I responded that the more appropriate and correct name for Israel’s security fence is the “Leftists are Idiots Fence.”  Indeed, I would urge everyone to adopt that name for it and insist that no other be used in polite company.

The security barrier should be dubbed the “Leftists are Idiots Fence” because the very need for its construction was as a countermeasure to the countless acts of murder and other violence triggered by the imposition upon Israel of the Left’s political agenda with regard to making “peace” with the “Palestinians.”   The building of the “Leftists are Idiots Fence” became necessary because of the “recognition” of the PLO by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and all the fruits of that poisonous tree that followed.  The consequential series of agreements to allow the PLO to import its army of assassins and terrorists into the West Bank and Gaza (never mind that the Hamas later evicted the PLO from Gaza) produced so many massacres of Israelis that the only way to reduce the level of violence was with large fences and barriers that prevented “Palestinians” from getting close enough to Jews to murder them.

The “Leftists are Idiots Fence” was only the latest bi-product of the long-time theology of the Left concerning how to make peace with Arabs.  The Left believes that Israel can appease its way to peace by making endless concessions to the Arabs.  The fact that every single round of appeasements and concessions to date has produced escalation of terror never persuades the Left that something is flawed with its approach to peace or in its political theology.  The universal explanation by the Left for the utter and complete failure of its “ideas” has always been to insist in totalitarian unison that they fail because Israel does not make enough appeasements and concessions.

The Israeli Left has been wrong about absolutely everything for at least 20 years, and it would be very difficult to uncover anything about which it was not wrong going back even 60 years.  The Israeli Left of the 1950s believed in Soviet-style economic central planning.  Under David Ben Gurion, it built and then preserved a command-and-control economic mechanism that resembled that of Soviet regimes in many ways.  It was designed to place near totalitarian control of the economy in the hands of the MAPAI socialist party (later renamed the Labor Party).   Israel was essentially a one-party state until 1978, and that single ruling party was MAPAI.

Thanks to that command-and-control structure, Israel remained an impoverished, underdeveloped Third World country until well into the 1980s, complete with Third World levels of corruption, primitive technology, and tax rates sometimes exceeding 100% of earnings.  By the late 1980s, the command-and-control regime was largely although not completely dismantled, this thanks to a complex set of causes, and Israel quickly morphed into a developed wealthy First World country, to the chagrin of its socialists.  The Far Left yearns to restore the semi-bolshevik planning and control structure, and has now managed to co-opt much of the “Social Justice” protests in Israel and recruit those protesters behind this goal.

But in the long term, the more harmful segment of leftist ideology was the belief that the bulk of Arabs are good and decent people who truly want peace and co-existence.  That belief happens to be false.  The vast majority of Arabs want a genocidal resolution to the “problem” of the existence of Israel and its Jewish population.

But the Left is so passionately wedded to this part of its political theology that it has dominated everything the Left has done or said for decades.  And since the Left has been in office in Israel more often than it has not been (while the Likud has itself often behaved in many ways like a party of the Israeli Left), most of the most destructive decisions and errors Israel has made stem directly from this theology.

Never mind that the ethnic Germans living under Czechoslovak rule were being treated infinitely better than were Germans living under German rule. In fact, the Sudetens were arguably the best treated minority in all of Europe.  Never mind that Germans already had achieved self-determination in the form of nation states – ­ Germany and Austria – to which Sudeten Germans could freely move.  Never mind that the ONLY reason Germany was demanding self-determination and independence for the Sudetens was as a ploy to destroy all of Czechoslovakia and then to carry out genocide.  Sound familiar?

The modern Czechoslovakian state came into existence in 1918; in the first of many parallels with modern Israel, it was a country recreated after centuries, having been destroyed and absorbed by others over the years. In the Middle Ages, Bohemia and Moravia had been separate Czech kingdoms, enjoying varying degrees of independence, generally within the framework of the Holy Roman Empire.

Modern Czech nationalism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. During World War I, Czechs participated in resistance and espionage against the Axis powers, and their leaders lobbied in European capitals for independence. After centuries of persecution, the Czechs reestablished their sovereignty following World War I and linked up with their Slovakian cousins in the new state of Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia contained a diverse and heterogeneous population, like the Habsburg Empire from which it emerged. In particular, about 23 percent of its citizens were ethnic Germans, concentrated in the Western section known as the Sudetenland. Most Sudeten Germans were violently opposed to incorporation within the Czechoslovakian state. Instead, they identified openly with larger neighboring countries and fundamentally opposed the very existence of the new state. On October 21, 1918, German deputies from all parts of the former Austrian Empire convened and issued a call for national “self-determination” for the Germans of Czechoslovakia, using the term President Woodrow Wilson had recently added to the international lexicon. In the following year, Sudeten Germans launched a wave of violent demonstrations and terrorism in opposition to the inclusion of their lands in the Czech state. In addition, thousands of Sudeten Germans fled from the new state to the neighboring countries of Germany and Austria.

The new Czechoslovakia thus included a large element with questionable loyalty to the state. Czechoslovakia was ruled by social democrats committed to social reform and egalitarianism; they made attempts to resolve this problem by winning over the hostile minority through economic integration, tolerance, freedom, and liberal social reform. The first Czechoslovakian president, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, a powerful, strong-willed, charismatic, and progressive politician, proposed a comprehensive program of equality for all national groups in the new state.

Czechoslovakia quickly developed in the 1920s into a stable parliamentary democracy with protection for all the freedoms found in modern Western states. A large number of political parties contested elections and gained representation in the parliament.  The country passed legislative programs that were among the most progressive in the world. Trade union activism and power bloomed, and widespread experimentation with cooperative agriculture took place.

The German minority was permitted to operate its own schools in its own languages and control its own local affairs. German was an official national language in the German areas of Czechoslovakia. Sudeten Germans voted and were elected to parliament.  On the whole, the Sudeten Germans enjoyed better treatment than any other national minority in Europe.

However, by 1937 the Sudeten Germans found themselves at the center of escalating tensions. The radicalization of nationalist movements in neighboring countries, where power was seized by revolutionary and xenophobic leaders, led to growing international conflict. Specifically, the pan-German ideology and imperialist ambitions of the Third Reich inflamed the Sudeten conflict. Adolf Hitler saw Czechoslovakia as an integral part of the German national homeland, an area to be absorbed and integrated into the Reich.

As international tensions grew, Berlin complained more and more about discrimination and mistreatment of the Sudetens. In response, Sudeten Germans moved away from peaceful coexistence in favor of polarization and extremism. Their growing nationalist movement was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and authoritarian. The Nazi Party was formally banned in Czechoslovakia but support for the Sudeten German Party (SdP), the Nazi surrogate party, soared; in 1935 it received 63 percent of the German vote in Czechoslovakia (a higher percentage than what the Nazis received in Germany in 1933), and 78 percent in 1938. The SdP never outlined a political or social program of nation-building beyond demanding “self-determination.”

The SdP used violence to suppress other competing nationalist parties and asserted its own position as sole spokesman for the Sudeten Germans. It organized Sudeten refugees who had fled to Germany when Czechoslovakia became independent and recruited them into the Heimatbund, a paramilitary organization. This group later formed the basis of the Sudeten German Freikorps, a terrorist organization to which 34,000 Sudetens living in Germany were recruited. These terrorists raided Czech border areas and carried out atrocities until late 1938. The SdP and other Sudeten political organizations openly identified with the Nazi Party in Germany.

After coming to power, but especially beginning in 1937, Hitler turned the issue of Sudeten national rights into his main instrument for aggression against Czechoslovakia. Self-determination served him as a means to destroy and annex the country. The most important Nazi assault on Czechoslovakia was its propaganda machine’s denunciation of the supposed torture and physical abuse of Sudeten Germans at the hands of Czechoslovakia—this from the regime that had already built concentration camps.

By mid-1937, Hitler simultaneously pressured Prague to make concessions on the Sudeten issue and completed a military plan for the conquest of Czechoslovakia. In 1938 the SdP adopted the Carlsbad Eight Points, a manifesto that essentially called for the partitioning of Czechoslovakia and the secession of the Sudetenland to Germany.

The internal problem of minority “rights” quickly assumed international dimensions. Responding to Nazi protests, the Western powers received Henlein with an official welcome of a kind usually reserved for a head of state. In contrast, as Czech historian Radomir Luza notes, Czechoslovakia’s president Benes was treated “more cavalierly than if he had been the chief of a tribe in Africa.”

This symbolism revealed a deeper outlook as the Western states pressured Prague to accede to Sudeten demands. In July 1936, Britain’s Foreign Minister Anthony Eden urged Czechoslovakia to grant the Sudeten Germans full autonomy. Responding to these pressures, Czechoslovak leaders agreed to negotiate with the SdP and proposed a program for limited Sudeten autonomy. The SdP, acting under orders from Hitler, peremptorily rejected the plan. (Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop advised the Sudeten Nazis: “Always negotiate and do not let the thread break; but always demand more than the opposing side can offer.”)

Henlein escalated his rhetoric, denouncing the Prague regime as “Hussite-Bolshevik criminals,” even as threats from the Third Reich assumed a more ominous tone. Reports arrived of German troop concentrations near the Czechoslovak frontier. At the same time that Berlin prepared for war, it denounced the Czechs as “the real disturbers of peace in Europe.”

Prague from the beginning argued that the issue of Sudeten self-determination was a red herring, that the real cause of crisis was the Third Reich’s aggressive intentions. The few Western voices that agreed with this analysis were generally ignored.  Although Czechoslovakia had always maintained that the Sudeten problem was an internal affair and no business of the world community, in August 1938, London demanded and Prague had to accept a British mediator. Chamberlain and French prime minister Edouard Daladier accused Prague of ill-treating the Sudeten minority and so being responsible for conflict. The European press routinely painted Czechoslovakia prime minister Benes as a warmonger.

While the condemnation of Grass from most corners of civilization has been massive and dramatic, Grass is also attracting a considerable following and outpouring of support from the Axis of Evil, the one that allies the radical Left to the genocidal Islamofascists.  Statements endorsing the Teuton and his “poem” have come from the radical Left, all the way from Noam Chomsky to the Israel-hating Israeli professor of German history, Moshe Zimmerman from the Hebrew University.  No relation to the shooter in Florida.

Grass has quite a bit of a track record when it comes to Jew bashing (but is hardly the only anti-Semite literary figure).  Best recognized for his Hitler moustache, Grass had served in the Waffen SS as a Panzer soldier.  He is putting his SS experiences to good use these days in his lobbying for Israel’s destruction.  His poem, expressing clearly his underlying desire to see Israel exterminated, triggered Israel’s Minister of the Interior to declare him persona non grata, in effect banned from Israel.  Even leftist “post-Zionist” Tom Segev, writing in Israel’s radical leftist daily Haaretz, denounced Grass in these words:

Grass’ comparison of Israel and Iran is unfair, because unlike Iran, Israel has never threatened to wipe another country off the map. And contrary to Grass’ sanctimonious verses, under no circumstances would a military action against Iran lead to the extermination of the Iranian people, because as far as we know, it would exclusively target the country’s nuclear facilities.

Few could dispute that the world will be a better place without an Iranian nuclear weapon. And not only in Israel – also the northern German town of Lubeck, the capital of marzipan, where Grass writes, paints and sculpts, will be a better place if Iran doesn’t get the bomb. Grass basks in hypocritical moralism and agonizes over not having condemned Israel’s nuclear capacity earlier. … One gets the impression Grass’ act of “breaking the silence” is more a self-contained personal experience than anything else. Neither can one escape the notion that he seeks to recreate the shock waves of his confession six years ago about his service in the Waffen SS during World War II.

