How Anti-Israel Resolutions Were Defeated at American Historical Association: Jeffrey Herf, Legal Insurrection, Jan. 6, 2016— …By a vote of 144 to 51, members of the American Historical Association, at the Business Meeting of their annual convention in New York City on January 4, decided not to pursue two resolutions that denounced aspects of the policies of the government of Israel.
Marxism Failed in the World, But Conquered Western Academia: Philip Carl Salzman, Daily Caller, Jan. 11, 2016 — One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance.
Academics for Free Speech…No, Really: George F. Will, National Post, Dec. 28, 2015— Although he is just 22, Andrew Zeller is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Purdue University.
Christian Evangelicals in Jerusalem Show Love for Israel: Daniel Estrin, Business Insider, Oct. 1, 2016 — Thousands of evangelical Christians from more than 80 countries descended upon Jerusalem…
2015's Hits at DanielPipes.org: Daniel Pipes Blog, Jan. 10, 2016
If You Want to Change the Campus Culture, Look to the Faculty: Mitchell Bard, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 14, 2016
ISIL Fight Forgets Lessons of First Gulf War: Matthew Fisher, National Post, Jan. 14, 2015
The Battle of the Budge – December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945: Nurit Greenger, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 12, 2015
HOW ANTI-ISRAEL RESOLUTIONS WERE DEFEATED AT
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
Jeffrey Herf
Legal Insurrection, Jan. 6, 2016
…By a vote of 144 to 51, members of the American Historical Association, at the Business Meeting of their annual convention in New York City on January 4, decided not to pursue two resolutions that denounced aspects of the policies of the government of Israel…It is the most decisive defeat that groups supporting resolutions denouncing Israel have suffered since "BDS" (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) efforts gathered steam in American universities in recent years.
This is a preliminary anatomy of its defeat. The case for rejection on procedural grounds was straightforward. Readers of Legal Insurrection will understand that debates about procedure are also debates about substance and the rule of law.
The AHA bylaws require that members wishing to submit resolutions to be considered at the Business Meeting must do so by November lst. An initial resolution was submitted by the Historians Against the War (HAW). HAW is a group of leftist academics that emerged in opposition to the war in Iraq and that issued a petition alleging Israel had committed "war crimes" during the war with Hamas last summer. I wrote about the emergence of a "pro-Hamas left". An earlier anti-Israeli resolution was rejected because, according to AHA executive director James Grossman, it went "beyond matters of concern to the Association, to the profession of history, or to the academic profession."
HAW's original petition included demands for a boycott of Israel universities and implementation of the Palestinian right of return. That resolution was rejected by the AHA Council because the advocates had not gathered enough signatures and because the content of the resolution was deemed, in the words of AHA executive director James Grossman, "beyond matters of concern to the Association, to the profession of history, or to the academic profession."
On December 22, 2014, HAW submitted revised resolutions. The revisions eliminated the boycott and right of return elements but included allegations that Israel threatened an oral history archive when it bombed buildings at the Islamic University in Gaza in August 2014, and that it denied access of foreign scholars and Palestinian students to universities in Gaza and on the West Bank. HAW then requested that the AHA Council decide whether or not to place the resolution on the agenda, even though it was submitted six weeks after the deadline, something that the Council had the right to do, despite the restrictions regarding resolutions in the organization's bylaws.
At its meeting on January 2, 2014, the Council, led by AHA President Jan Goldstein (University of Chicago), refused to do so for two reasons. First, the December 22 resolution was submitted six weeks after the November 1 deadline, and therefore, AHA members did not have the opportunity to evaluate them. Second, because the resolutions were filed so late, many members would not be at the business meeting because they did not know these matters would be discussed there.
A memo by Sonya Michel of the University of Maryland is an important document in this matter. Submitted on December 29th, the Michel memo was circulated to the AHA Council. Michel urged that the AHA Council not to place the HAW resolutions on the agenda because doing so would "be violating the spirit of that bylaw" requiring a two-thirds majority, which,"was probably inserted to prevent a small group (whether a minority or slim majority) from imposing its will at the last minute on the membership at large, perhaps catching them unawares about an important issue coming up." Doing so would also not give "members adequate time and opportunity for full consideration of important issues–issues that, in this case, are by all accounts extremely controversial," she added. "Notifying members that these items are on the agenda of the meeting only at the meeting itself would deny them the kind of information they would need to decide whether or not to attend the Business Meeting in the first place."
Michel and a number of us elaborated on these points as well at the business meeting. As I pointed out on the floor of that meeting, the issue of time needed for reflection was of central concern to historians. The rejection of the resolutions also rested on a reassertion of the principle that the AHA is a scholarly, not a political, organization.
