Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

In the long and gruesome annals of IDF mayhem against children, this one deserves a special place of shame. It seems that three Palestinian Bedouins, 10-year-old Mahmoud Ghazal, his 12-year-old cousin, Yehiya Ghazal, and their 10-year-old cousin Sara Ghazal were playing tag last Tuesday in a Beit Hanun field just outside their home as children are wont to do. These particular kids had made a very bad mistake in playing near Palestinian rocket launchers. It so happens the launchers were being monitored by Israeli aerial reconnaissance. When the IDF saw the children approaching the launchers it too made a fateful error by assuming they were activating them. According to the IDF, while it saw the children approaching the launchers it only noticed they were children after artillery fire had been launched:

The Israel Defense Forces said the children were killed after an army ground unit fired on Qassam launchers in the area. The launchers, which were pointed at Israel, were deployed in fields just outside Beit Hanun, near the Ghazal family’s home. According to the IDF, troops detected “unidentified movement and opened fire.”

…The probe, which was launched immediately after the incident, determined that the children were playing tag near the launchers, as revealed by army footage recording the incident. The video reportedly shows the children - who appear as figures whose age cannot be determined - approaching the launchers and then moving back, in a way that could be seen as suggesting that they were loading the launchers with rockets.

The terrain did not allow for direct observation of the area, so the army had to rely on aerial photography. The unit that launched the missile at the children used this visual feed to direct their fire, army sources told Haaretz.

The video does show one of the figures to be a child, army sources said, but this happened so close to the moment of impact that the troops were unable to abort in time.

This is what happens when the IDF acts hastily, indiscriminately and without sufficient technical means to ensure it has selected a valid target. It did not have the technical means to discriminate whether the individuals were adults terrorists or innocent children. Instead, it presumed the former with disastrous results. Disastrous only for feeling human beings. The IDF will certainly shed few tears and express perfunctory regret. After all, these were only Palestinian children and Bedouin at that.

Finally, if IDF video of the attack viewed after the attack showed clearly the children WERE children and playing tag, why couldn’t the IDF video taken BEFORE the attack have shown the same image?

May the childrens’ families be comforted in their sorrow and loss. And may the gunner who targeted them have many sleepless nights imagining the cries of these children after the shell hit.

tags IDF-children-killed-in-Gaza-Tuesday-were-playing-tag

Recently, I waded into the Campus Watch campaign against Nadia Abu El-Haj, who is seeking tenure at Barnard College. Since 2005, pro-Israel academics, Campus Watch and Frontpagemagazine have been calling for her head. I was helped in my research into the Jewish neocon campaign by several academics who found the tactics of Abu El-Haj’s opponents to be odious. Scott MacEachern, in particular, made me aware that Alexander Joffe wrote the first bitterly negative academic review in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, which was published in 2005. MacEachern pointed out that at the time of publication Joffe was the director of Campus Watch. I asked in my blog why neither the Journal nor Joffe saw fit to mention this affiliation, which created a clear conflict of interest considering Campus Watch’s harsh, ideological campaign against her tenure.

Today, Joffe replied to my charges and apparently he’s oblivious to any ethical issue:

I wrote and submitted the review in question in 2003, and began working for MEF [Middle East Forum--a Daniel Pipes group related to Campus Watch] a year later. It appeared in the journal in 2005.

My assessment of the book has nothing whatsoever to do with politics and everything to do with scholarship. This should be evident to those who have actually read the review.

The issue is not institutional affiliation, identity, or demanding that editors change lines in pieces that have gone to press. it is the content and coherent of the critique.

So his answer is essentially, I wrote the review before working for Campus Watch, therefore I’m home free. The fact that he was working for Campus Watch WHEN it was first published doesn’t faze him in the least. And the fact that Campus Watch’s campaign against Abu El-Haj was anything but “scholarly” also doesn’t phase him. In his world, you can lead a bifurcated existence as director of an ideologically driven propaganda outfit while also being a dispassionate scholar.

I replied thus to this e mail:

You were intellectually & politically dishonest in not reporting yr affiliation to the publication & asking them to note it so that readers could put into context your vested interest in trashing her work.

And by the way, how did Campus Watch come to be interested in trashing her work to begin with? Through your own interest in her possibly? And who is the real Hugh Fitzgerald, whose hatchet job on Abu El Haj in Campus Watch & Frontpagemagazine published around the same time your review was published & while you were director?