But alongside the condemnations have come large numbers of expressions of support for Herr Grass and his opinions.  Take for example the shrill cheers for Grass from the pro-jihad Neo-Stalinist web magazine “Counterpunch.”   It ran a piece by Tariq Ali, a communist extremist from Lahore who lives in Britain.  A fanatical anti-Semite and hater of America, Ali (no relation to Ali G) defends Grass by attacking Jews for blaming Germans for the Holocaust, and then turns around and trivializes the Holocaust itself in these words: “Behind this thinking is the Zionist and Zionophile argument that the crime against the Jews of Europe was unique in the annals of history. This was true as far as the method of extermination was concerned, but not in any other way. The Belgians massacred the Congolese in greater numbers.”  Ali condemns Germany for sending aid and reparations to Israel, not for its anti-Semitism and history of genocide.  It is interesting to note that while Ali himself trivializes the Holocaust as just one set of killings among so many others, Counterpunch these days is chock full of actual Holocaust Denier columnists, including the deranged “Israel Shamir,” Gilad Atzmon, and others, alongside such anti-Semitic critters as Norman Finkelstein. Stalinist Alexander Cockburn, who runs the site, seems never to have met a Jew he does not think deserves to be murdered.

Meanwhile, Grass became overnight the darling of Neo-Nazis all over the world.  A cabinet minister from Iran just loves the Grass poem.  Deputy Culture Minister Javad Shamaqdari wrote in a sycophantic letter to Grass: “I read your literary work of human and historical responsibility, and it warns beautifully…Telling the truth in this way may awake the silent and dormant conscience of the West. Writers are able single-handedly to prevent human tragedies, in a way that armies cannot.”   Leftists and Neo-Nazis of various stripes took to the streets of Germany in rallies of support for Grass.  The brownshirts were joined by the “World Socialist Web Site” and the pro-terror “Electronic Intifada” and Al Jazeera.  They were also joined by Neo-Nazi “anarchist” Stephen Lendman, who posts daily anti-Semitic spam on the “Indymedia” anarchist sites.

Another supporter of Grass, in fact his sidekick in trying to prevent an Israeli theater company from performing in Britain, has been Emma Thompson, a leftist British actress who claims to be an anarchist.  You may recall her recent bon mot on American television in which she claimed that British residents of the Isle of Man stone homosexuals to death.  She signed a letter that asserted that the Habimah Theater had oppressed Palestinians, perhaps by requiring that they buy tickets to attend its shows.  The letter said, inter alia:  “Habimah has a shameful record of involvement with illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory.”  The Harry Potter witch has a rich track record of bashing Israel.

Scott Ritter is not the only darling of the Left to get himself into trouble because of his sexual misbehavior. Another is Marc H. Ellis, a tenured professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and one of the most malicious collaborators in the Campus Wars against the Jews.  He openly calls for Israel to be exterminated.  He is to be one of the key speakers at the “Annihilate Israel” academic “conference” to be held in a few days at Harvard.

Baylor University’s president is Kenneth Starr, best remembered from his investigations of another sexual predator, Bill Clinton.  The current campaign to rid Baylor of Ellis is because Ellis reportedly sexually harassed a female faculty member, who got herself a lawyer and filed a complaint.  Evidently all sorts of Baylor faculty knew about it.  In response to this, Starr and Baylor have suspended Ellis from all teaching and administrative duties indefinitely.  Baylor offered to “buy Ellis out” to get him to leave.  Last July the Faculty Dismissal Committee notified Ellis that the administration was seeking his dismissal.

As this world’s largest Baptist University, Baylor officials do not take kindly to professors manhandling the prairie womenfolk.  Ellis seems to be defending himself by claiming his suspension is “discriminatory” because others at Baylor have been involved in hanky-panky and have not been similarly punished.   In his words, his are “alleged offenses reportedly routine at Baylor.”  In other words, if other gropers were coddled, so should he be.  Ellis is also claiming there is a dark conspiracy by the tiny local Waco Jewish community to pay Baylor to get him fired.

The radical Left has long adored and celebrated Ellis because he is a radical Jewish anti-Semite in the tradition of Hezbollah agent Norman Finkelstein.  The anti-Israel Middle East Studies Association issued a statement defending and endorsing Ellis, as did the American Association of University Professors.  How ridiculous these groups appear now that it is known that Ellis is under fire not because of his anti-Semitism but because of his inability to control his lascivious behavior.

A pro-Ellis petition has been organized by Cornell West and is being promoted by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky. (What a comedown for Chomsky, the one-time apologist for the Khmer Rouge, now merely an apologist for Ellis.) It charges that Ellis is a victim of “persecution.” The very first endorsement of the petition is by the discredited pseudo-academic fraud Ilan Pappe.  In a speech at the American Academy of Religion in November, Cornell West, who just does not like Jews very much, described Ellis as a “prophetic figure.”

Ellis is a professor of “Jewish Studies” who knows nothing at all about Judaism or Jewish Studies.   He has built a career as a Bash-Israel propagandist and supporter of Islamofascism and as a leader in the movement to exterminate Israel and Israelis.  Indeed, that is the real reason the radical Left is defending him.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright loves him.  Academic terrorist Edward Said adored him while Said was still alive.  George McGovern likes him.  Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein is the close soul-brother of Ellis, who endorsed Finkelstein’s “book” and who likes to mimic Finkelstein’s smear terminology about the “Holocaust Industry.”

Ellis has no degrees and no academic training at all in Jewish theology, Jewish history, Jewish anything.  He holds a PhD degree from a Jesuit University (Marquette), where people may know their Catholic catechism but no one would consider it a serious place to learn about Judaism.  Ellis later was employed at the Maryknoll School of Theology in Maryknoll, New York (a liberation theology school that closed in 1994 and was not even accredited).  Ellis woke up one fine morning and decided he was an expert in “Jewish Studies.”  He peddled himself as such to Baylor, which evidently did not check out his credentials very thoroughly.  There he set up the university’s Center for Jewish Studies as his one-man fiefdom.  While Baylor should be saluted for wanting to have a Jewish Studies department operating in this Baptist University, hiring Ellis was hardly the way to go about it.

Ellis replaces the traditional Jewish Biblical Patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with Marx, Lenin and Arafat.  In Ellis’s writings as a purported “theologian,” there is nothing to indicate he has any familiarity at all with Jewish religious sources or concepts.  Indeed, there is no evidence that he has ever read the Bible, let alone studied the Talmud or other classical Jewish texts.  Ellis’s “theology” is the same as that of the wacky pro-LSD hippie magazine “Tikkun,” on whose board of editors he sits. Tikkun is published by Michael Lerner, promoter of psychedelic drugs and one-time SDS leader. While Lerner pretends to be a rabbi, he is not and never has been ordained by any rabbinic school. Both Lerner and Ellis like to cite obsessively the “Ethics of the Books of the Prophets in the Bible” as artillery support for their politics, but neither has ever provided any evidence that he has ever read those books or has the slightest idea what they contain.

Harvard University is a school of rich tradition. And in a few days it will be restoring a great Harvard tradition dating back to the 1930s: the tradition of hosting Nazis and violent anti-Semites on campus seeking the mass murder of Jews.

Harvard is to hold a pseudo-academic conference devoted to calls for Israel’s extermination. This “academic conference” will be little more than a genteel campus pogrom. Misnamed the “One State Conference,” it will definitely not have any discussion of any “one-state solution” under which all of Western “Palestine” remains one single Jewish state, while “Palestinians” unhappy about living there as a political minority move to one of the 22 Arab states. When the conference organizers and speakers talk about a “one-state solution,” what they mean is a Rwanda solution, a final one, to the “Jewish Problem” of the Middle East. They want Israel annihilated and replaced by a “bi-national” state with an Islamist Arab majority in control. And it does not take a great imagination to understand just how Jews will fare under such a “solution.”

Naturally, Harvard is defending this campus atrocity with the usual protestations about academic freedom and freedom of speech. The administrators who justify such open and violent bigotry in the guise of an academic conference are the very same people who never seem to express any objections when campus hooligans disrupt and harass talks by Israeli diplomats and rallies by Jewish students. Harvard administrators would be the first ones in the Ivy League to shut down as “hate speech” any “conference” devoted to proving that black people have lower IQs than others, that called for evicting all illegal Hispanics from the nation, or that promoted the view that homosexuality is a mental disorder.

In any case, a brief review of pedigrees of the participants in this “conference” illustrates just how clearly this is to be nothing more than a bash-the-Jews campus crusade.

The “star” of the Harvard pogrom will be Ilan Pappe, who is arguably the most thoroughly discredited pseudo-academic on the planet. Pappe is a notorious fabricator, someone who claims proudly that facts and truth are of no importance. “Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers,” the French newspaper Le Soir, has cited Pappe as saying.

Pappe is an expatriate Israeli who devoted one of his “books” to his sons with the wish that they may grow up in a world without Israel. His own University of Exeter recently chastised him for his infamous habit of playing fast and loose with facts. Pappe is best known as a fulltime anti-Israel propagandist who has done more than any other anti-Israel Israeli to promote the moral equivalence of “Nakba denial” with Holocaust denial. (For those who are unaware, “Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe,” is the term Arabs use to refer to Israel’s birth.) He is a “new historian” in the sense of pseudo-historian. His mission in life is to invent an imaginary Palestinian historic “narrative.” Nearly all those beating the “Nakba” drum today cite Pappe and his books about the supposed “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs by Israel in its war of independence.

Pappe was a lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, but moved to resume a pseudo-academic propagandist position at the University of Exeter in the UK. Even other anti-Zionists have repudiated Pappe as a liar and fabricator. He openly calls for Israel to be exterminated and endorses Hamas terrorism. He considers Noam Chomsky insufficiently anti-Israel.

Pappe, who ran for the parliament in Israel on the slate of the Stalinist communist party and played a central role in fomenting boycotts of Israel in the UK and elsewhere, was also the central figure in the now infamous “Tantura Affair.” In this incident, Pappe coached a graduate student of his into inventing a non-existent “massacre” of Arabs by the Hagana Jewish militia (Alexandroni Brigade) in Tantura, south of Haifa, a “massacre” that Pappe claims took place in 1948. Not a shred of any evidence for any such “massacre” exists. Arab and other journalists who were present at the time of the battle that took place in Tantura reported no massacre. Arabs living in the town at the time confirmed that a battle did occur, but that after the battle the Jewish militiamen aided and assisted the townspeople, not massacring anyone. The graduate student in question was sued for libel by the veterans of the Hagana militia. He later admitted in court with his lawyer present that the entire massacre was an invention.

No matter – Pappe roams the world and continues to spread the lie about the imaginary Tantura “massacre,” a lie that has found its way into nearly every anti-Semitic web site and Neo-Nazi magazine on Earth, and even a handful of otherwise respectable mainstream journalists foolishly rely upon him. Pappe has lied about practically everything else, including about being “persecuted” by his own university in Israel. In fact, Pappe was never fired for his fraud and fabrication by the University of Haifa, although he should have been. (Some wags even suggested the university should be boycotted for not firing Pappe.) That did not stop Pappe from waving his stigmata as a “victim of Zionism” before the European anti-Semites promoting “divestment” from Israel. His recruitment by the University of Exeter proves how indifferent that school is to scholarly standards. His coming appearance as the star of the Harvard academic pogrom shows that things are not much better there.

While Pappe may be the most notorious fabricator at Harvard’s Destroy Israel Conference, he is hardly the only one. A close runner-up will be Stephen M. Walt, who – along with his sidekick John Mearsheimer – is best known for proliferating medieval “theories” about a grand Jewish cabal plotting to control the world. Walt and Mearsheimer spin yarns about the imaginary power of the “Jewish lobby” that sound very much like German propaganda from the 1930s. It would be an exaggeration to say that there is no Israel lobby whatsoever in the United States, but only a small exaggeration. The “Israel lobby” does not come up to the pinky toes in terms of the power of the farm lobby and the teachers union lobby. Walt’s partner Mearsheimer has been in the news the past few weeks for endorsing and celebrating a notoriously deranged British Israel-born Holocaust denier, Gilad Atzmon. Walt also defends Mearsheimer’s choice of Nazi chums on his own personal blog.

The Greek government does not cease to beg the EU and international institutions for spare change in order to help the country dig itself out of its debt debacle. But, as it turns out, the Greek government evidently really has too much spare budgetary funds, money it is desperate to find a way to waste.