To ask historians at a business meeting to reach conclusions about assertions of fact regarding events that supposedly occurred during the Gaza War and travel rights of scholars in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank was absurd. This was the case because it was asking historians to act on the basis political opinions rather than as a result of careful examination of evidence. No one, we argued, was able to make such assessments as a result of scholarly research. Doing so without research would be abolishing the distinction between politics and scholarship—doing what no historian should do, namely assume what remained to be proven before examination of evidence had taken place…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
BUT CONQUERED WESTERN ACADEMIA Philip Carl Salzman Daily Caller, Jan. 11, 2016
One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance. This was demonstrated repeatedly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the switch in China from communes and central planning to capitalism, the vast slaughter of the Khmer Rouge, the breakdown of the Cuban economy, and the starving prison house that is North Korea.
The one place that marxism has succeeded is in conquering academia in Europe and North America. Marxism-Leninism is now the dominant model of history and society being taught in Western universities and colleges. Faculties of social science and humanities disguise their marxism under the label “postcolonialism,” anti-neoliberalism, and the quest for equality and “social justice.” And while our educational institutions laud “diversity” in gender, race, sexual preference, religion, national origin, etc., diversity in opinion, theory, and political view is nowhere to be seen. So our students hear only the Marxist view, and take it to be established truth.
Postcolonialism is the view that all ills in the world stem from Western imperialism and colonialism. The hierarchical caste system in India, that disenfranchises half the population as “untouchables,” is, according to postcolonial analysis, and invention of the British while they governed India. So too with tribes in Africa, allegedly invented by the British colonial authorities to “divide and conquer” the native African, who previously had all mixed together happily with no divisions and no conflicts. So too in Central Asia, where, thanks to Soviet colonial authorities, “formerly fluid hybridities and contextual identifications were stabilized, naturalized, and set into a particular mold that gave each group a definitive history, physiognomy, mentality, material culture, customs, language, and territory,” according to one postcolonial author. Apparently, according to the postcolonial view, history and culture in India, Africa, and Central Asia started with the arrival of outsiders in recent centuries.
In the Middle East, problems and disorder began, according to postcolonialism, with the Sykes-Picot arbitrary boundaries imposed by the West after WWI, and the imposition of the “foreign and colonialist” Jews on the “indigenous” Palestinians. Unnoticed by postcolonialists are the Persian, Hittite, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Mongol, and Ottoman imperial conquests that made up much of Middle Eastern history, or the unending tribal conflicts beyond the control of imperial authorities. Once again, for postcolonialists, local and regional cultures were benign, and history began with Western imperialism in recent centuries.
The dirtiest word in the marxist vocabulary is “neoliberal,” which stands for an economy based on capitalist principles and processes. Students have learned that “neoliberal” is equivalent to evil. Two students, independently, recently said to me that “we need to replace capitalism,” although they had no suggestions about what to replace it with. That half the world tried to replace capitalism in the 20th century, with disastrous results, they apparently had no idea. That capitalism has brought unparalleled prosperity, if not peace and happiness, is unknown to students. They have been taught that the only products of capitalism are exploitation and oppression. Globalization is taught as the expansion of exploitation and oppression worldwide. The great economic developments in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and the economic progress in Africa, is terra incognita to students, taught only problems but no successes.
Students are taught that the primary value is equality: not liberal equality of opportunity, but the equality of result idealized in marxist theory. They are not taught, and give no thought to complementary values, such as freedom and prosperity. Equality of result is advocated under the guise of “social justice,” which means redistribution of wealth. Students rail against the “1%,” unaware that most members of that category are salaried doctors, lawyers, and businessmen who earn their top wages. Nor do they understand that stock ownership is widespread in Western societies, by both private individuals and public institutions, such as pension funds and universities.
The marxism taught in colleges and universities is anti-Western, seeing the West as no more than a source of conquest, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, non-Western cultures are upheld as purer, more decent, and fairer than Western culture. The alliance between Marxist politics and islamism as seen in the support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood follows logically. Students now see themselves as defenders of Islam, along with all other non-Western cultures, although they know little about these other cultures and their histories. It has been imagined that the West would fall through materialist decadence; but now it appears that the West is most at risk from self-hate, fostered by the treason of the academics.