And any time you ever write about any academic subject on which Campus Watch has campaigned (including attacks on Arab researchers) I will expect you to note your former affiliation and if you do not I will do my best to ensure it is noted for you. I will also circulate this information in the archaeology field among your peers who will have more opportunity than I to monitor your publications.

I didn’t expect Joffe would like reply and he didn’t disappoint:

Fortunately I do not have to satisfy your expectations in any sphere of endeavor, nor append my life history to everything that I write. Writing and analyses stand on their own merits, something which you evidently cannot comprehend– rather than on the presumed politics, identity or motives of the writer. Sadly, academia operates almost exclusively on your principles, and this is another reason I am glad to no longer be wasting my time in that area.

I have some sympathy for those who’ve left academia without fulfilling their ambitions as I’m one of those people myself. But to blame one’s failures or dissatisfaction on the alleged political machinations or vendettas of other scholars seems downright bitter and just plain sad. You’ll also note that Joffe condemns my allegedly poisoned political principles while denying that he has any such principles that might be relevant to what he writes on this subject.

And this, it seems to me, is precisely the subject of Abu El-Haj’s book: that archaeologists like Joffe do their work in a vacuum that ignores the political, national, and historical assumptions they bring to that work. And these assumptions often unconsciously inform their judgments and decisions. But I wouldn’t expect someone as obtuse as Joffe to begin to understand this.

I also note that Joffe did his doctoral disseration under William Dever who, it should be noted, is another one of the archaeologists to call for Barnard to deny Abu El Haj tenure. And where did Prof. Dever make his views known? In the pages of the neocon New York Sun, which served as a willing media conduit for the charges of Campus Watch. Do I detect a unifying theme here?

A commenter notes below that Joffe currently serves as director of research for the David Project, a Jewish ultra-Israel group which also monitors campuses for alleged Islamist hate. The David Project spearheaded the attack on Columbia Arab studies professors like Joseph Massad and Rashid Khalidi. The attacks against Abu El-Haj (who teaches at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College) fit in nicely with the David Project/Campus Watch MO.

Oh and here are some of the distinguished academic achievements of the professor accused of “junk scholarship” by one of her academic detractors (not an archaeologist of course):

She held fellowships at Harvard University’s Academy for International and Area Studies, the University of Pennsylvania Mellon Program, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She is, in addition, a former Fulbright Fellow and a recipient of awards from the SSRC-McArthur Grant in International Peace and Security, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities among others. Professor Abu El-Haj has lectured widely at the New York Academy of Sciences, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics (LSE), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London

tags alexander-joffe, campus-watch, israeli-archaeology, journal-of-near-eastern-studies, nadia-abu-el-haj-barnard-tenure-battle, scott-maceachern

The NY Times’ Samuel Freedman weighs in on the smear campaign against Debbie Almontaser and the Khalil Gibran Academy by the Jewish neocon world. It’s a fine article which I wish could’ve been written a little earlier in the campaign so that it could’ve made more of a difference in defending Almontaser and her reputation. But no matter, it’s important that Freedman has documented for the world to see the overt racism of the school’s and Almontaser’s accusers. After quoting some especially pungent anti-Arab vitriol from right-wing blogs, Freedman notes:

Thus commenced the smear campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy and, specifically, Debbie Almontaser. For the next six months, from blogs to talk shows to cable networks to the right-wing press, the hysteria and hatred never ceased. Regrettably, it worked.

Ms. Almontaser resigned as principal earlier this month. Nominally, she quit to quell the controversy about her remarks to The New York Post insufficiently denouncing the term “intifada” on a T-shirt made by a local Arab-American organization. That episode, however, merely provided the pretext for her ouster, for the triumph of a concerted exercise in character assassination.

The Times columnist has come forward to draw a line in the sand and say: “This should not be acceptable discourse in our city.” I only wish more prominent figures like Joel Klein, Michael Bloomberg, Randi Weingarten (who sealed Almontaser’s fate by her betrayal), and even Abe Foxman would’ve done what Freedman did. Where are the leaders when you need them? Covering their asses and ducking down in their foxholes.

