Then there is the disgraceful, shameless leftist Jewish faculty members and students at Brandeis University who are calling for Israeli ambassador Michael Oren to be disinvited from speaking. These people are mental cases. Even those who claim to be pro-Israel don't have the moral fiber and courage to truly defend Israel as being in the right and calling out her enemies for the evil barbarians that they are. Instead they cower in fear of muslim groups on campus.
3,000 European Jewish intellectuals urge end to Israeli settlementscontinued
A new leftist European Jewish group, JCall, has written a letter to be delivered Sunday to the European Parliament calling for a cessation of what it calls systematic support for Israeli government decisions.
JCall, which describes itself as "the European J Street" and is to be officially launched Sunday with the presentation of the letter, has raised a storm with its call to stop construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem.
The letter is signed by some 3,000 Jewish intellectuals, among them philosophers Bernard Henri-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut, considered some of Israel's strongest defenders among French intellectuals. Signatories also include Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the student protests in the 1960s and now a member of the European Parliament, as well as other Jewish members of the European Parliament.
The letter calls occupation and settlements "morally and politically wrong," noting that they "feed the unacceptable delegitimization process that Israel currently faces abroad."
Jews Not Wanted on Campus If They Support Israel—Not Even at Brandeiscontinue
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Will Brandeis Withstand Being Intimidated, Shamed, in the matter of the Israeli Ambassador’s Right to Speak?
The world is watching. Will Brandeis turn out to be another version of the University of California at Irvine, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco, or will it continue to model individual achievement over mob rule? Will it defend genuine free and academic speech?
Michael B. Oren, the distinguished historian and author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, the co-editor of New Essays on Zionism, and Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, has been invited to deliver the keynote address at Brandeis’s 2010 commencement exercises.
It is shocking but not surprising that a number of Brandeis students and faculty have denounced this choice while others applaud it. The denouncers claim that Ambassador Oren will be “political,” and as such “divisive” and “polarizing.” According to long-time activist and professor Gordon Fellman, “His role obligates him to defend Israeli policies. … [T]hat includes defending the Israeli incursion into Gaza, housing policies of the occupation, and so on. I think for many people that’s a third rail. Why mess up a commencement with a third rail?”
I dunno. In 2006, Jordan’s Prince Hassan bin Talal delivered the keynote address at graduation. Students did not protest Jordan’s human rights record vis a vis the Palestinians both in 1970 and in 2010, or in terms of torturing its own citizens, nor its abysmal record on honor-related violence, including honor killings. Indeed, no one held Jordan accountable for its systematic past desecration of Jewish holy places and for its evacuation of Jews from the Jewish quarter in 1948. A prince who represents a country and a regime that behaves in this way is as “political” as Oren could ever be. The only difference is that one man is an Arab, Muslim prince, while the other is an intellectual Jew and an American-Israeli. Students did not create online petitions to debate the merits of choosing Jordan’s prince as a speaker.
The Justice, Brandeis’s student newspaper, has published a range of views on Ambassador Oren. In a roundup of opinion, Jackie Saffir, senator for the class of 2010, is quoted as having said she was “disappointed” (even before she heard what Oren might have to say), that his “perspective is not a fresh one….worse, allowing him to speak might actually give people the idea that Brandeis is a Jewish school.”
Imagine the shame of that!
Our World: Convenient moral blindnesscontinued
By CAROLINE GLICK
03/05/2010
The fact of the matter is that defending Israel against its enemies – on campuses, in the media – isn’t a freedom of speech issue.
Moral blindness in the face of evil is depravity. But in the upside-down moral universe of our world, moral blindness has become a badge of honor. If you refuse to call evil by its name, then you are a moderate. And if you stand up to evil, you are an extremist.
The embrace of moral blindness as an emblem of sophistication is nowhere more apparent than among American Jews. Take recent events on US college campuses. This week the Washington Times reported that a large and vocal group of Brandeis University students are organizing to protest the university’s decision to invite Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to give this year’s commencement address.
In a Facebook initiative led by a student named Jonathan Sussman, several hundred students have joined the demand to disinvite Oren. Sussman claims that by inviting him, Brandeis is siding with “a rogue state apologist, a defender of (among other things) the war crimes and human rights abuses of the war on Gaza.”
Sussman gained notoriety earlier this year when he sought to organize students to disrupt former UN ambassador Dore Gold in a debate the university hosted between him and Richard Goldstone. Sussman, a self-proclaimed communist, is a member of the anti-American Students for Democratic Society.
4 comments:
I'm in a weird situation. I agree 100% and have nothing useful to add. It's very frustrating.
The Jews are afraid of defending their rights and affirming the moral justice of Israel's existence. Instead they either cower in the shadow of the Red-Green political correctness regime or remain silent.
Such is the zeitgeist of our time.
With the resumption of negotiations and Israel's compliance with Obama's dictates, the truth is revealed. Israel is nothing but a puppet on a string.
The Talmud tells us that when G-d gave the Torah to the Jewish people, He decided to give it on Mt. Sinai, the smallest of the mountains. G-d said, "my Torah will only stay with those who are humble, so "I will give it on a small and humble mountain."
But currently many Jews have lost their sense of humbleness. They have been infected by the virus of arrogance, of thinking of themselves as all knowing. they feel that they have the gift of prophecy. They state, attempts at peacemaking must innevitably fail. They berate and condemn their brethern Jews as "self hating", leftist, traitorous . The delegitimizing of other Jews for not following their dictates of one group, is a grave transgression of Hashem's will , that the house of Israel remain strong through unity.
Hashem does not recognize hyphenated Jews. There are no leftist Jews, Right Wing Jews. All Jews are Jews no matter what their background, their belief system. the Orthodox are no better than the liberal, conservative, or reform. And of course the reverse applies as well.
It is of utmost importance that we don't repeat the sins of our forefathers, through factional infighting. That will destroy Israel as surely as external attack. Judaism teaches us to respect and act with tolerance towards the "other".
Boruch Hashem
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