December 5, 2002Enrolling in anti-Semitism 101
By Melissa Radler
Copyright 1995-2002 The Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/
Alan Dershowitz says the US campus remains a rumpus room or anti-Israel campaigning - and he knows why.
The last week of November was a typical one for Middle East watchers at Harvard: Tom Paulin, an Irish poet and Oxford lecturer who refers to the IDF as the "Zionist SS" and recommends that "Brooklyn-born settlers be shot dead," was reinvited to the campus after a move to cancel his appearance was denounced by students and English department faculty as a violation of First Amendment rights.
Meanwhile, over at the law school, Professor Alan Dershowitz was slapped with a complaint courtesy of the Washington-based Muslim Legal Defense and Education Fund. The Muslim attorneys said that Dershowitz violated the rules of his profession by proposing, in this newspaper, that Israel declare a unilateral cease-fire then circulate a list of Palestinian villages that will be slated for demolition should terror attacks continue.
Dershowitz, who has made a career out of being a civil libertarian, had no defenders.
"There is no more cowardly group in the world than American academics," said Dershowitz during a recent interview in his Manhattan apartment. The interview took place before the complaint was filed, but academia's silence on defending Israel and condemning Arab terrorism was already a source of contention.
"They hide behind their tenure, they want to be loved by all their students and they're unwilling to engage in controversial stances," he said.
Last spring, as Israeli troops were entering the West Bank to halt 18 months of terrorist attacks that culminated in the Pessah massacre, students and faculty at Harvard and MIT were busy circulating a joint divestiture petition deploring Israel's "military occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory."
Within weeks, a counter-petition was in circulation, and Dershowitz decided to write his newest book, Why Terrorism Works, in part to help uneducated students counter anti-Israel bias on campus.
Divestment appeals to a seemingly hapless mixture of die-hard liberals, clueless professors, and well-meaning but misinformed individuals, says Dershowitz, and he laments that with everything known about state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Arab world, persecution of homosexuals in Egypt, slavery in Sudan and the use of torture in the Philippines, Israel is the only country singled out for criticism at institutions of higher education.
"It's very screwed up," he says. "It is an 'Alice in Wonderland,' topsy-turvy world."
Dershowitz places divestment supporters into five groups. They include "knee-jerk opponents of the US, Israel, of globalization and Westernization," and pro-Palestinian students, which he describes as "the reward we have gotten for actively pushing diversity and increasing the number of Muslim and Arab American students at universities."
Next up are old-fashioned anti-Semites who hate Jews and Israel and well-meaning people who don't like Ariel Sharon and think divestment is a legitimate means of criticizing his politics.
THE LAST group is a special target of Dershowitz's wrath.
"Ignoramuses with PhDs, poets and psychologists who have no idea what they're doing," he says. Two of divestiture's most stalwart supporters are longtime Dershowitz foes - MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky and Columbia literature professor Edward Said, whom Dershowitz calls "a thug who has thrown rocks at Israelis and lied about it."
"If you put in front of them a petition to divest from a nonexistent country, they'd probably sign that one too. We were thinking of doing a divestment petition from 'Freedonia,' in which we described Freedonia as an ally of the United States in the southwest somewhere. You cannot overestimate the stupidity of many of my colleagues," he says.
The good news is that divestment from Israel appeals to a small, though vocal group of people, and anti-divestment petitions have won Ivy League campus popularity contests everywhere they've surfaced. The Harvard-MIT petition garnered 583 signatures; 10 times the number, 5,831, signed an anti-divestment petition and university president Lawrence Summers denounced divestment as "anti-Semitic in effect if not intent." The University of Pennsylvania has 222 pro-divestment signatures, compared to 8,035 names on a counter-petition. At Columbia, 954 favor divestment, and 33,258 oppose it.
At Harvard, law and business school faculty stayed away from the divestment petition and some signed on to the counter-petition, but few have been vocal in their condemnation of anti-Israel activity on campus. At an open session Dershowitz organized last month to discuss divestment, neither supporters nor detractors showed up, and he ended up debating an empty chair. He gets phone calls from professors who whisper their thanks to him for speaking out on the Middle East. He said he tells them: "What are you whispering about!"
"The whole campaign for divestment is educational malpractice by professors. It turns the world upside down. It takes the country which has probably best struck the balance between security and liberty and turns it into the pariah, and rewards countries that don't even try to strike a balance," he says.