Who ever cared about Debbie Almontaser and what she went through in this ordeal?? Listen to a friend speak about it:

“She feels that she’s been violated, personally and professionally,” said Louis Cristillo, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who has studied the experiences of Muslim children in the New York public schools. “To be painted as somebody who’s un-American, questioning her patriotism, is extremely hurtful for her. She’s really shocked at how devastatingly effective the defamation was.”

And here Freedman names names of those responsible for blackening Almontaser’s reputation:

In syndicated columns by Daniel Pipes, in articles and editorials in The New York Post and The New York Sun, on such Web sites as PipeLineNews and Militant Islam Monitor, both concerned with radical Islam, the Gibran school was repeatedly characterized as a “madrassa,” an Arabic term plainly meant to evoke images of indoctrination into terrorism and holy war.

Bella Rabinowitz, writing on March 9 in PipeLineNews, called Gibran “an Islamist public school whose curriculum shares the same ideology as the Sept. 11 terrorists.” Alicia Colon wrote in The Sun on May 1, “How delighted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have been to hear the news” that New York “is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals.”

Also important to me are the inclusion of two statements of support from local rabbis with whom the ex-Gibran principal worked in laying the groundwork for the school:

“There’s zero correspondence between the caricature and the actual person,” said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation in Park Slope, who was on the Gibran school’s advisory board. “The words that were used to describe her, the fears that were evoked, are absolutely unrelated to her and her life’s work. Not in any way, shape or form.”

Another rabbi who has worked with Ms. Almontaser on interfaith efforts, Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, said: “It’s all about insinuation and innuendo and this formula of Arab equals Muslim equals terrorist. The viciousness and the vileness of this case surpass anything I’ve seen before.”

This entire episode brings to mind a quotation from Pirkey Avot:

“Whoever destroys one life is as if he has destroyed an entire world.”

Similarly, whoever destroys one reputation is as if he has destroyed the good name of us all.

tags anti-arab-racism, Critics-Ignored-Record-of-a-Muslim-Principal, daniel-pipes, debbie-almontaser, islamophobia, khalil-gibran-academy, samuel-freedman-new-york-times

I’m scratching my head about this one. I don’t know much about Larry Craig other than that he’s a conservative Republican senator from a rock-ribbed Republican state. It could be that he’s a sterling man of principle (though knowing the current batch of U.S. senators that’s doubtful). But I simply don’t find much of what he’s saying to be credible.

You’re a U.S. senator and plead guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct–after allegedly soliciting sex in a public restroom–without consulting a lawyer? Either the man’s telling the truth and he’s a fool; or he’s lying in which case he’s only going to get himself into deeper doodoo. According to today’s NPR story he also claimed he’d never solicited sex before and that he hadn’t in this particular incident. Personally, I can’t say what’s true. But I’m guessing that Craig is in denial about a lot of things including his sexuality and his sexual behavior. Otherwise, why would he plead guilty which in effect admits he engaged in the behavior?

If he isn’t telling the truth then shortly people will be coming out of the woodwork to refresh his memory. Actually, I just visited the Idaho Stateman site and there already is at least one Republican coming forward to claim he had sex with him in Washington’s Union Station. And other alleged incidents are reported here. That would probably explain the Republican Senate caucus’ immediate announcement that they would investigate the matter. It won’t look good for the Party to have a Senate candidate accused of multiple counts of soliciting gay sex.

I thought this response of Craig’s during a Stateman interview was instructive:

“I’ve been in this business 27 years in the public eye here. I don’t go around anywhere hitting on men, and by God, if I did, I wouldn’t do it in Boise, Idaho! Jiminy!”

Where would you do it? The Minneapolis airport or Union Station?? Don’t you just love that “Jiminy?” I didn’t know that people talked like that anymore.

Another point that just came to mind–isn’t it sad that in this day and age people’s sexuality can be so repressed that they feel compelled to resort to such furtive and humiliating means of sexual expression? Craig certainly is a hypocritical scumbag for being a homophobic bastard in his voting record. But I can’t help feeling both sad and disgusted at the subterranean life he forced himself to lead.

And if Craig is telling the truth, then he’s been mistreated by the media and deserves an apology. We’ll find out soon enough which it is.

tags idaho-statesman, larry-craig-senator-soliciting-sex

I don’t know what’s going on in Chicago these days. I’ve always thought of it as a progressive, tolerant and diverse place by and large. But something’s gotten into Chicago folk over the past few months…First DePaul University unceremoniously dumped Norman Finkelstein for reasons that even the school’s administration’s haven’t been able to articulate convincingly to anyone but Alan Dershowitz.

