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The Closing of the Academic Mind in Ireland. Revisited.

In January of this year, in a tiny Irish town of Cahersiveen, teachers of teenagers with impressionable minds led them into the streets with placards reading “Free Palestine.” Post- Christmas, these schoolchildren were still wearing their red and white Christmas hats. Symbolically, it had become a religious thing to save the Palestinians. When asked who they were freeing Palestine from, a trio of bright young faces answered, “From the Jews.” 

Such is the level of education in that beautiful little town.

They were taught by their teachers that they were on a charitable mission to raise money to plant olive trees. When asked if they were sure that their money would not go to fund Palestinian terrorists their answer was, shockingly, “What have they done to you? They are only against Jews. Jews are evil.” 

They did not know that the questioner was Sarah Honig, an Israeli Jew, and a journalist with the Jerusalem Post, who has experienced Palestinian terrorism.

 In March, the Irish Teachers Union imposed a boycott on Israel. Irish teachers can no longer have contact with their Israeli counterparts. As with the teachers of Cahersiveen, they do so out of a perverted form of altruism.

So let me raise this suggestion. If Irish teachers wish to instill in their students an Israeli boycott they should lead by personal example. May I suggest that all Irish teachers throw away their computers, laptops, Apple apps, and cell phones? All operate by virtue of an Israeli educational system that not only nurtures the free flow of ideas, including expression across the wide spectrum of political opinion, it teaches individual and collective initiative and innovation that gives the world the wonders of our tech-age, as well as the universal benefits in science, medicine, and agriculture that is turning back starvation and disease.

Their communication equipment, with which they teach and relate to the outside world, operates with Israeli ingenuity, a result of our teaching profession.

So, come on Irish teachers, show your students your commitment to your cause. Trash your computers and phones, lest you be called a hypocrite.

If it’s teaching that the boycott is all about then Irish teachers are advised to examine a Palestinian educational system that teaches children to hate Jews. Echoes of this seem to have reached Cahersiveen. 

It also teaches young minds to incitement to violence, that Israel has no right to exist, and the falsehood of a Palestinian history. This is what the TUI is supporting.

The Palestinian leadership stifles opposing voices of protest. They imprison teachers and journalists who challenge the corrupt, violent, and failing leadership of a rejectionism of Israel that leaves the Palestinian Arabs with little hope of political progress.

Now the TUI joins them in stifling the ability of Irish teachers to reach out to their Israeli partners. They did so without allowing debate or an opposing voice. It was proposed and seconded without delay. Is this the way that teachers practice democracy in Ireland?

This is not the free exchange of thought and expression. This is the closing of the academic mind in Ireland.

Once you announce to the world, as did the TUI, that you stop dialogue, that you dogmatically come down on one side of an argument, is the moment when you cease to be a scholar or a teacher. An academic union that denies other academics causes more damage to itself than those it will not communicate with.  

When it is applied against the teachers of one nation, and one nation only, turning the Jewish state of Israel into a nation of pariah teachers, it exposes the manipulation of those that impose the ban.

Israel will continue to prosper with its free exchange of ideas despite the TUI ruling. The true victim is the reputation of Ireland as an open-minded and enlightened society. It has taken a backward step. It has done so because their leading teachers union has been hijacked by people of unthinking and unreasonable extremism.

This Irish boycott is a double-edged sword. It is not only meant to isolate Israel, it is also meant to manipulate public opinion against Israel. Their boycott proposal was dressed up in the language of lies, half-truths, and disinformation, as are most anti-Israel campaigns. If we are to reclaim the legitimization of Israel the disinformation and false narrative of those who act to harm Israel must be challenged.

The adoption of the Irish boycott is a further act against Israel, namely dehumanization. By attempting to remove Israel from the society of the academic world makes it fair game for all sorts of incitement and violence, and by designating it as a legitimate target for legal recourse and abuse, the TUI have acted to dehumanize Israel on fallacious grounds. Just as we heard the evil anti-Semitic words coming out of naïve teenage mouths in Cahersiveen so we must ask what is behind this based act that was steamrolled into acceptance by the TUI?