To prove the hypocrisy of his colleagues once and for all, Dershowitz is drafting six mock divestiture petitions from Egypt, China, Jordan and other hotbeds of human-rights violations, and sending them out to all those who urged their universities to divest from Israel. He's not holding his breath for the signatures.
DERSHOWITZ'S defense of Israel raises this question: If justice is on the Jewish state's side, then why hasn't there been a groundswell of support for Israel on campus or within the international community?
Why Terrorism Works goes a long way toward answering this question. Dershowitz's 250-page book, which was published this fall around the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, argues that terrorism, particularly Palestinian terrorism, has succeeded because the international community has rewarded it and given in to the terrorists' demands. The cover features close-ups of a smirking Osama bin Laden and a grinning Yasser Arafat, and Dershowitz, whose legal expertise includes Jewish law, explains why the pictures were chosen: "Arafat is bin Laden's Talmud."
Remember the 1972 Munich Olympics, asks Dershowitz, when Black September murdered 11 Israeli athletes and the whole world shuddered? It worked: less than two months later, Germany released the terrorists in the guise of a sham hijacking and a behind the scenes plea to leave Germany out of the Israeli-Arab dispute, and two years later, Yasser Arafat became the first non-state leader to address the United Nations General Assembly.
Remember Armenian and Kurdish nationalism? Those causes were left in the diplomatic dust after the Palestinians hijacked the world's sympathies with their terrorist outrages, leaving the two groups haplessly fomenting internal strife against large, non-Jewish populations with oil reserves.
Dershowitz writes that the Palestinian leadership considered the Munich massacre its first major success after years of low-profile attacks, and that the fruits of the Palestinian terrorists' labor - recognition by leaders, observer status at the UN, state visits by Arafat to the world's capitals - all happened in a decade during which terrorists shot, knifed and hijacked their way through Europe and the Middle East, killing and maiming hundreds of Israeli schoolchildren, Jewish bus passengers, Puerto Rican tourists and European travelers.
Today, says Dershowitz, Israel is under assault again, and the United States has paid the price of international appeasement with the September 11 attacks. Israel, after two years of suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and failed cease-fire bids, has become a pariah state in European capitals and on American college campuses.
Dershowitz says he's anxious to see students circulating his book which has a a 20-page chart that lists Palestinian terror attacks from 1968 to 1997 on the left-hand-side of the page, with corresponding benefits to the Palestinian cause on the right.
For instance, just two weeks after Palestinian terrorists attacked an El Al office in Athens, killing a Greek child and wounding 13, the UN recognized the "inalienable rights of the Palestinian people," only to witness an airplane hijacking two months later in Munich.
"I think people who read the book will not sign the divestiture petition. The people who read the book will understand that Israel's stance in some respects provides a model to democracies," he says.
HOW CAN democracies fight terrorism and win? First of all, by striking the right balance between civil liberties and security, and Why Terrorism Works argues that the Israeli model, honed over 54 years of statehood and bloodshed, should be emulated by nations now under similar siege by terrorists.
National ID cards, which would deprive everyone of a bit of anonymity in order to relieve the burden on a specific group, moderate and responsible racial profiling, better airport security and phone check-ins for visitors to the US are all suggested as antidotes to terrorism.
But all this will come to naught if countries continue to negotiate with terrorists.
Dershowitz's favorite chapter is the one that has garnered the most controversy: a law school-like deliberation on the use of torture for the "ticking time bomb."
This isn't a walk back into the Dark Ages, says Dershowitz; it's a debate aimed at getting people to think about the use of torture, which, he points out, is being used clandestinely by the US whenever terror suspects are apprehended in Egypt or the Philippines, for example, and interrogated before extradition. If torture is going to be used, its practice should become part of the public record with the issuing of torture warrants by courts, he writes. He adds, during the interview, that Manhattan Project-type think tanks to develop hi-tech solutions should be funded.
Would the lawyer who is famous for defending clients such as Claus Von Bulow, O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson also defend a terrorist?
Dershowitz is willing to defend Yasser Arafat, despite being convinced of the PA leader's complicity in the murder of three Americans: David Berger, an Israeli-American athlete killed in the Munich massacre, and ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel and charge d'affaires George Curtis Moore, who were kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1973 in the basement of the Saudi embassy in Khartoum.
"I wish I had an opportunity to defend that son of a bitch," says Dershowitz. "I've defended murderers before. I've never defended a mass murderer before, but I'd be happy to defend Arafat because that would mean that somebody finally put him on trial."
Back