Indeed that is the only plausible explanation for the decision by the government of Greece a few days ago to start funding pedophiles. No, that is not a spoof and not a misprint.  According to the Associated Press, the Greek government has just recognized pedophiles as a population of the “disabled,” entitled under law to governmental disability compensation and added to the country’s welfare roll.  The children who are the victims of those pedophiles evidently are not.

Pedophiles are not the only folks being added to the growing lists of those who may enjoy free handouts and disability income from the Greek government. (Notice I did not say benefits “paid for by the Greek taxpayer,” since so much of the Greek national budget is not covered by them these days.)  Exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs were also just added to the welfare roll list that already includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists.  Under the new Greek “disability” rules and categories, pedophiles will get larger welfare checks than people who have undergone organ transplants. Peeping Toms will enjoy a higher level of support than diabetics.

The additions to the welfare roll were denounced by the Greek National Confederation of Disabled People and its leader Yiannis Vardakastanis, who is blind. They are concerned that all the additions will lead to the reduction in support levels for people with real disabilities. Now almost the only people in Greece who will not be recognized as “disabled” are those who abide by the law. Under the circumstances, those law abiders should really be the first group to be acknowledged as disabled, because they are clearly insane.

What is one to make of all this?

The first conclusion is that this new set of insane “disability” policies serves as a perfect demonstration of what led Greece to the debtors dog house in the first place. For many years the Greek governments of both the leading parties have handled their finances like the cartoon king in the Wizard of Id, handing out massive wide-scale exemptions from payment of taxes while ladling out populist largess with a soup spoon so large that it could quench the thirst of mythological Greek gods.

The second conclusion is that what we observe in Greece is political correctness on crack and steroids.  Here is the ultimate and natural culmination of the attempts to subject society to the idiocies of political correctness.  When “approval” becomes a universal entitlement, when all condemnation of all forms of behavior is a reactionary manifestation of intolerance and bigotry, why should not pedophilia and kleptomania be added to the lists of behavior about which one must never ever be judgmental?

But perhaps the most important lesson from the Greek policies is that there seem to be no limits to the “medicalization” of misbehavior.   For decades now, growing numbers of evil, destructive, anti-social, and deviant behavior have been “medicalized,” converted into medical conditions.  Once they are classified as medical conditions, those who engage in such behavior get an automatic “pass” from society.  They often also get money.  While not quite as insane as the Greek policies, the United States has digested a huge bowl of similar idiocy within the framework of the Americans with Disabilities Act, first passed in 1990.

Definitions of disabilities are getting sillier and sillier in many parts of the world.  In the United States, the current version of the Americans with Disabilities Act defines the term “disability” with respect to an individual as: (A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment.

From the start, public safety was not considered valid grounds for “discriminating” against people with “disabilities.” So a group of near-sighted people sued when they were denied jobs as airline pilots. People with serious psychiatric problems have sued when denied various jobs and positions in which the public could be placed in harm’s way as a result of their employment. People with contagious diseases like hepatitis cannot be denied jobs in which they may infect others, since that would be discrimination against the disabled.  It is even more difficult to deny positions to those with AIDS or HIV.

Well, it seems the Obama team lately was running short of things over which to bash Israel and so it decided that the treatment of women in Israel is something that needs condemnation. Led by Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration thinks that Israel does not treat its women nicely or respectfully enough.  This is the same Hillary Clinton who never had much to say about the treatment of women in the Clinton White House. Other administration bashers of Israel joined the feeding frenzy.

This is the same Obama team that rarely has had anything to say about the treatment of women in the Muslim world, without a doubt the very worst such treatment that can be found on the planet.  Hillary insisted that Israel’s treatment of women is as bad as that in Iran, although Obama people do not exactly speak out against the treatment of women in Iran before breakfast each day.  Hillary also used the same opportunity to condemn Israel for considering the adoption of transparency laws that would require disclosure of foreign funding to political NGOs operating inside Israel, laws that are similar to what the United States and many other democratic countries already have.  After all, how will those who desire Israel’s annihilation be able to finance picayune treasonous radical anti-Israel propaganda NGOs inside Israel if such transparency ever takes effect?

So when Hillary Clinton recently decided to speak out against the mistreatment of Middle Eastern women, she singled out Israel for condemnation, and then turned around to welcome a delegation of Saudi feudalists with cordiality.  If Hillary considers Israel a force of anti-feminine darkness and repression, just imagine how awful she must regard Scandinavia.  She compared Israel’s treatment of women with the racial segregation that once was so common in the American South. Israeli public figures, led by the secularist non-Orthodox Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz, denounced Hillary’s comments as absurd and incorrect.  He was joined by numerous other secularist Israelis.

The Obama administration is largely silent when it comes to the plight of women in the Muslim world, but keeps condemning the only country in the Middle East that has a woman chief justice, plenty of women in its parliament, more women MDs and than men, countless women army officers and court judges, and which has had a woman as head of state, something the US has never had.  Israel is also the only country in the world where a panel of judges, two of them women, put a former president in prison for alleged rape and sexual abuse of women.  But perhaps that is what really has Bill Clinton’s wife so hostile to and suspicious of Israel.

Women university students in Israel have been the majority out of all undergraduate Israeli students since 1980, reaching 58% of students in 1999.  That is without including teachers colleges in the computation, where women are a far larger share.  Women students are the majority of students, not just in the fields of education and humanities, but also in such “non-traditional” fields for women as biological sciences and agriculture.  Women are a majority of medical students, 48.3% of law students, and 39% of physics students, according to the latest survey.  There are also oodles of women students in math, engineering, and computer sciences.   Women students are also a small majority of those pursuing MA and PhD studies.

So just what got Hillary and the Obama team so upset?  Well, it seems that Israel has been debating the behavior of some small ultra-religious Jewish sects, groups that believe in strict gender separation, especially in public spaces.  Known as the chareidim, these are religious radicals, best known for their black clothing, long sidecurls, anti-modern life styles, and especially for their ideas about “modesty” for women.  No Jew anywhere has to belong to such communities and women in those communities unhappy with the life style may leave at any time.

In some communities of these chareidim, there have been initiatives to introduce a small number of special bus lines in which women and men do not sit together.  When a secularist Israeli woman rider challenged the initiative and sat in the “men’s section” of one such bus Israel’s ultra-secularist leftist media proclaimed her the Israeli Rosa Parks, and Hillary picked up the cue.  In another incident, some religious soldiers requested not to be required to attend a concert in which women were singing, on grounds that according to their religious outlook such singing is erotic and immodest.  And in yet other incidents, some signs were put up in the neighborhoods of chareidim asking women not to congregate on a street next to a synagogue, or calling on men and women in the name of modesty to walk on opposing sides of some streets in those neighborhoods.

She’s unforgettable, she’s a legend though
… It’s kinda incredible

— From “Mona Lisa” by Britney Spears

Meet Israel’s secret weapon against terrorism, code named “Mona Lisa.”   Not only is Mona Lisa an effective weapon against Arab anti-Israel terrorism and Islamofascism, but she is also one of the most effective weapons in the Israeli arsenal against the guttersnipes screaming about imaginary “Israel Apartheid.”  Let us sit back and watch in amusement as Hitlerjugend from the “Boycott and Divest from Israel” movement and their fellow jihad travelers try to cope with our Mona.

There are two critical things you need to know about this new secret weapon.  The first is that Mona Lisa is the real name of an Israeli woman combat soldier.  At her parents’ suggestion – she writes it as a single word, Monalisa (Nat King Cole did the same!).   The second thing you need to know is that she is an Arab.

Monalisa Abdo is a nineteen year old combat soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces.  She serves in one of Israel’s elite anti-terror units.  Moreover she wears the legendary red army boots that only Israel’s most elite fighting units wear, the Israeli equivalents of the American SEALS and green berets.  My own military experiences are timid in comparison with what soldiers do and no one would ever think of letting me even get near a pair of red combat boots.

Monalisa grew up in Haifa.  Most Israeli Arabs are not conscripted into the Israeli military, but they may volunteer to serve if they wish.  Some do so out of patriotism and loyalty to the state, and some do so because of the career benefits and training that will help them later in the workplace.  Monalisa is clearly among the former.  Her story and an interview with her appear in the December 2, 2011 issue of Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper.

She describes the nasty comments some Arabs made to her and her family members when she signed up.  She dismisses them.  And her parents are squarely behind her.  “Israeli Arabs need to serve in the Israeli military,” she insists in the interview, “to give to the country and not just take.”  Israel is our country and we need to serve it, she believes.  And military service is beneficial for those who serve, she adds, teaching them discipline and responsibility.  Monalisa’s older sister Michelin, age 21, has also decided to enlist and will start her service in a few days.  In the same unit as Mona.

Monalisa not only asked to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces but signed up for an elite combat unit named “Karkel,” in which both men and women serve side by side on the front lines.  Karkel is the name of a wild desert cat that lives in Israel’s south.  The unit is station in the Arava desert close to the border with Egypt.  Hunting down terrorist infiltrators is its specialty.

By now, Israel, at the urging and bullying of the world, has tried pretty much every conceivable idea and option for achieving tranquility and reconciliation with the Hamas, except for one.  Israel removed its army and civilian population from the Gaza Strip.  In what amounted to the first ethnic self-cleansing in history, Israel evicted the entire Jewish presence in Gaza.  The entire area was turned over to the Palestinians, lock, stock, barrel, and Jew-free.

The result is of course known.  The Hamas immediately converted all of Gaza into a large rocket launch pad and a base for initiating terrorist attacks against Israel.  It kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and held him incommunicado, refusing medical treatment to him, even though his arm was filled with shrapnel.  Israel in response provided free electricity and water to the Gazans and sent civilian supplies into Gaza.  Israel never made any serious efforts to stop the massive tunnel smuggling into Gaza from Egypt, even when it was clear that the main item being smuggled was weapons.  These smuggled weapons include bomb materials and sophisticated rockets that can now reach Tel Aviv.  Israel responded to the endless rocket attacks against its own civilians by turning the other cheek.  Only after 8000 rocket strikes did it launch the half-hearted symbolic retaliation in the “Cast Lead” campaign, withdrawing quickly after it was launched.

There is only one strategy for dealing with the Hamas that Israel has never attempted.  That untried strategy is victory.  Israel has never seriously attempted to achieve peace and tranquility with the Gaza Palestinians by means of victory.  This is somewhat strange, since it is hard to think of any other war that did not end in peace only after victory.  Instead, the world keeps demanding that Israel respond to Hamas provocation with an endless series of one-sided “goodwill measures.”  Never mind that the only invariable effect of such Israeli “goodwill measures” has been to trigger more Hamas terrorism.  The only “peace settlement” the Hamas is interested in is one in which Israelis volunteer to allow themselves to be placed in Hamas-run extermination camps for Jews.

Victory in the case of the war with the Gaza terrorists would mean annihilating the Hamas.  Interestingly, there is an increasing chorus of voices inside Israel now calling for peace through victory.  One of these is General Dan Halutz, the controversial erstwhile chief of staff of the Israeli army.  A few days ago a Hamas rocket was fired into Israel and struck a school building.  In response, Halutz called for a “mortal blow” to be dealt to the Hamas’ civilian and “military” leadership.  Then, in a radio interview, Halutz said, “We must bring back our deterrence vis-à-vis Gaza. It has not existed for even one moment since Operation Cast Lead and to this day.”  He has been joined by other Israeli leaders.  The finance minister, Yuval Steinitz (who is a philosophy professor at my own university when he is not busy in public life), recently called on Israel to topple the Hamas “regime” in Gaza if the terror continues.

The terrorist aggression by the Hamas has been carried on nonstop ever since it seized power in Gaza.  Most acts of Hamas barbarism do not even get reported in the world media, for which dogs biting and shooting rockets at postmen are passé.  Hamas rockets land in Israeli civilian areas almost every day.  Hamas leaders continue to call openly for Israel’s obliteration and for the annihilation of Jews.  All this is surprising only for those who have no understanding of what the Hamas really is.   Anyone who has read the brochure on the Hamas being distributed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center will know otherwise.