As Joel Fishman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs pointed out in his “The Relegitimization of Israel and the Battle for the Mainstream Consensus” there is real danger of a link between dehumanization and actual violence.
The Irish teachers boycott is an antithesis to the notion of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and those that placed the boycott proposal to the membership of TUI know this to be true.

The late Ehud Sprinzak, a past associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem described delegitimization as a process involving manipulation where an accepted political entity that is recognized as having the right to exist, is transformed into an unacceptable entity without such a right. This political entity is not only seen as misguided and wrong, but undeserving of existence.

Sprinzak said, “The loss of legitimacy effectively means the loss of the right to speak or debate in certain forums….At best, they will be indulged as members of a sub-human species.”

Can anyone doubt after hearing the words of young schoolchildren in a tiny Irish town that this is not happening in Ireland, or that this was not the intention of the Irish Teachers Union?

Noted jurist, Anthony Julius, wrote in his book “Trials of the Diaspora”, “The boycotted person (or state) is pushed away by the ‘general horror and common hate.’ It is a denial, among other things, of the boycotted person’s freedom of expression. To limit or deny self-expression is thus an attack at the root of what it is to be human…Boycotting is thus an activity especially susceptible to hypocrisy. It implies moral judgments both on the boycotted and the boycotter.”

When balanced through the prism of what is taught in Israeli and in Palestinian schools can anyone doubt that there is hypocrisy at play in Ireland?

When the Irish Teachers Union picks out one set of teachers and loathes them above all others, when it simplifies politics and history to fit a biased ideology of victim and oppressor, or imposes a twisted view of good and evil on events that defy such categorization, is the time when academic thinking has been abandoned. As such, it should have no place in an academic union anywhere that purports to represent scholars and teachers.

In the end it is not about Israel at all. It is the way they practice free thought in Ireland. It is about the idea and concept of academia and those who think differently to you. It is about a voice that desires to be heard but has been blocked out by closed ears, ears that refuse to listen to reason.

It is the closing of the academic mind in Ireland.

 

Barry Shaw is the Special Consultant on Delegimitization Issues to The Strategic Dialogue Center at the Netanya Academic College. He is also the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com

 

 

THE CLOSING OF THE ACADEMIC MIND IN IRELAND.

In recent months, when I have been highlighting various anti-Israel acts emanating from the Emerald Isle, I have been rebutted by people in Ireland who claim that their country is strongly supportive of Israel.  Now, they have their work cut out as they have been seriously challenged by the recent boycott of Israel by the Irish Teachers Union.

With the adoption of a full boycott of Israel, the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) became the first educational trade union in Europe to take such a full-bodied step. Not even the powerfully left-wing educational unions in Britain managed to pass such a sweeping academic boycott.  The heinous part of the Irish decision is it did not isolate Israeli academics living or working in the “disputed territories,” ( as if that wouldn’t be wrong) rather, and specifically, it targeted all of Israel, and only Israel, for its wrath.
Despite the high-minded claims of Jim Roche, a lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and an avid activist for the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Gaza Action in support of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, that the BDS Movement “is a noble non-violent method of resisting Israeli militarism, occupation and apartheid” the action of the Irish Teachers Union was aimed at sovereign Israel with no differentiation, and with no adherence to truth and full facts.

The TUI may look on this as a success but, to quote Booker Prize winning author, Howard Jacobson, their decision constitutes not enlightenment but “the closing of the academic mind” in Ireland.

