Resisting Falsehood: a reply to "Resisting Apartheid"

Hooray! John Palmer has, as promised, posted Menachem Kellner's Resisting Falsehood and Protecting Integrity, in its entirety, at EclectEcon! It's a rather lengthy post, but well worth the attention. The essay is a response to Omar Barghouti's "Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Why the Academic and Cultural Boycott?", a call for just such a boycott. Kellner responds:

Mr. Barghouti seeks to convince his readers that Israeli Jews are inveterate racists, and that Israel is an apartheid state. In the space allotted to me, I cannot possibly correct all of the deceptive falsehoods he uses — as the Hebrew expression has it, it is easier to throw mud than clean it up. By characterizing more accurately than Mr.
Barghouti the true nature and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and then addressing his two main charges, racism and apartheid, I will undermine his call for a boycott.

Central, of course, to the cries for boycott, are the arguments that Israel is racist, cruel and inhumane toward the Palestinians... putting up a wall, and all that, so that suicide bombers just can't get in to play. The double standard is blatant and lethal. As Kellner points out

Israel is held to standards of behavior to which no other country in the world is held, and when it fails to live up to those standards, it is condemned in absolutist, Manichean terms as thoroughly depraved and corrupted. In the eyes of its enemies,[xi] the Israeli cup must be brimming over with goodness; otherwise it is empty of all redeeming value. Palestinians, on the other hand, are consistently forgiven their excesses. Often this forgiveness is on the grounds that the Palestinians, being militarily inferior, have no choice but to use means which, if used by any other group in the world, would be condemned (and rightly so) as uncivilized war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Kellner's essay continues to quite effectively shoot down the primary "logic" behind the current propositions for boycott. (I had a sneak peek at Kellner's piece, when John e-mailed it to me several days ago, & I'd been waiting for him to post it so we could share it around). Please, go read the whole thing. Share it with friends. It's worth it.

EclectEcon: on academic freedom

John Palmer at EclectEcon has linked to a terrific article by Michael Yudkin, explaining why this recent trend in academia to call for boycotting Israel is a demonstration of willful ignorance (a common problem, but not exactly something one wants to see in college professors).

Since my earliest days, I've been a part of the collegiate world (first, as a child of a student, and then as the professor's daughter -- a "faculty brat"). In the intervening years, I've seen professors go from isolated, ivory tower, "there is no room for politics in the classroom or on campus" conservatives to ideologues selling every leftist fantasy, even in hard-science lectures. Both sides, in my view, have incredibly destructive powers as it comes to their own credibility with students and in town-and-gown relations.

I do worry about the value of an advanced education, in this day and age. At least when the old geezers tried to stay out of politics, the effect on the outside world was that the students came out of the school having been left to think for themselves in order to come to any political decision. The modern trend seems to be more dangerous, for the fact that its leftist sanctimony is an activist position, and brooks no argument. Their aim seems to be simple political indoctrination, and that is no education.

Worse, the direction this indoctrination takes is problematic. It can affect the lives of people outside the narrow confines of the campus, and affect them in ugly ways -- as the Yudkin article demonstrates. But Yudkin's conclusion, I think, says it very nicely:

It is a good deal easier to make grand gestures than to engage with the complexities of so intractable a problem as the conflict between Israel and her neighbours.

The university experience is supposed to prepare one for eschewing grand gestures, for learning how to face intractable problems. Too many of today's students are being cheated. Therefore, tomorrow's society is, as well.

Handing the turkey to the Bumpuses' dogs

At Jihad Watch, Marisol shows that Ehud Olmert has a self-destructive streak in him, as he is now allowing Egypt to ship heap plenty arms to the Palestinians.

So, I was reading the article and thinking to myself, maybe Olmert is just giving the Palestinians and their supporters a little more rope with which to hang themselves.

After all, if they get all the financial and military support they want, then they can't blame Israel for their problems, right? Then the world will understand exactly how foamingly fanatically hate-filled these people of Gaza (and points south, east, and north of Israel) really are.... When those weapons get turned on innocent Israelis, the world will rally around them, and this whole savage scene will cease.

And in the real world, there's nobody left in Israel to bury the dead.

(HT: FrontPageMag.com)

Update: It occurs to me that not everybody will know the title reference. It comes from the penultimate scene of Jean Shepherd's "A Christmas Story," when the dogs owned by the neigbors (the Bumpuses) broke through the kitchen door and... well, Ralphie's family had Peking duck for Christmas dinner, that year.