It has become vogue in many circles to represent Middle East savagery as part of some sort of “War of Civilizations.” It is not. In fact, the Middle East is simply a war by barbarism against all civilization. It is also considered chic to represent the Middle East conflict as a “cycle of violence,” and as something fundamentally symmetrical between Arab terrorists and Israeli soldiers.  It is not.

For those of us old enough to be AARP members, the name “Kent State” conjures up memories of the killings of 4 Kent State students on May 4, 1970 in an over-reaction by Ohio State Guardsmen positioned on the campus during anti-war protests.

This past week Kent State gained a new basis for international notoriety and for a different sort of death, this time of academic standards and decency.  Kent State is home to one of the worst tenured jihadists and pseudo-academic barbarians on the planet.

Julio Pino is a tenured pseudo-academic, teaching Latin American history at Kent State.  He was born in Cuba in 1960 and is a proud Fidelista, although he seems to prefer the option of having three square meals to eat in the heartland of American capitalism to living in the workers’ paradise.  In 2000 he converted to Islam and adopted the new name, Assad Jibril Pino.  Since then he has been a professional anti-Semite and rabble rouser against Israel.  He routinely denounces Israel for perpetuating “genocide” and Nazi-like crimes. (He evidently has never found any crimes in Cuba committed by the communists there, nor any human rights abuses of Muslims in Muslim regimes.)   He proudly admits to being a full-time indoctrinator of his students at Kent State.  He has referred to his students at Kent State as his “little jihadists” and his “beloved Taliban.”  He insists that the United States is “rapidly descending toward Christian fascism, we need more Ward Churchills.”  In September 2000, Pino declared a fatwa on the moderator of the “Marxism List,” proclaiming that those who dared to disagree with him were “hereby sentenced to death.”  He routinely celebrates mass murderers and suicide bombers, including the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the US on 9-11.  The Kent State student paper has had some biting satire to say about all this.

Pino was in the news this past week for academic barbarism.  An Israeli diplomat was speaking at Kent State and Pino jumped up and interrupted the talk by screaming “Death to Israel.”  Pino was upset when the diplomat noted that that Israel had offered humanitarian aid to Turkey, despite Turkey’s recent behavior, and Pino insisted the aid was really just profits from murdering Arab babies.

It is not often that I disagree with my good friend David Hornik, but – alas – this is one such time.  I have a very different take on the “prisoner exchange” deal just carried out between Israel and the Hamas terrorists, indeed one quite the opposite of what Hornik writes in his Frontpage Magazine piece “Freeing Gilad Shalit,” followed, by “Defending the Gilad Shalit Deal.”

Hornik essentially claims that the deal was justified because only small numbers of Palestinian murderers released by Israel in the past reverted to terrorism and murdered Jews.  He claims, much like the Israeli Prime Minister, that there was simply no viable alternative and leaving Shalit to his fate was just not an option.  Hornik does not believe the release of the terrorists creates an unreasonable security threat to Israel.  In part, this is because some of the worst terrorists will be deported to areas outside Israeli territorial control.  Steven M. Goldberg, writing in FPM, among others, disagrees.

So do I.

The issue is not simply the security risks from setting more than a thousand mass murderers back on the street.  I do not buy the “statistical trend” argument that since terrorist murders in Israel have been relatively low in recent years, the trend can just be extrapolated.  I think this smacks of “September 10, 2011” thinking.  In other words, looking at recent numbers as indicative of trends does not save us from the possibility of imminent quantum leaps of danger.  But even if Hornik is correct and the released murderers do not revert to terrorism, the “exchange” that released them was still insane.  It was a cynical slap in the face to the victims of those terrorists.  And it was a symbolic acquiescence by Israel to the terrorist point of view that has always insisted, much like the German Nazis, that murdering Jews is legitimate because Jewish life just “does not count,” because Jews are sub-human.  Those terrorists should have remained in prison (or been executed) and not traded for Shalit.

Khaled Mashal, chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau in Damascus, Syria, also seems to disagree with Hornik. He proclaimed, “Those released will return to armed struggle.  It is a great national achievement.”

I think that the best definition of leadership is where a political leader is willing to resist populist pressure to do “popular” things whenever those “popular” things are harmful.  A real leader is someone capable of resisting the temptation to act as demagogue and play to the crowd.

In the massive release of mass murderers for Shalit, Bibi Netanyahu has revealed himself to be the very opposite of a leader.  The release of the Palestinian mass murderers is popular in Israel at the moment, according to public opinion surveys.  Netanyahu has a long track record of doing whatever the caprices of the public happen to favor at the moment.  So I suppose in some ways it was not surprising that he agreed to this atrocity.  A man who does not have the backbone to stare down and dismiss summer Woodstock-on-the-Yarkon “social justice” protesters (the cousins of the Wall Street Occupiers) cannot be expected to resist the passionate Israeli public’s desire to see Gilad Shalit released.

The release of the murderers is fleetingly popular in Israel this week.  Negotiating with Palestinians is also generally popular in Israel.  So are price controls on housing and raising the minimum wage.  So is (depending on wording of question) creating a Palestinian state.  Being a leader means refusing to create disasters just because the public this week happens to feel that it is a nice idea to create them.

There was a general and deeply-felt desire for Shalit’s release among all Israelis.  The media have kept the plight of his family in the headlines for five years.  Shalit was in captivity for longer than the U.S. soldiers who survived the Bataan death march in the Philippines or the British troops captured in Hong Kong and Singapore.

But it is now clear that the main effect of the organizations in Israel drumming up support for “Let’s Get Shalit Released,” and “We Demand Shalit’s Freedom,” was to increase the number of murderers released in the exchange, from a couple of hundred to over a thousand.  It was obvious all along that the protests “on behalf of Gilad” had no effect whatsoever on Hamas other than persuading it to hold out longer for greater levels of appeasement.  The protests simply weakened the resolve of the already weak Israeli political leadership to resist the extortion.

The focus of the country has lately been on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, or “OWS.”  You know, the people who claim to speak for the 99% of Americans who are not wealthy capitalists and who think they can create social justice and equality by marching around the New York Stock Exchange and other centers of capitalism, like Greenwich Village.

Here is how the leaders of the leaderless OWS describe themselves on their Web site:

“Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.”

They go on to promise: “We are growing.  Block by block – city by city.  We will see change in this country, in this world.  It will happen sooner than you can imagine.”

Now it occurs to me that there is only one appropriate and sensible response to the “Occupy Wall Street” anarchists and street urchins.  And that is to create a competing grassroots mass movement that will challenge the attention OWS is receiving in the media, while offering a rational and constructive alternative agenda for real social change.

I propose that the alternative mass movement be called “Occupy Berkeley.”

OB will be a mass movement holding protests and street demonstrations in Berkeley, California.  Its first order of business will be to occupy Telegraph Avenue.  The slogan of OB should be, “We are the other 99.999999%,” referring to the fact that people who despise Berkeley street hippies and “anarchists” represent exactly that proportion of the general population.

OB will specialize in civil disobedience and street theater.  Among its initiatives will be a mass roundup of Berkeley hippies who will be conducted to the central facilities of OB, where they will all be given free baths.  A special re-education campus will be set up in Orange County, California, where all Bay Area communists and drug users will be sent to learn about the disadvantages of communism.

OB will also rid Berkeley of those asking passersby for spare change.  Instead, OB will promote entrepreneurship for panhandlers and for homeless youths.  Anyone in the Bay area stopping passersby and asking for spare change will be ordered to do pushups, where the first 40 are unpaid but after that, payment will be made to the panhandlers at the rate of 20 cents per pushup.  Tax free.  Pregnant panhandlers and those over 70 will be permitted to do their pushups from the knees.

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the Israeli “Bus 300” affair is once again popping up in the media just days after the al-Qaeda terrorist with the US passport, Anwar al-Awlaki, was liquidated by a drone in Yemen. Many of the points being raised in debate over the killing of al-Awlaki are the same as those long raised regarding the Israeli “Bus 300 Affair.” In both incidents terrorists were summarily executed by the intelligence agencies of democratic nations, without trial and “due process.” Both cases are being exploited by the enemies of those democracies to paint them as “inhumane regimes.”

In the Bus 300 Affair, intelligence agents from Israel’s Shin Bet liquidated two terrorists captured after hijacking a bus full of civilians, mainly women, and threatening to blow them up.  The al-Awlaki affair is far fresher in everyone’s mind.  Many on the Left, joined by Ron Paul and some fringe members of the Right, are grumbling about how al-Awlaki was liquidated “without proper due process and trial.”  The eminent professor of law from Berkeley, John Yoo, probably made the best case for the killing, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Yet, from the howls on the left, you would never know that President Barack Obama had won another victory in the war on terror. Even as details of the operation leaked out, critics claimed that our government had “assassinated” an American citizen without due process. … Worse yet, they get the rights of a nation at war terribly wrong. Awlaki’s killing in no way violates the prohibition on assassination … [A]ssassination is an act of murder for political purposes.  Killing Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy is assassination.  Shooting an enemy soldier in wartime is not.  In World War II, the United States did not carry out an assassination when it sent long-range fighters to shoot down an air transport carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.  American citizens who join the enemy do not enjoy a roving legal force-field that immunizes them from military reprisal.  President Abraham Lincoln confronted this question at the outset of the Civil War.

Almost all of the commentators and bloggers who roll their eyes in mock horror over the execution of the two terrorists in the “Bus 300” affair refuse to report what actually happened there.

On April 12, 1984, four Arab terrorists who had entered the Israeli Negev from Gaza commandeered an Israeli civilian bus filled mostly with women commuters returning home to Ashkelon from their jobs in Tel Aviv.  There were pregnant women among the victims.  The terrorists seized the bus and attempted to drive it towards the Egyptian border.  They were armed with knives and explosives and threatened to blow up the entire bus with its passengers if stopped.  They crashed through road blocks and were pursued by military jeeps.  The bus eventually was stopped near Gaza City.

The incident took place just a few years after the massacre of bus passengers by terrorists in another incident along Israel’s main coastal road. Holding the Bus 300 passengers as hostages, the terrorists demanded the release of 500 jailed terrorists, threatening to murder the captives if their demands were not met.

The next morning, an Israeli SWAT team stormed Bus 300 and freed the passengers.  Two of the terrorists were killed in the operation.  One Israeli woman on the bus died in the crossfire and seven others were injured.  The Israeli military announced that all four terrorists had died in the operation.  Later it turned out that two of the four had actually been captured alive and were executed by intelligence agents on the spot.  The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Syria took credit for the attack, although Israel claimed that Arafat’s Fatah terror organization was responsible.

The incident turned into a “scandal” when an Israeli newspaper called Hadashot (owned by the radical leftist Haaretz publishing house; it has since closed), edited by one Yossi Klein, defied Israel’s military censor (which censors news reporting about some sensitive military matters) and published a photo of one of the captured terrorists being led away.  (Originally published with faces of intelligence officers blackened out.)

In the aftermath, several Israeli intelligence officers were indicted for their roles in “covering up” the execution of the two captured terrorists.  All officers would be either exonerated in court or granted presidential “pardon” before indictment. Careers were damaged more by the negative publicity than from formal judicial actions. The head of the Shin Bet at the time was forced to resign. One intelligence officer named Ehud Yatom proudly boasted of his role in eliminating the terrorists.  He later served as a member of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset).

An official commission of inquiry then examined activities and procedures of the intelligence agency.

[This article is reprinted from the Fall 2011 issue of Middle East Quarterly.]

Israel is under assault from within, and not just from the usual suspects. Its legitimacy and, in many cases, its very existence are being attacked by a domestic academic Fifth Column. Hundreds of professors and lecturers, employed by Israel’s state-financed universities, are building careers as full-time activists working against the very country in which they live. And the problem is growing. Fortunately, the Israeli public has become aware of the problem and is increasingly demanding that something be done about it. A not-inconsiderable part of the credit for this belongs to the Middle East Quarterly, probably the first serious journal to discuss the problem a decade ago, sparking a debate that continues to challenge the Israeli academy’s offensive against the Jewish state.