Jacobson addressed the left-wing Engage group back in 2007. To slightly paraphrase his words,  boycotting and gagging Israeli academics, teachers and scholars, is a more brutal act than silence. It is a brutal act that you perform on yourself, knowingly, purposefully, and on principle. Not to listen to others is to wage war on your own faculties. To deny yourself, if you are a reasoning and thinking person as academics and teachers must be, the tools by which you reason. Once you announce to the world, as did the TUI, that you stop listening is the moment when you cease to be a scholar or a teacher. An academic union that denies other academics causes more damage to itself than the union it will not listen or communicate with.

When it is applied against one nation and one nation only, namely turning the Jewish state of Israel into a nation of pariah teachers, it becomes aggressively disproportionate. It exposes the manipulation of those that impose the ban. It victimizes those who have been banned.

Israel will continue to prosper with its free exchange of ideas despite the TUI ruling. The true victim is the reputation of Ireland as an open-minded and enlightened society. It has taken a backward step. It has done so because their leading teachers union has been hijacked by people of an unthinking and unreasonable extremism.

This Irish boycott of Israel is a double-edged sword. It is not only meant to damage and isolate Israel, it also has a purpose to manipulate public opinion against Israel. It is important to acknowledge and act to counter the creeping annexation of public opinion. Their boycott proposal was dressed up in the language of lies, half-truths, and disinformation, as are most anti-Israel campaigns. If we are to claim the relegitimization of Israel we must challenge the disinformation methods and false narrative of those who act to harm Israel.

The actions of the Teachers Union of Ireland leap off the pages of a KGB official, Ilya Dzirkvelov, who wrote in the 80s, “Disinformation is not just a well-presented lie – which is, easy to recognize – but a compilation of facts and events which must not only be difficult to refute but which must result in serious consequences for the opposing side.”

The Soviet Union is the foremost proponent of disinformation for political purposes. The infamous Durban slogan of “Zionism is Racism,” that was adopted by the United Nations, is straight out of the Soviet disinformation manual. Its activists and advocates continue their efforts by attempting to brand Israel as an apartheid state.

The adoption of the Irish boycott is a further act against Israel, namely dehumanization. By attempting to remove Israel from the society of the intellectual, cultured and academic world making it fair game for all sorts of incitement and violence, and by designating it as a legitimate target for legal recourse and abuse, the TUI have acted to dehumanize the Jewish state on fallacious grounds. Gregory H. Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, placed “dehumization” in third place in his “Eight Stages of Genocide” briefing paper to the US State Department. As Joel Fishman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs pointed out in his noteworthy The Relegitimization of Israel and the Battle for the Mainstream Consensus” there is real danger in the link between dehumanization and actual violence. Fishman is also a member of the board of “Scholars for Peace in the Middle East” and must surely find the Irish teachers boycott an antithesis to the notion of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

It is clear that those who manipulated the anti-Israel boycott do so as part of their agenda to delegitimize Israel. The late Ehud Sprinzak, a past associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem described delegitimization as a process involving ideological and symbolic manipulation whereby an accepted political entity that is recognized as having the right to exist is transformed into an unacceptable entity without such a right. This political entity is not only seen as misguided and wrong but altogether undeserving of existence. Sprinzak goes on, “The loss of legitimacy effectively means the loss of the right to speak or debate in certain forums….At best, they will be indulged as members of a sub-human species.”

Can anyone doubt that this is not the intention of the Irish Teachers Union with activists such as Jim Roche?

In Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian, circles public diplomacy Israel is adopted as another form of warfare against Israel. So it is with the TUI. The Irish teachers do not act against gross Muslim hate, violence, and genocide against fellow Christians and Catholics in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Despite their declared love of the Palestinians, they fail to apply the same assault against the Arab regimes that oppress Palestinians in places like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, oppression that truly includes apartheid and deadly measures. Neither do they speak up and pass boycott resolutions against Turkey for oppressing and occupying Cyprus and the Kurds, or China’s human rights offenses against the Tibetans, or Russia against the Chechens. No, it is only Israel that gets their goat.