Then the Chicago Global Affairs Council, after inviting Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to speak about their new book on the Israel Lobby, canceled the invitation unless they agreed to debate Abe Foxman. It seems that some Council members (no doubt also supporters of AIPAC) decided Walt and Mearsheimer were far too incendiary to speak without some rejoinder from the pro-Israel community. The two original speakers quite rightly balked at being so singled out and thus they were also unceremoniously booted.

Hearing this, some Jewish Chicagoans scoured the Jewish community for a facility (synagogue of community center) that would house a Walt-Mearsheimer event. Guess what, none could be found.

And returning to DePaul, not content to be made a laughingstock of the academic world in their treatment of Finkelstein DURING the tenure process, they’ve practically stuck their asses in the air and asked the world to kick them with their latest round of campus buffoonery. It seems Norman Finkelstein is such a danger to the faculty, administrators and students of DePaul that the classes he was to teach during his final year there have all been canceled. His office has been shuttered and he has been denied another office. Even his possessions in his old office have not yet been released to him. This is the equivalent of a corporation’s calling security guards to escort a disgraced ex-employee out of the building. Except in that case they usually give the poor shlub a cardboard box with his possessions in them:

On Friday, August 24th…DePaul’s University…decided to cancel Professor Norman G. Finkelstein’s classes for the autumn quarter.

…What is the stated reason for the cancellation of Finkelstein’s courses…? Professor Finkelstein, it seems, in the judgment of DePaul’s administration, constitutes a security threat to DePaul faculty and staff. In a previous article, I documented that Finkelstein simply confronted Dean “Chuck” Suchar outside of 990 Fullerton on June 14th after the special LA&S emergency meeting devoted to discussing the procedural and academic freedom violations in the Finkelstein and Larudee cases…Suchar apparently alleged that he felt harassed by Finkelstein, calling for the administration to issue a restraining order against his colleague.

In an irony sure not to escape Dissident Voice readers, Finkelstein is being barred from teaching courses devoted to examining “Freedom and Empowerment” and “Justice and Social Equality”. In addition, Finkelstein is being thrown out of his office and might not even have access to office space this coming academic year at DePaul.

According to what I’ve read, this is behavior that is absolutely unheard of in the usually laid back world of academe. To me, this is like a university administration holding up a big sign saying: “SUE ME, PLEASE, for lots of money!” I don’t know much about faculty employment contracts. But I do know that DePaul has broken so many usual conventions that should Finkelstein wish I bet he could sue them for a great deal of money.

An academic blogger is quoted in Inside Higher Education denouncing DePaul’s decision:

John K. Wilson, on his blog College Freedom, wrote: “If anyone doubted whether DePaul was violating Finkelstein’s rights, that doubt must end with this decision…. Even if DePaul pays off Finkelstein, it is violating his academic freedom (and the freedom of its students) by refusing to let him teach and effectively silencing his voice in its classrooms.”

Finkelstein, not the sort to take any insult lying down, has has let the Administration know he will give as good as he gets:

DePaul University has canceled all of Norman G. Finkelstein’s courses, taken away his office, and put him on administrative leave for his final year, but the controversial political scientist said that will not stop him from coming back to teach this fall. If necessary, he said, he will go to jail.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Finkelstein told The Chronicle that he intends “to show up on the first day of the academic year to teach my classes (students are currently searching for an alternative venue) and to use my regular office in the political-science department. If the university attempts to impede my movements, I intend to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and go to jail. If incarcerated, I intend to go on a protracted hunger strike until DePaul comes to its senses.”

“It is regrettable,” Mr. Finkelstein continued, “that I have been driven to such drastic actions to defend basic principles of academic freedom and my contractual rights, upon which DePaul has been riding roughshod for so long.”

I don’t think the Vincentians at DePaul bargained for what a tough Jew Norman Finkelstein would turn out to be. And I think they better reconsider their idiocy before it bites them big time. How much more horrible publicity like this can they take? Apparently, they’ve hired the celebrities’ favorite crisis PR flack Howard Rubenstein to guide them through this gauntlet of bad press of their own making. But I don’t even think Rubenstein can make lemonade out of the lemons he’s been given by DePaul.