“Socrates” Blows the Whistle

In fall 2001, the Middle East Quarterly ran a major exposé of anti-Israel academics based inside Israeli universities. Titled “Israel’s Academic Extremists,”[1] it shattered the conspiracy of silence that had long been observed in the Israeli media and on Israeli campuses about scholars working against their own country and in support of its enemies. And it opened a floodgate.

The article was attributed to “Solomon Socrates,” described as “the pen name for a watchdog team of researchers keeping an eye on Israel’s universities.” The very fact that the authors felt they needed the cloak of anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation from their colleagues within higher education may have been the most dramatic illustration of the sorry state of academic freedom and pluralism in Israel’s universities.

Noting that hiring and promotion procedures at Israeli universities were commonly politicized, with leftist faculty who had poor academic publication records getting hired and promoted as acts of political solidarity, the article offered thumbnail characterizations of about two dozen Israeli academic extremists. Today that list seems tame and thin, at least when compared with the dimensions of the problem as it is now understood. A few of the names were of obscure academicians of little interest, evidently spotlighted as a result of some outlandish statements and positions. Two of those named, Benny Morris and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, would no longer make the list and are generally considered today to be important defenders of Zionism and critics of “post-Zionist” historical revisionism of which they were once key articulators. Morris appears to have jettisoned most of his earlier Israel-bashing and New History revisionism regarding the period of Israel’s war of independence, though not everyone is persuaded the rehabilitation is sincere.[2] As a result he has become the favorite whipping boy for much of the anti-Zionist Left, incensed that he no longer spends his days denouncing Israel as the ultimate evil in the world. In February 2010, Morris was even denied the right to speak at a Cambridge University student event on the grounds that he was too pro-Israel and thus supposedly anti-Arab.[3] In June 2011 he was physically attacked by anti-Israel activists while on his way to lecture in the London School of Economics.[4] Gur-Ze’ev, meanwhile, has been speaking out forcefully against the anti-Semitism and totalitarian inclinations of the radical Left, to the chagrin of those who oppose him.[5]

From Socrates’ 2001 list, Baruch Kimmerling, Dan Bar-On, and Israel Shahak are no longer alive while Ilan Pappé and Gabriel Piterberg have emigrated and built careers elsewhere as full-time Israel bashers. The remaining names have, however, been joined by scores, perhaps hundreds, of home-grown academic bashers of Israel over the past decade.

The Internal War against Israel

Most of Israel’s anti-Israel academics hold tenured faculty positions at the country’s tax-funded public universities. They include people who justify and celebrate Arab terrorism and who help initiate campaigns of boycott and economic divestment directed against their own country in time of war. Today many of the leaders of the so-called BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [against Israel]) are Israeli academics. The phenomenon is near pandemic at the four main Israeli liberal arts universities: Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University, the University of Haifa, and Ben-Gurion University. At the two scientific-engineering institutions, the Technion and the Weizmann Institute, there are small numbers of faculty involved in such political activity but they are a minor presence, and this is also true of the religious university, Bar-Ilan. Israeli colleges are less generously funded by the government than universities and so are more dependent on competing for student tuition.  This may explain why extremist faculty is more unusual there than in universities, though Sapir College in the Negev may be an exception.

On the eve of the 2003 Iraq war, dozens of Israeli academics warned the world that Israel was planning massive war crimes and genocidal massacres against the Palestinians the moment the first coalition troops were to land in Iraq.[6] When the actual fighting took place and no such crimes were perpetrated by Israel, not a single signer of the petition issued an apology for the smears against the Jewish state.

In other petitions, Israeli academics routinely denounce Israel for carrying out war crimes and human rights violations. In some, they call for suppressing Israeli sovereignty by imposing political solutions on the country that they favor but which are opposed by the vast majority of Israelis.[7] Hundreds of Israeli university professors have been involved in organizing mutiny and insurrection among Israeli soldiers, and some have been arrested for violently attacking police and soldiers or for similar forms of law breaking. For example, Tel Aviv University’s Anat Matar,[8] the Hebrew University’s Amiel Vardi, math lecturer Kobi Snitz[9] (who has taught at several institutions), and others have been arrested for lawbreaking and for participating in violent, illegal demonstrations.  At least one faculty member at Ben Gurion University has openly called for murder of those who reject his far-leftist opinions.[10] The Israeli university authorities wink  at such behavior[11] and sometimes even collaborate with[12] and promote it.

Scores of Israeli academics openly advocate the so-called Palestinian right of return,[13] which would effectively end Israel’s existence, while others openly call for Israel to be annihilated altogether. Other Israeli academics signed the so-called Olga document demanding that Israel grant the Palestinians an unrestricted “right of return.”[14] Such people often claim to favor a “one-state solution,”[15] in which Israel’s existence as a sovereign nation would end, to be enfolded within a larger state with an Arab and Muslim government and majority. A few Israeli academics even campaign on behalf of and promote Holocaust deniers. Articles by Ben-Gurion University’s Neve Gordon have been published on the web site of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel[16] and in Iran’s state newspaper.[17] Neve has also endorsed Norman Finkelstein,[18] often regarded as a Holocaust denier or at least a Holocaust trivializer while other Israeli academics have praised Holocaust revisionist David Irving.[19]

During the Cast Lead military operation against Hamas in Gaza (winter 2008-09), the visibility of this group grew. While polls showed near-unanimous support for the operations among Israeli Jews,[20] a high proportion of Israeli academics opposed the operation.[21] The Hebrew University professor of linguistic education, Nurit Elhanan-Peled, has devoted much of her career to promoting the political agenda of the very same Palestinian terrorists who murdered her own daughter in a suicide bombing of a civilian Israeli bus.[22] Many anti-Israel academics cheered on Hamas as it launched rockets at the civilians in Israel’s south.[23] Others publicly endorsed Hezbollah’s “legitimate resistance,” when northern Israel was showered by Katyusha rockets during the summer war of 2006.[24] Some are currently among the leaders of marches that call upon the world to prevent Jews from living in neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, where, they believe, Jews just do not belong.

The Dershowitz Counterattack

Probably the most dramatic exhibition of the problem came at the national assembly of the governors of Tel Aviv University (TAU) in the spring of 2010. The keynote speaker invited to the affair was Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. While left of center, Dershowitz is passionately pro-Israel and, at the same time, vehemently opposed to infringements upon academic freedom.

Upon receiving an honorary doctoral degree at Tel Aviv University, Dershowitz gave a dramatic speech denouncing the home-grown, anti-Israel cadre of lecturers dominating Israeli universities.[25] He defended the rights of these academics to exercise freedom of speech—or, in his words, the “right to be wrong.” But he also defended the rights of others to denounce and criticize them.

In no time, Dershowitz confronted the all-too-common refrain sounded by these scholars that they are only engaging in legitimate criticism of Israel. To the contrary, Dershowitz contended, these people were actually often engaged in delegitimizing Israel itself, calling for world boycotts against the Jewish state, and at times calling for its annihilation. They go so far, he stated, as to organize boycott campaigns by recruiting and leading teams of anti-Israel radicals. ] Dershowitz then named several Tel Aviv University faculty, including some who were in Boston that same week attempting to organize a boycott against the Technion, Israel’s main engineering university,[26] for supposedly being a cog in the Israeli “war machine.”

Without naming names, Dershowitz heaped scorn on TAU professor Shlomo Sand for his recent book, The Invention of the Jewish People,[27] which claims that there is actually no such thing as a Jewish people. Dershowitz went on to denounce those who insist that freedom of speech belongs only to people who agree with them and assailed those at Israeli universities who harass students who dare to disagree with forced-fed ideology, comparing this behavior to teachers who sexually harass students. He insisted that students too are entitled to academic freedom, which includes the right to disagree with their professors.

While such a peroration would ignite controversy anywhere, it was downright incendiary at Tel Aviv University (TAU), arguably home to the greatest concentration of tenured leftists teaching in Israel.[28] While the audience repeatedly interrupted him with loud applause, faculty members reportedly squirmed in their seats.[29]

It did not take long for these academics to open fire in retaliation; within days, a group of TAU professors denounced Dershowitz and challenged his right to criticize them. Signatures for a petition were collected and published on a left-wing website. The petition essentially denied Dershowitz’s right to freedom of speech, despite the pretence of some signatories to the contrary, by deriding his charges against specific academics as “bordering on incitement that can pose a clear and present danger to these members of staff.”[30]

A quick look at the names on the petition illustrates the nature of the problem. Among the signatories claiming that Dershowitz’s words criticizing the anti-Israel camp reminded them of “the dark regimes” in human history were:

Chaim Gans of TAU law school, who organized a petition demanding that Col. Pnina Baruch-Sharvit, head of the Israel Defense Forces international law division, be prevented from teaching a course in the school after her retirement from military service because her department (allegedly) legitimized strikes in which civilians were hurt or killed during Operation Cast Lead.[31]

Gadi Algazi, a historian at TAU who, among other activities, led a march of Israeli Arabs supporting Hezbollah terror.[32]

Uri Hadar, a psychology professor, who recently organized a conference at TAU to support Hamas and Hezbollah.[33]

Daniel Bar-Tal, an educational psychologist, who produces anti-Jewish propaganda for the U.N. and believes Zionism is an obstacle to peace.[34]

The Attack against Freedom of Speech

As starkly demonstrated by the anti- Dershowitz petition, Israel’s tenured radicals are not only vehemently anti-Israel but also staunchly anti-democratic. For them, academic freedom and freedom of speech means absolute protection of the right to “criticize” Israel but not to defend it.

McCarthyism has become the favorite rhetorical bludgeon wielded by Israeli academics to deny their critics the freedom of speech. This McCarthyism, they charge, endangers freedom of speech and democracy. So tenured academics should have the sacrosanct right to denounce and demonize all of Israel and also to smear non-leftist Israelis, including private citizens such as army officers, in the most lurid and vulgar ways.  But those who respond by criticizing these critics are endangering democracy. In particular, the radical academics have denounced the watchdog web sites that monitor and cite what they say, as well as the Zionist student organization Im Tirtzu (“If you will it”) and Knesset members who have criticized the behavior of the radicals. In the strange world of Israeli academic radicals, the worst offense against academic freedom is the verbatim citing of what they actually say or write.

Some professors, most notoriously David Newman, dean of social sciences and humanities at Ben-Gurion University, [35] and Daniel Bar-Tal of the School of Education at Tel Aviv University,[36] have published calls for the suppression and silencing of critics. The president of TAU censored Mark Tanenbaum , a governor of his own university’s board, when the latter proposed an investigation into professors who use the school’s name and funds when participating in forums of political nature[37]—behavior that is incidentally barred by the university’s own bylaws. The Israeli media have also reported a growing number of demands from academics that the freedom of expression of their critics, and for that matter—of scholars deviating from politically correct dogmas—be suppressed.[38]

Thus, for example, when Yeruham Leavitt was teaching a class in medical ethics at Ben-Gurion University, he questioned the assertion that children raised by homosexual couples experience no adverse effects. For this he was not only fired for “unacceptable thinking,” but the president of Ben-Gurion University, Rivka Carmi, went out of her way to defend the firing.[39] On the other hand, when a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University, Eyal Ben-Ari, was accused by several female students of having raped and sexually molested them, the university at first circled the wagons around him and only years later suspended him for two years without pay.[40]

Tel Aviv University faculty members have participated in protests demanding that the campus Center for Iranian Studies be shut down because radical faculty members said they feared its work could assist the United States and Israel in confronting Tehran.[41] The radicals also opposed allowing an Israel ex-general to speak there.[42] A few years back some radical faculty protested against the opening of a campus synagogue, claiming its presence on campus would contribute to “religious coercion” and suppression of “religious pluralism.”[43] Obviously no student would be coerced into attending religious ceremony at the synagogue. But the absence of a synagogue before this one was opened did not strike the radical faculty members as infringing upon student freedom of expression and religion. In 2008, the student union at Tel Aviv University wanted to hold an exhibit protesting human rights abuses in China, but university officials ordered it shut down lest it offend Chinese diplomats.[44] Meanwhile, TAU has repeatedly hosted events organized by the Israeli Communist Party, held in campus facilities.