Noted jurist, Anthony Julius, aligned himself with Howard Jacobson when he described boycotts in his book “Trials of the Diaspora” thus; “The boycotted person (or state) is pushed away by the ‘general horror and common hate.’ It is a denial, among other things, of the boycotted person’s freedom of expression. To limit or deny self-expression is thus an attack at the root of what it is to be human…Boycotting is thus an activity especially susceptible to hypocrisy. It implies moral judgments both on the boycotted and the boycotter.”

When the Irish Teachers Union picks out one set of teachers and loathes them above all others, of simplifying politics and history to  fit a biased ideology of victim and oppressor, of imposing a twisted view of good and evil on events that defy such categorization, is the time when academic thinking, open-mindedness, and reason has been abandoned. As such, it should have no place in an academic union anywhere that purports to represent scholars and teachers.
In the end, as Jacobson reminds us, it is not about Israel at all. It is the way they practice free thought in Ireland. It is about the idea and concept we have of academia and those who think differently to you. It is about a voice that desires to be heard but has been blocked out by closed ears, ears that refuse to listen to reason. It is the closing of the academic mind in Ireland.

Barry Shaw is the Special Consultant on Delegimitization Issues to The Strategic Dialogue Center at the Netanya Academic College. He is also the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com

Archbishop Tutu! Revisit Israel!

Archbishop Tutu! Revisit Israel!

Apply Truth and Reconciliation to Israel and Israelis in the name of Judeo-Christian values.

 Original Thinking from Barry Shaw.

What is it about Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Apartheid, and Israel? Why is it that Israel, and only Israel, is the one country that drives this clergyman to apoplexy? Not Syria, not the Sudan, not Nigeria, not Mali, where thousands of fellow Christians are slaughtered as you read my words. Not even Mauritania, where the minority Arab Muslims apply ethnic cleansing, torture, and even slavery against his fellow black religionists. No. It’s only Israel that gets his goat.

Now we read that Tutu has added his endorsement to a billboard campaign on the New York subway castigating Israel as being the one and only Apartheid state in a wicked world.

Amazingly this Anglican bishop has joined with the American Muslims for Palestine, keen to add yet another Shariah state to the region in place of the one and only Jewish one, in depriving the Middle East of the exclusively liberal democratic nation where Apartheid is the last thing being practiced.

In the scrawl of his message he says how distressed he was during his last visit to the Holy Land. “It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”

I have no idea where he visited in Israel that reminded him of the shameful townships I saw during my trip to South Africa last year. There I witnessed the crime of the apartheid of poverty being inflicted by his political party on millions of Africans who live in tin shacks with no electricity or sanitary system. Show me one Palestinian living in such condition. Decades after the removal of the white regime Tutu’s South Africa has done little to relieve the poverty, or reduce the murderous crime statistics. What is it they say about people who live in glass houses? The same applies to those who tolerate tin shacks.

The last time Tutu visited Israel was way back in 1989. Then he offended many by insensitively saying about the Holocaust during a visit to Yad Vashem Memorial, “We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer." 

To say these words at that special place in the heart of the Jewish State was deeply hurtful.

Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center called it "a gratuitous insult to Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere.” 

The Archbishop revealed an inherent anti-Semitism when, with a slip of the tongue at a 2002 public lecture on divestments from Israel, he said, "People are scared in this country [the US] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful – very powerful.” His remarks were met with outrage. In 2005, in a reprinted version of his speech, he diverted his anti-Semitic reference to reflect an anti-Israel bias by replaced the expression “Jewish lobby” with “pro-Israel lobby” but the anti-Semitic cat was already out of the bag. 

Famed US attorney, Alan Dershowitz, called Archbishop Tutu “a racist and a bigot” during the controversial Durban 2 Conference in 2009. 

Archbishop Tutu is closely linked to a black liberation theology. This may have its place against the background of the painful South African experience of blacks against whites. Where it loses its value, and warps into a misguided racism, is when people like Tutu try to apply black liberation theology on to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nothing can be further from the truth, and truth is what Tutu purports to promote, if one recalls his notable Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Archbishop Tutu, as a man of truth, must reassess his opinion of Israel.