The American Association of University Professors as well has taken strong exception to DePaul’s treatment of Finkelstein:

Jonathan Knight, who directs the program in academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors, said…that the fact that DePaul is continuing to pay Finkelstein does not end questions about the university’s “extraordinary” actions. Knight noted that Finkelstein’s classroom conduct has never been questioned, and said that removing a professor from teaching in such a case is only justified by real fears about a danger the professor could pose. “That’s a terrible commentary to be making on an individual,” Knight said, and should require real evidence and faculty input.

Unless there has been a real hearing and the opportunity for due process, Knight said, the move is not a matter of placing someone on leave, but a “summary dismissal…”

Given all of these nightmares in Chicago, the DePaul Academic Freedom Committee and other local students and peace activists have decided to plan a mass public forum on academic freedom scheduled for the University of Chicago campus on October 12th. The conference’s keynote speakers are Noam Chomsky (MIT), John Mearsheimer (Univ. of Chicago), Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia), Neve Gordon (Ben-Gurion University, Israel), and Tariq Ali (New Left Review). They ought to invite Dean Suchar and President Holtschneider to be the panel respondents. Maybe they’d learn something.

tags aaup, academic-freedom, depaul-suspends-norman-finkelstein-cancels-courses, tenure-battle

George Bush seems to be cleaning the decks towards the end of his presidency in the (I hope) vain hope that he can leave a clean slate on which the next Republican presidential candidate can begin writing. First Rove leaves, now Gonzales. Who's next? Of course, the figures most likely to truly wipe the slate clean would be Cheney and Bush himself. As long as they're in power no amount of cleaning house will distract voters from the awful record of this Administration. That and the never-ending war in Iraq will work wonders to focus the minds of voters when they enter the voting booth in November, 2008.

Noah Feldman writes a short piece in today's NY Times Sunday Magazine on the same theme I wrote about yesterday here: can public schools be devoted to teaching about a particular religious tradition without espousing it. He begins the essay with a similar premise to the one I argued yesterday--that religious and secular are not necessarily polar opposites: The source of the [Supreme Court's] confusion [over defining what religious expressions are permissible in secular society] is the mistaken notion that the categories “religious” and “secular” are strictly binary, like an on-off switch. It’s true that some things are inherently religious, like a prayer or a church or a Torah scroll. (It would be impossible to make heads or tails ...

Adin swings My wife was sitting with our children looking at a wedding photo of her kissing with daddy. My six year old asked what we were doing. She replied we were getting married and mentioned everyone in the room was singing. "What were they singing, mommy?" Here mommy breaks out into A siman tov a mazel tov, yhey lanu, the wonderfully festive Jewish wedding anthem. Since it's near bedtime, I hear the whole tribe--mom, six year old and 2 1/2 year old twins marching up the stairs singing like they're in a wedding procession. But my irrepressible bouncy 2 1/2 year old boy is singing: "Simen tov, ...

The new public school...called the Ben Gamla Charter School...is run by an Orthodox rabbi, serves kosher lunches and concentrates on teaching Hebrew. About 400 students started classes at Ben Gamla this week amid caustic debate over whether a public school can teach Hebrew without touching Judaism and the unconstitutional side of the church-state divide. The conflict intensified Wednesday, when the Broward County School Board ordered Ben Gamla to suspend Hebrew lessons because its curriculum — the third proposed by the school — referred to a Web site that mentioned religion. Opponents say that it is impossible to teach Hebrew — and aspects of Jewish culture — outside a religious context, and that Ben Gamla, billed as the nation’s first Hebrew-English charter school, ...

I know. It sounds too preposterous to be true. But read on. Earlier today, Fadi of Kabobfest linked in a comment here to a Muslim Link post by Tariq Nelson about David Yerushalmi's "infiltration" of a Virginia mosque for the purposes of unmasking its alleged jihadi agenda. Since I know Yerushalmi based on his strident Israeli nationalist views I was having a hard time crediting Nelson's claims that he espoused "white supremacist" views. But Larry Cohler Esses has set me straight and proven that a Jew can indeed by a white supremacist as proven by this Yerushalmi essay in Conservative Voice: While our constitutional republic was specifically designed to insulate our national leaders from the masses, ...