Academics from all across the country are now calling for a boycott of Ariel University Center in Samaria because it is located across the “Green Line.”[45] There have been no petitions though to eliminate politicized programs of ideological indoctrination run by the radical Left inside many university departments. There have been petitions by left-wing faculty members to eliminate university programs for Israeli army officers, intelligence service officers, and police, as well as petitions to bar army officers from holding academic positions.[46] Similarly, a group of University of Haifa faculty from its school of education organized a petition to demand that army officers be barred from speaking in schools.

All too often, university administrations have colluded with this mindset. When Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University filed a harassment “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (SLAPP) lawsuit against this author for criticizing his public, political activities and writings, he was backed by the highest officials at the university. These evidently see nothing amiss with such attempts at suppressing freedom of speech for other academics who happen to dislike Gordon’s extremist opinions.[47]

Hiring for Uniformity in Thought

The Israeli campus has become thoroughly politicized with faculty hiring and promotion decisions subordinated to political bias. As noted in the 2001 MEQ article, scholars with mediocre academic records are often hired and promoted as acts of solidarity with the Left. There have also been allegations of malicious blocking and sabotaging of the academic careers of those with political views on the Right. Israeli academics recruited through this politicized process have misused their podiums to impose courses consisting of anti-Israel libel and venom on students.[48]

The manner in which this ideological hegemony is maintained over campuses is well known within the Israeli academic institutions, even if the corruption has rarely been aired publicly. Consider a typical hiring or promotion procedure for an academic whose publication record consists mainly, or exclusively, of propaganda articles that bash Israel. Evaluation procedures are typically corrupted and politicized: An evaluation committee for the candidate is appointed, consisting entirely of like-minded faculty members who then typically requests assessments from eight to ten “referees” from Israel and around the world. But all, or nearly all, of the referee letter-writers will themselves have identical anti-Israel sympathies and can generally be counted upon to write glowing letters of support out of a sense of political solidarity. Ben-Gurion University seems to be the most accomplished institution in such practices.

Faculty chat lists in which Israeli professors post comments, especially in the social sciences, are invariably dominated by the self-defined “progressives.”  The author was personally summoned by a rector of the University of Haifa, Yossi Ben Artzi, and threatened with disciplinary actions for using sarcasm in response to “bash-Israel” postings placed on the local professors’ chat list. The “Israel Social Science” chat list is routinely censored to limit postings critical of the Left while ideological postings by anti-Israel faculty members suffer from no such handicap and dominate the list.[49] For example, an ideological article by the left-leaning Hebrew University professor Yitzhak Galnoor attacking the exercise of academic freedom by critics of leftists in Israeli universities[50] was posted on the list, while list manager David Levi-Faur refused to permit any response to it to appear.

Would-be non-leftist faculty can clearly see the political writing on the wall. They must choose either to toe the political line out of career self-interest or to muzzle themselves and maintain a low profile, at least until they reach senior academic ranks and often after that as well.[51] Thus political uniformity and the campus hegemony are perpetuated.

Abuses inside the Classroom

Israeli administrators have long turned a blind eye to anti-Israel courses which are often mandatory for students.[52] They have ignored growing reports that students are being harassed and penalized by faculty members when they dare to disagree with faculty political opining and indoctrination.[53] When the Im Tirtzu movement issued reports documenting classroom intimidation[54] and indoctrination of students, they were denounced by scores of faculty members and by the rectors at Ben-Gurion University, University of Haifa, and Tel Aviv University as McCarthyists and fascists.[55]

One of the most bizarre controversies concerning freedom of the press and freedom of speech has been afflicting Israel in recent days.  The basic question is whether there exists some sort of right to advocate the mass murder of Jews.

That sounds as if it is some sort of debate that took place in the 1930s in the darkest regimes.  The entire affair began when a far-leftist columnist for the only English-language newspaper in Israel, the Jerusalem Post, expressed support for such a right to conduct mass murder of Jews.  The columnist is Larry Derfner.  The Post is probably the most pluralistic and balanced newspaper in Israel, giving ample room for opining by writers from the Right, the Left, the Center, by Arabs and non-Israelis, and by just about everyone else.

Derfner’s endorsement of the right to murder Jews was actually published in a blog not connected with the newspaper, and it was his response to the mass murder that was conducted by Palestinians and some Egyptian collaborators in Israel’s deep south near Eilat a few weeks back.  The column triggered a boisterous debate inside Israel and outside it about the limits of journalistic license and freedom of speech.

Derfner’s comments can be seen as roughly similar to the infamous comments by Ward Churchill after the 9-11 attack.  Churchill had justified the attacks and denounced the victims as “Little Eichmanns.”

Derfner’s celebratory justifications of mass murders of Jewish civilians were not a prank.  His comments appeared on a blog, from which he has since removed them, and his original posting can be read in full here.  His posting began:

‘I think a lot of people who realize that the occupation is wrong also realize that the Palestinians have the right to resist it ­ to use violence against Israelis, even to kill Israelis, especially when Israel is showing zero willingness to end the occupation, which has been the case since the Netanyahu government took over (among other times in the past).  But people don’t want to say this, especially right after a terror attack like this last one that killed eight Israelis near Eilat. And there are lots of good reasons for this reticence, such as: You don’t want to further upset your own countrymen when they are grieving, you don’t want to say or write anything that could be picked up by Israel’s enemies and used as justification for killing more of us. (These are good reasons; fear of being called a traitor, for instance, is a bad reason.)  But I think it’s time to overcome this reticence, even at the cost of enflaming the already enflamed sensitivities of the Israeli public, because this unwillingness to say outright that Palestinians have the right to fight the occupation, especially now, inadvertently helps keep the occupation going.’

He then went on:

‘But if, on the other hand, we were to say very forthrightly what many of us believe and the rest of us suspect ­ that the Palestinians, like every nation living under hostile rule, have the right to fight back, that their terrorism, especially in the face of a rejectionist Israeli government, is justified ­ what effect would that have? A powerful one, I think, because the truth is powerful.  If those who oppose the occupation acknowledged publicly that it justifies Palestinian terrorism, then those who support the occupation would have to explain why it doesn’t.’

It goes without saying that Derfner failed to volunteer himself and his own family as people who should be murdered by Palestinian terrorism as resistance against Israeli occupation.  It is also not surprising that many an Israeli found Derfner’s defense of some sort of divine right to murder Jews as part of resistance against “occupation” to be highly reminiscent of similar German claims and of similar German allegations that their country was under Jewish “occupation” and control.

Derfner’s comments triggered a firestorm of rage.  By his own admission, hundreds of outraged subscribers to the Jerusalem Post cancelled their subscriptions.  Within days the editor of the Jerusalem Post announced that the paper would no longer employ or publish Derfner, because of the poor taste in his justification of mass murder of Jews.  Derfner issued a “clarification” and a sort of apology, but fired he remained.  He then took to the pages of the small socialist newspaper in New York, the Forward, to try to spin his advocacy of murder into something less offensive.

Very soon Derfner was not only being denounced for his advocacy of murder, but leftists and anti-Semites within Israel and from all over the world were defending him, endorsing his comments, and denouncing the Jerusalem Post for canning him.  Countless anti-Israel blogs denounced the newspaper and its editor for supposedly engaging in suppressing freedom of speech, calling them “fascists” and “McCarthyists.”   Even a New York Times blogger took up the banner for Derfner, a bit curious since the Times has not published Ward Churchill nor bin Laden nor others who celebrate the 9-11 attacks on New York.

Firing Derfner of course had nothing to do with freedom of speech.  No one is stopping Derfner from standing on the street corners of Zion and advocating murder of Jews.  Actually, open advocacy of murder is against the law in Israel and is decidedly NOT regarded as protected speech, but that law is never applied against Israeli leftists.  So Derfner obviously has nothing to fear in terms of prosecution.  Israel’s Attorney General office is dominated by leftists who never prosecute other leftists for engaging in violence or advocating it, even when they openly advocate murder.  Arabs who openly support terrorist atrocities and call for mass murder of Jews are never prosecuted and their statements are regarded as protected speech.  Rabbis and right-wingers who advocate things the prosecutors regard as “racist” or “incitement” however have been arrested by the score.  A non-leftist who criticizes the illegal and treasonous political behavior of a leftist extremist is regarded as having engaged in “libel.”

There are some calls in Israel for the enforcement of the law against Derfner.

Ward Churchill’s defamation of the victims of the 9-11 attacks might be protected speech.  But that does not grant Churchill any sort of entitlement to publish his views in any mainstream newspaper, nor to advocate them in front of any classroom or other forum.  Freedom of speech is not an automatic entitlement to newspaper space.

Israeli radical leftists have long had an intense hatred toward American conservatives. This is in spite of the fact that American conservatives are almost all pro-Israel. In actuality, the hatred of Israeli leftists toward conservatives is precisely because conservatives are pro-Israel. Like in most other countries, the radical leftists in the Jewish State are anti-Israel in addition to being anti-American.

Israeli leftists insist that overseas supporters of Israel who are conservative should be shunned. They demand that Israel proclaim that those conservatives are just not ethical enough to be accepted as friends. Israeli leftists insist that Israel should only allow itself to be befriended by foreign leftists. Never mind that the search for pro-Israel foreign leftists is about as productive as the search for human life on other planets. The Left outside of Israel is almost entirely anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, and foreign liberals are by and large (although not entirely) anti-Israel. Israeli leftists want foreign pro-Israel conservatives to be regarded as personae non gratae by Israel. A few years back, Amiram Goldblum, a professor at the Hebrew University and a founder of the leftist Peace Now, called upon Israel to prevent American evangelist Christians from entering Israel. He objected to them because they are too pro-Israel. The Israeli Left is outraged that Israeli cable TV carries Fox News, because it is pro-Israel. The anti-Israel BBC and CNN channels, however, are fine.

The most dramatic manifestation of the Israeli Left’s hatred of pro-Israel foreign conservatives was evident in the severity of “Beckaphobia” in recent days. The Israeli Left is suffering from an intense phobia regarding conservative media powerhouse Glenn Beck.

Beck was in Israel last week (and has been here a lot in recent months) for one purpose only – to support Israel. He is an outspoken and well-spoken American conservative. His political opinions are solidly conservative and you cannot listen to his recent speech in Jerusalem without being convinced of the sincerity of his love of Israel and solidarity with Jews. You might even be moved to tears (from his citing the Scroll of Ruth, for instance).

The Israeli Left has been jihading all week against Beck. Yossi Sarid, the ex-head of the semi-Marxist Meretz party, crayoned an op-ed demonizing Beck, and just recently had an op-ed in Haaretz claiming that Israel fought the Six Day War out of a Nazi-like quest for Lebensraum (his word) and expansionism. Sarid was joined by lots of left-wing Haaretz writers in Beck-bashing. And even the normally sensible Maariv editor, Ben-Dror Yemini, decided to gripe about Beck. Naturally, Peace Now denounced the decision to allow Beck into the country. The daily Haaretz, Israel’s analogue to The Nation, ran a nasty editorial denouncing Beck.

The leftists demanding that Beck be regarded as persona non grata are almost without exception the same people who protested when Israel denied the neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein, the anti-Semitic Stalinist Noam Chomsky and the pro-jihad pseudo-academic Richard Falk, entry into the country. Israel had prevented those people from entering because of their ties to Islamic terrorists and anti-Semites. The lesson is clear – the Left’s mantra is really this: Israel, hate it or leave it!

There is nothing like a good stock market bear run to get all the media wags out and chattering about the “death of capitalism.”  Invariably the same folks take to lecturing the rest of us about how the only hope for humankind is “social democracy” in the form of Scandinavian-style “socialism.”