He wrote an op-ed piece in the Tampa Bay Times in which he thanked the Jewish people for being on the side of the “disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones” during the dark days of Apartheid South Africa.  

Jews, and Israelis, have always stood on the side of the suffering, while defending ourselves against those who come to harm us. Israel, more than most countries including South Africa, has reached out to relieve the suffering of others with humanitarian aid and practical assistance, especially in times of grave distress.

Universally, millions have benefitted from Israeli innovation, scientific, medical, and agricultural achievements, but Tutu turned his article into an anti-Semitic screed by adding;

“Whether Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can’t ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people.”

Clearly, he is among those who have never judged Israel by any decent standard. This can be seen by his refusal to condemn the people who are persecuting his co-religionists in Africa and in the Arab world with the same passion and standard that he applies against Israel. Neither will we hear any condemnation from him for the blatant apartheid policies carried out against the  Palestinians he purports to support in the Arab regimes where they find themselves without status, without work, without education, without freedom of movement, without representation, without a vote, solely based on them being Palestinian in Arab and Muslim lands. Isn’t that pure Apartheid?

Instead, Tutu claims Israel has “oppressed more than the apartheid ideologues could ever dream about in South Africa.”

In Tutu’s words, Israel outdoes the white regime in South Africa as an apartheid regime.

It’s absolutely time for truth, Archbishop Tutu! Let us start with this accusation and the truth.

One of the criticisms I heard while I was in South Africa was that Israel was the last nation on earth to cooperate with the white regime.

Not so! How about the Arabs? Where did the white regime get the oil that fueled their industry and military machine? Not from Israel, I can assure you. They got it from the Arabs, the ones that Tutu prefers to support even as they commit genocide and slavery against the black Christians of Africa.

I ask the clergyman to carefully look at whose side he is supporting.

We, in Israel, find his bias against us strangely troubling. Tutu and Israel should be joined by our Judeo-Christian values in fending off a common enemy. We should be bonded in a unified fight against the same enemy that is persecuting and killing us both. Instead we find Archbishop Tutu in the camp of our mutual enemy.

I call upon him to at least to be a champion and protector of black Christians being victimized by the same cultural and religious hatred that is being waged against us both, even if he doesn’t care to defend our Jewish sense of survival, or support our dire need for Jewish self-determination in our holy land based on a historic injustice that has been perpetrated against Jews, by both Christians and Muslims.

 

I implore him to search his soul, look to his core responsibility as a Christian leader, and reassess his position on these vital issues. Our decades-old conflict with the Arabs is not a black and white issue. They are not the blacks, and we are not the whites. If he looks closely at Israel he will find us to be a Rainbow Nation. We are made up of refugees and people of many tongues and colors who have returned home from all over the globe, including Africa.

 Our conflict is not one of black oppression. Neither is it one of apartheid. Rather, it is one of a tiny nation resisting a cultural and religious hatred as we struggle still to establish our Jewish liberation and self-determination. Surely the Archbishop is familiar with that concept?

In supporting the Palestinians he supports a man, Mahmoud Abbas, who has declared “I will never accept the Jewish State of Israel, not in a thousand years!”  That, to us, is like someone saying “I will never accept black rule in South Africa, not in a thousand years!” Such is the racist meaning at the heart of both statements. How can any learned person tolerate such a position?

I ask him to reassess his attitude for the sake of truth and reconciliation between him, his country, and Israel. Let me address him this way;

Please come again to Israel. Let us introduce you to the true face of our nation. Open your heart and discover for yourself the people of our amazing land. Open your mind to the new experience of an Israel you do not know, and let us work, hand in hand, for truth and reconciliation between our two peoples.

Barry Shaw is the Special Consultant on Delegimitization Issues to The Strategic Dialogue Center at Netanya Academic College. He is also the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com