Moral idiocy: Academics fuel Palestinian terror against Israel - opinion

Imagine the hate required to overrun fellow humans at a bus stop. Imagine the super-sized evil required to keep accelerating when you notice six- and eight-year-old brothers standing there, innocently chatting with their dad. And imagine the perversity involved in celebrating such murders. Friday proved – again – how deep anti-Jewish demonization has been drilled into too many Palestinian hearts, deforming their souls.

Until the world acknowledges this wickedness – which on Friday ended three lives – more such murderers will be mass-produced – with Western dollars, progressive encouragement, and, in modern Jewry’s sickest trend, some Jews’ validation too.

Too many Blame-Israel-Firsters discount this cultivated ugliness which mocks their delusions that peace will descend once Israel retreats, creating a Palestinian dictatorship – er, state – next door. These pie-in-the-skiers keep deciding that Palestinian abominations confirm Israeli iniquity. They theorize that only desperate individuals driven by evil “occupiers” would act so viciously.

Jews have often been blamed for their enemies’ enmity. This Palestinian addiction to violence, however, reveals more about the killers than those killed.

This, the real cycle of violence, with Palestinian rejectionism and antisemitism fueling terrorism, poses the biggest obstacle to peace. The terrorist rot infects Palestinian identity. Contrast Israel’s army, which will abort legitimate missions to minimize civilian casualties, with Palestinians’ death cult, which targets kids and often blackmails the most vulnerable Palestinians into terror.

The Terrorist-Intellectual Complex

An academic recently challenged some other centrists and me for attacking the Netanyahu-Deri corruption yet ignoring the “occupation’s corruption.” Actually, I’m struck by many critics’ corruption, judging us long-distance through ivy-clouded lenses.

Their “Terrorist-Intellectual Complex” perpetuates violence. Palestinians keep deluding themselves that terrorism works, emboldened by ever-accumulating stacks of UN resolutions, academic treatises, “human rights” proclamations, and student petitions – amplified by retweets and likes.

Many have long noted that only intellectuals could figure out how to call themselves “progressive” while supporting sexist, homophobic, Jew-hating, murderers. Today, “woke” parents training their kids in self-abasement and cravenness to dodge confrontations, even in self-defense, nevertheless cheer Palestinians’ killing cult. And self-proclaimed “Social Justice Warriors” justify this most unjust movement, forgiving the Palestinian Authority and Hamas autocracies.

THE FALL 2022 Association of Jewish Studies Journal, focusing on “social justice” reveals these “hackademics’” propaganda – financed by gullible Jewish donors, imposed on unsuspecting students encouraged by asleep-at-the-wheel parents and grandparents to “take a Jewish studies course,” no matter how fanatic the professors are.

Prof. Jarrod Tanny and the Jewish Studies Zionist Network have spotlighted the offensive – and unscholarly – Gaza-Auschwitz comparison in the issue’s featured “artwork.” An artist – living in Berlin of all places – inscribed “the name of each Palestinian killed in Gaza” in 2014 – on her inner forearm of all places – then posted each image. Some photographs name 17- and 18-year-olds, overlooking that most killed that age were terrorists. So much for “living in alignment with her own values” and “embody[ing] the ideas of Jewish teaching at its most humanitarian core.” Which Jewish values honor child-murderers?

Clearly, I err. Amid this fog of “apartheid, “settler-colonial dispossession,” and “dismantling Zionism as a precondition for a Jewish praxis of justice” talk, another article admits: “Yes, the Jew in Hitler’s Germany was a victim.” But “She is not a victim in Israel today. (Even the most marginalized Israeli Jew inhabits a privileged position vis-à-vis Palestinians.)” Positing Palestinians “as the enemy of Jewish safety” is “an historical and ontological move” that “denies Palestinian lives and aspirations, thus constituting a form of injustice.”

Could that fool-teacher explain to the parents of Ya’akov Yisrael and Asher Menachem Pally, aged six and eight, and to the widow of Shlomo Laderman, the 20-year-old married two months before a Palestinian rammed him to death, how none are “victims” and that calling their murderer an “enemy of Jewish safety” is bigoted?

Beyond the moral obtuseness, what about the Jewish value of loyalty, of looking out for our own?

Moral idiocy is contagious. This upside-down (un)academic journal teaches that in Ukraine, “it wasn’t until the Bolsheviks and the Red Army took control that justice for the Jews began to prevail” – ignoring Soviet Jew-hatred. Another contributor teaching about abortion “helped my students understand the parallels between 1930s Germany and the United States in 2022.”

Revealingly, these trendy, mob-cowed, cowards purport to do the opposite of what they do. They claim to “make difficult statements of conscience in the face of extreme political climates of any kind.” They preach, unself-aware, that “A ‘justice’ that values the blood of one group over another is no justice at all.”

They believe they are “protecting truth, the bedrock of our democracy” by “ensur[ing] that learning and action on Jewish perspectives to social justice... do not begin with a preordained outcome” – although almost every position they take is cliché.

These extremists out-radical two-staters, brand “justice... antithetical to the Oslo peace frame” and condemn Oslo’s “segregationist peace formula” – assuming Palestinians yearn to live with Jews.

One academic attacks Orthodox Jews for their “self-serving political calculus,” their “abandonment of moral values,” their “smug confidence in Orthodox superiority” their “myopic interest” in their “values over others,” and their “claim” to “represent a superior morality” repeatedly undermined by their “actual behavior.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself – about these polemicists. Extremists often replicate the behavior they most detest in their most-hated rivals.

Finally, one humbly proclaims, “The world needs us.”

Actually, we need truth-seeking academics not woke propagandists. And Palestinians need genuine sympathizers to discourage terrorism while building toward peace by accepting that Israel is here to stay.

The writer is a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University, and the author of nine books on American history and four books on Zionism. He is the editor of the new three-volume set, Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People (www.theljp.org).