Prof. Philip Carl Salzman is a CIJR Academic Fellow
ACADEMICS FOR FREE SPEECH…NO, REALLY
George F. Will
National Post, Dec. 28, 2016
Although he is just 22, Andrew Zeller is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Purdue University. He is one reason the school is a rare exception to the rule of unreason on American campuses, where freedom of speech is under siege. He and Purdue are evidence that freedom of speech, by which truth is winnowed from error, is most reliably defended by those in whose intellectual pursuits the truth is most rigorously tested by reality.
While in high school in Bowling Green, Ohio, Zeller completed three years of college undergraduate courses. He arrived at Purdue when its incoming president, Indiana’s former Gov. Mitch Daniels, wanted the university to receive the top “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which combats campus restrictions on speech and rates institutions on their adherence to constitutional principles.
Zeller, president of Purdue’s graduate student government, and some undergraduate leaders urged Daniels to do what he was eager to do: Purdue has become the second university (after Princeton) to embrace the essence of the statement from the University of Chicago that affirms the principle that “education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think.” The statement says “it is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable or even deeply offensive,” and it endorses “a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”
Why is Purdue one of just six universities that have now aligned with the spirit of the Chicago policy? Partly because of Daniels’ leadership. But also because Purdue, Indiana’s land-grant institution, is true to the 1862 Morrill Act’s emphasis on applied learning. It graduates more engineers than any U.S. university other than Georgia Tech. Purdue, tied with the University of California-Berkeley, awards more STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) undergraduate diplomas than all but two public research universities (Penn State and Texas A&M). Among such universities, a higher percentage of Purdue students graduate in STEM fields than those of any school other than Georgia Tech and the University of California, San Diego.
Scientists and engineers live lives governed by the reality principle: get the variables wrong, the experiment will fail, even if this seems insensitive; do the math wrong, the equation will tell you, even if that hurts your feelings. Reality does not similarly regulate the production of Marxist interpretations of “Middlemarch” or turgid monographs on the false consciousness of Parisian street sweepers in 1714. Literature professors “deconstructing” Herman Melville cause nothing worse than excruciating boredom in their students. If engineers ignore reality, reality deconstructs their bridges. The Yale instructor whose email about hypothetically insensitive Halloween costumes incited a mob has resigned her teaching position. She did so in spite of a letter of faculty support organized by a physicist and signed mostly by scientists, including social scientists, rather than humanities faculty.
In their scalding 2007 book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,” Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson plausibly argue that Duke’s disgrace — a fictional rape; hysterical academics trashing due process — was driven by the faculty Group of 88. Signatories of its manifesto included “only two professors in math, just one in the hard sciences, and zero in law. … More than 84 per cent described their research interests as related to race, class or gender (or all three). The Group of 88 was disproportionately concentrated in the humanities and some social science departments. Fully 80 per cent of the African-American studies faculty members signed the statement, followed by women’s studies (72.2 per cent) and cultural anthropology (60 per cent).”
Higher education is increasingly a house divided. In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression. This is, however, a smattering of what counts as good news in today’s climate: for the first time in FIRE’s 16 years of monitoring academia’s authoritarianism, fewer than half (49.3 per cent) of American universities still have what FIRE considers egregiously unconstitutional speech policies. Purdue is one of six universities that eliminated speech codes this year, and one of just 22 with FIRE’s “green light” rating.
CHRISTIAN EVANGELICALS IN JERUSALEM SHOW LOVE FOR ISRAEL
Daniel Estrin
Business Insider, Oct. 1, 2015
Thousands of evangelical Christians from more than 80 countries descended upon Jerusalem (in October) to show their support for the Jewish state, including pilgrims and politicians from countries with a history of hostility toward Israel. The celebratory summit reflects evangelical Christianity's dramatic growth worldwide and gives a boost to Israel at a time when the country is increasingly isolated internationally.
Attitudes in Israel toward evangelicals are evolving, from skepticism about Christian Zionist motives, to the realization that Israel cannot survive on the support of diaspora Jewish communities alone and is in no position to turn down the potential political and tourism boost the Christians can provide. "Israel has no better friends throughout the world," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a videotaped address that was beamed to a Jerusalem basketball stadium packed with cheering pilgrims Tuesday. The gatherers waved flags from home countries such as Angola, Brazil, China, Germany, Italy and the U.S. There was even a small delegation from Egypt, a country that shares a cold peace with Israel.
Evangelical Christianity is one of the world's fastest growing religious movements. Of the world's estimated 2 billion Christians, some 700 million are evangelicals, according to the pro-Israel International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, which organized the Jerusalem summit. Evangelical movements are expanding most prominently in Latin America, Africa and Asia — regions that "hold great potential for the nation of Israel in political, diplomatic and economic terms," according to a position paper the group presented last year to Israel's Foreign Ministry.