It would be hard to understate the extent of romanticizing and fantasy concerning Scandinavia’s economic and social systems to be found among the Western “intellectual classes,” and that clearly includes the left wing of the Democrat Party.   Scandinavians themselves are often not as convinced that Scandinavian socialism is all it is cracked up to be, and Sweden’s own ex-Prime Minister Carl Bildt (current Foreign Minister) has pronounced it a failure.

Scandinavian countries are “socialist” in some senses and vibrantly capitalist in other senses.  They are “socialist” in the sense that they have very high taxes with very generous social welfare services provided by the state, the famous “cradle-to-grave” welfare state.  They are vibrantly capitalist in the sense that they have low levels of interference in markets by the government, low levels of regulation, low levels of nationalization of industry and capital, and almost no protectionism.  Interestingly, Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, manage to maintain those levels of taxes and expenditures while achieving high levels of national wealth and production, and a standard of living among the world’s highest.  As a result Western groupies of Scandinavia hold its “socialism” up as the model for the rest of the world and certainly for the bastions of capitalist inequality and class conflict, especially the English-speaking nations.

The wealth and riches of Sweden of course are at least in part the byproduct of Swedish cowardice and moral depravity.  Sweden sat out both World Wars, and emerged from them with its economy completely in tact.  In fact, “neutral” Sweden made money trading with Hitler’s Germany and providing the Nazi war machine with war materials, even while its fellow Scandinavian nations were being overrun, brutalized and devastated.

Be that as it may, Sweden in particular and Scandinavia in general are hailed as the great champions of humanism and egalitarianism, as the countries that have cured poverty and eliminated hardship and material suffering.  Here is not the place for an overall assessment of Scandinavian societies, which – like all countries – have their positive points and also their problems.  The question here is whether Scandinavian “socialism” is really the panacea for poverty.

Sure enough, poverty rates are comparatively low in Scandinavian countries compared with most of the rest of the world.   In fairness, it should be noted that they are not the ONLY countries with low poverty rates.  Ultra-capitalist Switzerland, which no one would mistake for a socialist country and which has a population similar in size to that of Sweden, appears to have poverty rates lower than those in the Scandinavian utopias.  But there is a serious analytic issue that must be addressed and it is this:  Are poverty rates in Scandinavian countries low because Scandinavian-style “socialism” works, or are they low because Scandinavians work?

Let us begin by noting that while the dimensions of poverty are relatively small by international standards, Scandinavian countries definitely do have poverty.  Scandinavian “socialism” has not eliminated it.

Poverty rates of course are highly dubious things to compare across countries.

The definition of “poverty” and its measurement are both highly problematic, and both vary dramatically, making inter-country comparisons difficult.   In all countries there are serious problems with the measures.  Wealthy people are sometimes counted as part of the population below the poverty line, as long as their current income happens to be low.  Examples are retired people and students.  The poverty statistics are based on reported incomes, meaning that lots of people living high on the hog are counted as poor because they do not report their income at all to the tax authorities, earning income from the “shadow economy.”  Poverty is generally measured by income, not consumption.  It is often measured as a percent of median income, not by material hardship, or by the rather silly “Gini coefficient.”  If every single person discovered a petroleum well in his yard, poverty rates would not change much.

Even if we accept the definitions and measures within each country at face value, there are still problems in making comparisons across different currency zones.  And some countries, including some Scandinavian ones, just do not report an official poverty rate of any sort.

Having noted all of that, by most estimates the Scandinavian countries are in relatively good but not remarkable positions relative to the rest of the world in terms of the dimensions of poverty.  Denmark’s poverty rate, with its bloated welfare state, is 12%, the same as the poverty rate in the US according to this source.  And poverty in Denmark is growing – it was estimated at 6% back in 1997 in a EU study.  (It should be noted though that Denmark has no official poverty measure.  Neither does Norway.)   Most other estimates put the US poverty rate higher than 12%.  Other estimates of poverty rates for Sweden, Norway and Finland run at about 6%, although some sources put it much higher.  The sources that estimate the US poverty rate as 18% also estimate the rates for Sweden and Norway at 9%.   A Finnish source estimates Finland’s 2010 poverty rate at 14%.  We will leave Iceland out of the comparisons, since the entire population of that country has been driven into insolvency by events in recent years.

While Scandinavian countries have relatively low poverty rates, Switzerland’s, as noted, is evidently even lower.  (I say evidently because Switzerland has no official measurement of poverty.   This web site puts it at 6.9%, slightly more than half that of Denmark’s.)   A summary of other estimates of poverty rates from different sources can be found here.  “Child poverty rates” are a separate story, but are low in Scandinavian countries, in large part because there are so few children there being born.

So Scandinavia has not eliminated poverty.  The interesting question is whether the low poverty rates there are thanks to the economic system or thanks to Scandinavians being hard-working thrifty disciplined people.  That Scandinavians are hard-working is evident from the fact that in spite of enormous benefits in Sweden for the unemployed and for those who do not work, creating incentives to avoid work, Sweden has a labor force participation rate that is one of the highest in Europe.

One way to test our question is to examine Scandinavians who do not live in Scandinavia.  There is a large Scandinavian population that lives in the bad-old-selfish-materialist-capitalist United States.  Well, it turns out that Scandinavians living under its selfish capitalism also have remarkably low poverty rates.  Economists Geranda Notten and Chris de Neubourg have studied Scandinavians living in the US and in Sweden and compared their poverty rates.  They estimate the poverty rate for Scandinavians living in the United States as 6.7%, half that of the general U.S population.  Using measures and definitions of poverty like those used in the US, the same analysts calculate the poverty rate in Sweden using the American poverty threshold as an identical 6.7% (although it was 10% using an alternative measure).   So low poverty among Scandinavians seems to be because Scandinavians work, whether or not Scandinavian “socialism” can be said to work.

It is difficult to explain to people living outside of Israel, and especially to Americans, the extent to which Israelis truly believe in communism.

Sometimes they call it socialism, but they basically mean communism.

This is not to say that they behave as communists in their private lives. Quite the contrary, Israelis live as the ultimate ideal of capitalism. They are enormously individualist. They are exceptionally good at starting and managing businesses, and of development and marketing innovations. Israel as a country has more start-up businesses than all of Europe. It registers more patents than any European country.

Yet those very same Israelis, who demonstrate every day their skills in succeeding in markets, hate markets. The word “socialism” carries enormously romantic and positive implications for Israelis. Especially among educated (non-Russian-born) Israelis. The word capitalism is something of an obscenity for most Israelis. I suspect that someone arrested for assault could get himself off in court if he claimed the victim had called him a capitalist, it being a form of hate speech. The Israeli media invariably use the word “capitalism” in conjunction with the word piggish. (Ironically, the one exception is the business editor of Haaretz, who supports market capitalism, while the rest of the same newspaper yearns for communism.) The only conceivable form of market economy in the minds of the Israeli chattering class is “piggish capitalism.” You would not believe the portion of Israeli professors and intellectuals who use that expression. The head of the Histadrut, Israel’s largest organized crime family, uses it, being a loyal believer in piggish communism.

In normal countries, pointing out that someone is a card-carrying member of the communist party is usually more than enough to discredit that person. Not in Israel. Carriers of communist party membership cards do so with pride. Most of the members of the history department at Tel Aviv University are such communists. So are oodles of other academics.

On the one hand, the operation of markets is what makes Israel a successful viable country, one incidentally that experienced almost no implosion at all during the global financial collapse of the past 4 years. But on the other hand, markets are things Israelis claim they want suppressed. Literate Israelis insist in unison that markets are what is wrong with the world, and suppressing markets is the answer to Israel’s problems. Markets are evil, rewarding selfishness. Benevolent governmental bureaucrats controlling the economy are what is needed.

Not every Israeli, mind you. Russian-Israelis, who today are maybe a fifth of the population, have no patience for those preaching the wonders of communism. And they are notably absent in the current “social justice” rallies and marches, or what I have been calling the Woodstock along the Yarkon Festival. Orthodox Jews rarely mouth the slogans of nostalgia for Bolshevik central planning of markets, although there are exceptions. (The commentator on the Torah portion in Maariv cannot get enough of communism and insists that suppressing piggish-capitalism is the highest form of Jewish ethics.)

Israeli academics are almost universally anti-capitalism. I am on the list of a chat list of Israeli social science faculty members, and for the past few weeks it has carried hundreds of postings yearning for socialist controls and denouncing capitalism. The posteurs universally fantasize about Israel adopting Scandinavian-style “socialism.” Putting aside some doubts as to how pleasant life really is in Scandinavia (witness Norway recently), Scandinavian “socialism” is actually not. It is essentially free markets mixed with very high tax rates and a gargantuan welfare state providing cradle-to-grave welfare services at state expense. In other words, Scandinavia has always been far more capitalistic countries than Israel, certainly of Israel was before the 1980s. In addition, Israel has always provided Scandinavian-style welfare state services, but without the freeing of markets and liberalization of production that characterized Scandinavia.

Academic economists generally do not join the antlered herds in pining for bolshevism, but there are exceptions. Israeli economists are among the few who know what a market is, what a price is, what a wage is. The protesters never know these things. But Israel has a long history of academic prostitution and one can always find a few academic economists willing to endorse the most idiotic “ideas” of those who understand nothing about economics, if it earns them a shekel or advances their careers. Hence the most passionate supporter of RAISING the minimum wage is “economist” Avishai Braverman, the guy who turned Ben Gurion University into Hamastan, and one can find similar cases of street-walking economists endorsing rent controls, nationalizations, and other fundamental axioms of economic Bolshevism.

Most people are not aware of it but Israel began its existence as a country with a system of Bolshevik central control. In its first years Ben Gurion implemented a system of massive nationalization and near-universal price and wage controls. It differed little from the economic structure created by Lenin. Ben Gurion got away with it for a while because of the War of Independence and the national emergency. Like in that old joke about how communism in the Sahara would produce a shortage of sand, by the early 1950s everything in Israel was in shortage, buying anything and everything involved endless Soviet-style queues, and most products could only be obtained in the black markets.

To Ben Gurion’s credit, he realized by the early 1950s that the system of Bolshevik controls was unworkable. Curiously, Lenin had also understood this and took steps to dismantle the controls, except that he died and was replaced by Stalin before serious reform took place in the Soviet Union. Lenin called his plan for partial de-Bolshevikation of the economy the “New Economic Plan” or NEP, exactly the SAME name adopted by Ben Gurion for HIS reforms in the early 1950s. (No coincidence!)

While most price controls were ended, other forms of economic Bolshevism were retained by Ben Gurion and his MAPAI party comrades. Huge portions of Israeli industry were nationalized, and much of what was left was semi-nationalized and grossly mismanaged by turning it over to the Histadrut trade union federation.

Economic policy sought to suppress competition everywhere. It strived to maximize the number of monopolies and cartels in the economy. The government controlled enormous amounts of resources, which it handed out as political favors, often to cronies and party oligarchs. Tax rates were enormous and sometimes exceed 100%. Profits by enterprises were derived mainly from government subsidies and handouts. Government policy was protectionist and anti-competitive. The capital market was suppressed and nationalized. The government’s working philosophy demanded that Israelis essentially turn all their income, savings, and wealth over to the government, and then the government bureaucracy would take care of the needs of the public and of citizens.

The result was a Third World economy, albeit one dominated by a political system that actually involved elections and parliamentary processes. Israel was pauperized by the Bolshevism. It remained poor and underdeveloped.

Things only began to change in a significant manner in the 1970s. Israel was being coerced into liberalizing its economy and removing some of the socialist controls because of Israel joining and signing various international trade agreements. The treaty partners refused to allow the Israeli government to continue its policies. The long period of zero growth following the Yom Kippur War also woke some people up to the necessity of having a functional economy.

In the 1950s and 1960s it was not unusual for people to lump Israeli economic policies and conditions together with those in Egypt and other Third World backwaters.

