeemer will come to Zion!”