The annual weeklong summit is billed as the Feast of Tabernacles, the Christian term for the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which in biblical times was marked by a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. This year's gathering included rock concert prayer rallies in which believers sang Hebrew songs and an annual flag-waving parade through the streets of Jerusalem. Evangelicals say their affinity for Israel stems from Christianity's Jewish roots and an anticipated Messianic age when all nations of the earth will flock to Jerusalem. Jews and Christians both believe in a future Messianic age, though Jews do not accept the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah.
"Jesus is Jewish. He's coming again," said Marilyn Henretty, 77, of Annandale, Virginia, from the bleachers of one of the week's prayer rallies, clasping a tambourine and wearing a 12-gemstone ring representing the 12 tribes of Israel. "We believe it's going to be soon. All signs point to that." There has long been suspicion in Israel that the evangelical bear hug is connected to a belief that the modern Jewish state is a precursor to the apocalypse — when Jesus will return and Jews will either accept Christianity or die. Israel's Chief Rabbinate called on Jews to boycott an evangelical rally open to local Israelis this week, calling it "spiritually dangerous" and warning that evangelicals were trying to convert Jews to Christianity.
Israeli liberals are also uncomfortable with evangelicals because of their ties to America's political right and their support for Israel's settlement enterprise in the West Bank, a major sticking point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some evangelicals, particularly from the U.S., work as volunteers on Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But suspicions are diminishing in Israel, especially as evangelical groups funnel hefty donations to Israel and evangelical representatives in Israel downplay the apocalypse, saying it is not a central tenant of faith for most of the world's evangelicals — or what makes them love Israel. "We feel that their support is genuine and not deriving from any ulterior motive," said Akiva Tor of Israel's Foreign Ministry…
Evangelicals at the summit boasted of their success at lobbying on Israel's behalf in the halls of parliaments around the world. There are currently 32 pro-Israeli caucuses in parliaments worldwide, according to the Israel Allies Foundation, a Jewish-Christian pro-Israel political group that brought two dozen lawmakers from 18 countries to Jerusalem this week to meet with Israeli lawmakers and officials. The Israeli parliament's Christian Allies Caucus, formed in 2004 to forge ties between Israeli lawmakers and Christian leaders, officially relaunched this summer after a period of dormancy. International Christian Embassy Jerusalem director Jurgen Buhler called it a "miracle."
At a prayer rally, Buhler introduced a group of 20 lawmakers from the Ivory Coast, which like most African nations broke ties with Israel in the 1970s but later restored them. The lawmakers flew to the Jerusalem summit on the Ivory Coast parliament's expense, Buhler said. The smiling lawmakers received a 12-ram's horn salute from a group of Taiwanese evangelicals blasting shofars, an ancient Jewish instrument. Also in attendance was Rev. Mosy Madugba of Nigeria, head of a network of Christian ministers, who said his close ties to Nigerian leaders helped change the country's traditional pro-Palestinian stance at the U.N. In recent years, Nigeria has abstained from supporting U.N. resolutions supporting Palestinian statehood.
Kenneth Meshoe, an evangelical South African lawmaker who heads the African Christian Democratic Party, said he has helped block anti-Israel motions in South Africa's parliament, including a recent effort to label Israeli products made in the West Bank as settlement products. His wife, Lydia, wore a bright yellow headdress and a Jewish Star of David necklace. Both said they hoped Jews would accept Jesus when the apocalypse comes. "God will bless those who bless Israel," he added.
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
2015's Hits at DanielPipes.org: Daniel Pipes Blog, Jan. 10, 2016—Which articles, blog posts, speeches, and interviews on my web site, DanielPipes.org, fared best in the year recently concluded? In ascending order, here are 2015's ten most widely read, listened-to, and watched pages:
If You Want to Change the Campus Culture, Look to the Faculty: Mitchell Bard, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 14, 2016— A number of articles have been written about a new organization that is going to work with faculty to address problems on campus related to Israel and the treatment of Jewish students.
ISIL Fight Forgets Lessons of First Gulf War: Matthew Fisher, National Post, Jan. 14, 2015—If there has been a “good” conflict in the Middle East, the first Gulf War may have been it. Twenty-five years ago this week, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein’s invading troops from Kuwait. Four days after that Canada went to war for the first time since Korea.
The Battle of the Budge – December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945: Nurit Greenger, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 12, 2015—The Battle of the Bulge was a major German offensive campaign launched through the densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg on the Western Front toward the end of World War II in Europe.