Things changed remarkably starting in the 1980s. Most of the nationalized industry was privatized, largely because state enterprises were losing so much money. Partly, this was due to the change in public willingness to tolerate the controls. Partly it was because of the growing number of people who had taken freshmen economics and understood the idiocy of Bolshevik controls. Partly, it was because of the growth of high tech, which the government could not control or understand. Partly, it was because of international trade treaty pressures.

There are still plenty of Bolshevik controls in place. Israel has a single-payer health system with four tightly regulated HMO-style providers. It works a lot better than you would expect, for some extraneous reasons (Israel has a young population that eats well and huge numbers of MDs). There are still oodles of monopolies and cartels. Agriculture is still largely anti-competitive and inefficient, dominated by government-erected cartels. Taxes are too high. The government owns a large portion of the land in the country. Some sectors are still distorted by protectionism, especially food.

The Woodstock on the Yarkon protesters are by and large leftist secularist Israelis demanding a return to the Bolshevik controls of the 1950s. They pine for the shortages and the rationing of that era because they figure that in a shortage THEY will be granted priority. The central demand of the protesters is rent controls. This will end up destroying the Israeli housing stock and pauperizing elderly owners of rental property who purchased those units with the intention of earning rental income in their old age. Like in New York and other cities having rent controls, the controls will create shortages, where the true cost of obtaining rental housing actually goes UP, not down.

The protesters pine for the Soviet steppes. They demand other forms of price controls so that Israel can turn into a Brezhnev-era style of country, where people spend their days waiting in lines for commodities in perpetual and growing shortage. They want markets to be suppressed, where squads of social justice commandos can decide who gets to live in which apartment, who gets to consume those commodities in shortage, and who earns what. They insist that wages be set based on what the protesters think people deserve to earn. Since there is not a single person in Israel who earns what he thinks he deserves to
earn, this amounts to a demand for a Soviet-style wage board that fixes wages for all professions, starting with those who are on strike, like the MDs. In other words, wages in the opinion of the protesters do not have to clear markets and signal where shortages and surpluses are. Wages should be arbitrary measures of “fairness.” Try to imagine just what happens when half the jobs in Israel attract no applicants because the fair wages there are insufficient to draw workers, while the other jobs have six applicants for each position because the fair wages there are much too high to clear the market. Try to imagine what life would be like if a Marxist sociologist or a caring social worker were appointed as economic dictator to decide all economic matters and decisions in Zion.

Every society on earth and every society in human history has people living in hardship and in poverty. There are poor people in all countries, including Scandinavia. Mankind has not discovered an innovation that eliminates poverty and hardship.

Yet the caring dreamers about Bolshevism along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv (note the irony of the name) demand an instant magic pill that will eliminate all hardship and inequality. And the failure of the government to provide one is proof that the evil “tycoons” are in charge and preventing the government from serving the people. “People not profits” is the slogan of choice used by those who are too stupid to understand that the only way to make producers serve the people and produce things the people want is for them to make profits doing so. Outlaw profits and you create mass starvation.

The tycoon fetish continues to dominate the protests. I have suggested that Mikey Lerner even change the name of his idiotic magazine from Tikkun to Tycoon. Many Israeli tycoons, at least outside high-tech, were made tycoons because of sweetheart deals with
the political establishment, particularly back in the days of MAPAI socialism.

The other irony is that the only “reform” the protesters have extracted from Netanyahu is the setting up of “Planning Speed-up Commissions.” And the most ironic part of this irony is that the main effect of those commissions will be to fatten up the “tycoons.”

Israel’s municipal planning and regulation of construction is a fever swamp of corruption and inefficiency. It takes two years to get a license to put windows in your porch and you may have to bribe city officials to get it. The endless bureaucratic pencil pushing and bickering does indeed slow down construction, affecting housing prices and availability. At the same time, these planning dinosaurs DO allow a certain amount of public involvement and intervention, especially when it comes to combating corrupt sweetheart dirty deals between municipalities and construction contractor “tycoons.” Corrupt municipal officials are constantly attempting to get approval for construction projects that will enrich contractor cronies, even when these are illegal, harmful to the public interest, ugly, and in some case built on public park lands and beaches. The officials attempt to bend zoning laws and regulations to “help their buddies.”

As a sop to the demonstrators, Netanyahu has proposed and the Knesset just passed the creation of “Planning Speed-Up Commissions,” to cut through the red tape and bureaucracy. The problem with the idea is simple: it will still take two years and possibly some bribes if you want to put a window pane on your porch. But the oligarchs will be able to use the Speed Up mechanism to push aside public opposition and suppress sensible zoning and planning regulations. The oligarchs are also being offered by Netanyahu public lands at below-market prices, where Netanyahu insists this will lower housing prices. The reality, as any freshman econ student can tell you, is that it will not lower housing prices by a shekel, and instead will only inflate the profits of the cronies getting in on the deal.

The hysteria of Israel’s radical Left in light of the new anti-boycott law is growing by the hour.

The problem with Israeli leftists is that they are anti-democratic and know they can never persuade the public to pursue leftist policies using the democratic process. There would be nothing wrong with leftists trying to convince the public using democratic means and persuasion that settlements are awful and must be removed. If the Left persuades enough people, they will elect a parliament that will implement the Left’s agenda.

The problem is that the vast majority of the public rejects the Left’s agenda and supports the continued development of “settlements” and other Israeli institutions in the West Bank, including Ariel University. Because the Left is incapable of persuading more than a few percent of Israelis, the Left pursues its agenda using coercive anti-democratic means, by organizing boycotts against West Bank Jews
and demonizing them. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic tactic and shows the real nature of Israel’s increasingly fascist far leftists.

In addition, those who boycott West Bank “settlements” are anti-Jewish bigots. How do we know this? Because they are not promoting the boycott of Israeli enterprises in the West Bank, but only of Jewish enterprises. If some Arab entrepreneurs in Nazareth or Haifa were to set up factories or hire people in the West Bank, none of the bleeding heart leftist boycotters would propose that THOSE be boycotted. Or
take the idea one step further. The Arab fascist Knesset Member Ahmed Tibi has Israeli citizenship. He also owns a residence in East Jerusalem, outside the “1967 Green Line.” (Hat tip – Hagai Segel in Makor Rishon.) Not a single leftist is calling for Tibi to be boycotted because of this. Why not? If the boycott is against all Israeli presence outside the Green Line, Tibi is as deserving of being boycotted as anyone else. In fact he sits in the Israeli parliament!

The answer of course is that the boycott is directed against Jews, not against Israelis. It is racist and bigoted and that is why the anti-boycott bill is justified, much like any law against discrimination.

There is another ironic twist to the leftists and their boycott against “settlements.” While intending only to harm Jews, the main victims of such boycotts are likely to be West Bank “Palestinians.” The enterprises operating in the West Bank that the Left wants boycotted employ thousands of “Palestinians,” paying them wages at least three times what they can earn in regular Palestinian jobs working for Palestinians. And Ariel University has lots of Palestinian students, I think between 10 and 15 percent of its student body. So if the leftists get their way, they will be inflicting serious damages on their beloved “Palestinians.”

While the Left is wetting itself over the anti-boycott law and insisting that boycotts are legitimate and democratic, Amnon Lord, writing in Makor Rishon, has an interesting anecdote.

It seems that a few years back, the Israeli government decided to prohibit Israeli drivers from getting their cars fixed in the West Bank. The garages there are cheaper but there were too many terrorist attacks against the traffic of Israelis going there for tune-ups. So, out of security concerns, it was prohibited for drivers to go there.

The Left had conniptions. Led by Uri Avnery, the father of Israeli anti-Zionism (and a one-time supporter of Nazism before World War II), the Left screamed that this boycott of West Bank garages was a racist reincarnation of Nazi German boycotts of Jewish shops. This is the same Avnery, and these are the same leftist moonbats, now bellowing that prohibiting boycotts against settlers is fascist and anti-democratic.

In the old novel Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, there is a bizarre character in the story, a man who had been a Nazi war criminal, but after the War trained as a medical doctor and came to the Caribbean in order to save sick impoverished island people.  He saves about a dozen people a week and he figure it will only take about 600 years to save more people than he had killed as a war criminal during the War.

I am reminded of that story whenever I examine the peculiar career of Prof. Benny Morris.   Now don’t take this the wrong way, ­ Morris was never any murderer or war criminal and I do not mean to imply that he was as evil as a Nazi. But he did have to spend the second half of his career undoing the damage from the first half.

Benny Morris was one of the original, and in some ways the most destructive, of Israel’s “New Historians.”  The “New Historians” are actually pseudo-historians, who seek to revise history to make it jive with Arab propaganda.  Those who denounce the “New Historians” as charlatans are sometimes called the “New New Historians.”  The far leftists call them McCarthyists and fascists.

For many years Morris was the leading “New Historian” revisionist.  Born on an Israeli socialist kibbutz and son of a diplomat, Morris did his PhD on Anglo-German relations at Cambridge.  He seemed to think that this qualified him to be a Middle East historian and Orientalist.  The academic world disagreed.  He returned to Israel from Cambridge and mainly worked as a newspaper journalist at the Jerusalem Post.

Morris’ main venture into historic revisionism came with the publication of his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, published by Cambridge University Press in 1988.   It was by and large a retelling of the “Arab narrative” about the creation of Palestinian “refugees.”  The alternative narrative, also knows as the truth, was that any Palestinians who became refugees resembled the ethnic German refugees at the end of World War II who became refugees.  Both sets were people who had supported the losing side of a genocidal war of aggression or who had fled the battle zones of the victorious armies in the war they had started.

In those days Morris was essentially a pseudo-historian, inventing historic “narratives” to reflect Arab propaganda and to dabbling in the demonization of Israel.  And he was good at it.   He collaborated with academic haters of Israel like British (Israeli expatriates) Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim.  Because he was so viciously anti-Israel and because so much of his “scholarly” work consisted of nothing more than anti-Israel propaganda, Morris at first had trouble finding an academic position in Israel.  He was eventually hired by Ben Gurion University, which cannot get enough of leftist anti-Israel propagandists serving as its faculty members.  Rumor has it that the president of the university at that time, leftist Avishai Braverman (today a politician in Israel’s Labor Party), personally intervened so that Morris could get hired.  While far less vulgar and infantile than the “books” of Norman Finkelstein, Morris turned out Bash-Israel and Bash-Zionism treatises, a lot about the 1948-9 Israeli war for independence.

All this made Morris the darling of the radical campus Left in Europe and the US.  They loved citing Morris to prove how evil Israel is and was.  About 12 years ago Morris would have been one of the most obvious targets for righteous Zionist rage and for being exposed, attacked and denounced as a pseudo-scholar and a charlatan, something like a Neve Gordon or Ilan Pappe.

But then something happened.

Morris suddenly appeared to have second thoughts.  He repented.  He largely repudiated his earlier anti-Israel radicalism and started espousing pro-Israel and pro-Zionist opinion, especially regarding the 1948-9 Israeli war of independence.  Not everyone is convinced that Morris has really wised up, and Efraim Karsh from the University of London is the leading proponent of the view that Morris has not and is simply engaged in pragmatic maneuvering and cynical posturing.  (See this and this, as well as several Karsh articles in the NY Times and Commentary Magazine).  Karsh is particularly critical of the fact that Morris has not outright renounced in total his earlier “histories” of the “Palestinian refugees.”

I was skeptical of Morris’ “conversion” at first, but over time it seems to me to be genuine.   I think his very first public break with the Bash-Israel Left took place in Berkeley in the late 90s, when I happened to be in town.  Invited to speak in a church, the place was packed with the usual Berkeley jihadists and Hitlerjugend expecting from Morris a blistering demonization of Israel.  Instead, Morris spent the entire talk explaining that the Middle East conflict is the fault of the Arabs, including any “refugee” problem.  You can imagine the hysterical reactions in the local Berkeley drug-infested media.  These days the Bay Area has its own specialized anti-Morris hate organizations, such as this one, devoted to demonizing Morris.  This is all so amusing.  The jihadists love citing from the old writings of Benny Morris about how Israel was somehow to blame for “Palestinian sufferings,” but refuse to listen when Morris himself repudiates those claims.