What is Behind the Israel Apartheid Weeks?

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com


Hat tip JJ and Miggie


As March approaches, we can expect another wave of organized Israel-Apartheid weeks being held in Europe and North America-largely on university campuses. Once again, the pro-Palestinian forces will  erect mock apartheid walls, bring in radical speakers, wave Palestinian flags, and accuse Israel of apartheid and genocide against the  benighted Palestinian people, who in spite of the supposed genocide have seen their population numbers explode. Indeed, the Arabs who have deigned to call themselves Palestinians have increased in numbers (through high birth rates) since the creation of Israel. Where is the genocide? Where are the death camps? As for the charges of apartheid, anyone familiar with the apartheid system of South Africa can readily list the differences. In this 5-minute video published by Prager University, South African Parliament Member Kennith Meshoe explains the differences.

But anyone who studies or works on a university campus might ask him or herself why this issue, this conflict, has assumed so large a role on campus. It is because a well-organized worldwide Palestinian lobby has made it so. We  are not talking about a few Arab students standing on a soap box at some corner of a university yelling at uninterested  students who pass by. We are talking about university recognized student groups who have the ability to rent space and bring in invited speakers largely using university funds (from tuition fees) made available to such groups. We can begin with the various chapters of the Muslim Student Association (a creation, by the way of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) and their sister organization, Students for Justice in Palestine. They are the ones who host the annual hate fests that come to so many campuses each year devoted to de-legitimizing the Jewish state.

Then you have the various university student governments who devote so much time and energy to repeated efforts to pass resolutions urging the university to boycott, sanction and divest from companies that do business with Israel. The University of California campuses have been especially active lately. One such resolution was narrowly voted down last week at UC Riverside after 4 hours of debate. (The universities uniformly issue statements rejecting such measures if they pass.) So  how is it that student governments allow themselves to get tied up with this issue when their efforts, time and resources could be better spent on other issues affecting the student body? It is because anti-Israel activists are getting themselves elected to student government positions and dominating said student governments.

Then there is the faculty, largely in the humanities, stuffed with left-wing radicals all too willing to use the issue as part of their bash America agenda. Burgeoning Middle East studies departments, funded by Saudi Arabia, are staffed with pan-Arab, anti-Israeli professors dedicated  to indoctrinating their students against Israel and the West.

Thus, what you have is the perfect marriage of convenience between the pro-Palestinians, Islamist forces, and the left.

But what is especially troubling is that the ultimate root cause of the Israel-Arab conflict is infecting our own campuses and our societies in the West. It is anti-Semitism-or if you prefer, pure Jew-hatred, plain and simple. At its source, the Arab world in the Middle East will never accept the idea of a Jewish state in its midst. The Palestinians are mere pawns. In the West, they have large armies of activists to do their bidding.

Of course, here in the US, it would be bad tactics to scream anti-Semitic insults on college campuses-though some speakers actually have (Amir Abdel Malik Ali, Alim Musa, Mohammed al Asi). For the most part, the speakers who come to campus will  insist that they are merely anti-Zionist-not anti-Jew. Indeed, the clever pro-Palestinian organizations on campuses have succeeded in bringing in a ready stable of Jewish activists who fervently hate Israel. From left-wing professors like (ex-professor) Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler, to anarchist Israelis like Matan Cohen, to Neturei Karta rabbi Ysroel Dovid Cohen, to the Jewish Voice for Peace, these useful  pawns are all too ready to travel the university lecture circuit and denounce the Jewish state on behalf of forces that want to drive every last Jew from the Middle East.

Sadly, in the process of all this activity in the past several  years, our country has witnessed a revival of anti-Semitism, the oldest hatred in the history of our planet. It is just the most recent form of Jew hatred. From charges of killing Christ to the Blood Libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to  being nationless, mercenary cheats, to being non-Aryan race defilers, to dominating Wall Street, Hollywood and the banks, it is the evil Zionist Israelis and their Jewish coreligionists in the West that are now the problem.  The modern anti-Semitism (or is it post-modern?) is now incorporating some of the old canards to gather public opinion against Israeli and Jews in general. Even the Blood Libel has been revived.

And the focal point for this resurgence in the US is on our university campuses.

Posted on "Apartheid Wall" at UC Irvine in May 2008 and personally witnessed by this writer


If you thought that  today's anti-Semitism in the West was something that was re-hatched by some neo-Nazi dropout types at punk rock concerts, think again. A recent study in Germany turned up some interesting results.

This is what our children are being exposed to when we send them off to college. These are the future leaders of our country, and their minds are being poisoned by rhetoric that often degenerates into out and out hate speech. Mix this up and throw it in with all the leftist race-conscious rhetoric that already predominates on our campuses, where "victimized and oppressed people of color" are aligned against "privileged whites", and what you have is a dangerous cocktail with the potential to explode some day in deadly violence on a US university campus.

But make no mistake: No matter how loud or how gentle the speakers words at these Israel Apartheid events; no matter whether the speaker is Arab, Jew or other; no matter how much the speaker sprinkles his/her words with phrases like "human rights", "justice", or "peace". It all boils down to one thing: For them, there is no room for Jews in the Middle East. And that is anti-Semitism or Jew-hatred, whichever you choose to call it.