Virus infecting Academe?
Reader comment on item: Is Campus Watch Part of a Conspiracy? [On Mearsheimer-Walt and The "Israeli Lobby"]

Submitted by yzoleowl (United States), May 12, 2006 at 15:50

Where parents pay to have their children educated at colleges and universities to seek knowledge and truth taught to them by authoritative dedicated scholars, many of their so-called "educators" appear to be more of brash propagandists and dedicated "co-conspirators" in a compulsive drive to bash Israel.

Instead of researching for facts and studying statistics to present a neutral objective narrative of the middle east conflict, they brashly blow the trumpet uniformly denouncing Israel as the aggressor, the perpetrator, the oppressor of the innocent, peaceful peace-seeking Palestinians. While EU leaders recoil in horror and shock and denounce Iran's hysterical president-elect's announced goal of wiping Israel off the map and his planned buildup of not-so-peaceful nuclear supplies (guess who is scheduled to be the first victim), the combined voice of academe which should have led the shrill denouncement of the prez's threats and plans as a menace to world and regional peace, is unheard as the deafening silence overwhelms their muted reaction to the greater danger.

Those who should be counted on as scholars and students of history continue to ignore the unceasing depredations of Hamas and their cohorts by other names, branding Israel as the instigator of the massacre of innocents, while fighters for liberty bravely try to persuade parents to lose their children to fictional martyrdom by serving as suicide bombers.

When hearing of attacks on Israel by armed thugs through networks of tunnels, these scholars and authorities on history, even putting aside the demonic slaughter of innocents, don't rush to condem the cruel inhumanity of the martyrdom practice, or shout their outrage at the opportunists who are too busy distributing paychecks to the bereaved parents and recruiting new human timebomb replacments to find the time to themselves do the volunteer bit. Instead they leap to their defense by the bland rationalization, "Well, consider the cause!", to justify these unceasing attacks.

The masses of ordinary hardworking poverty-stricken Arabs in every middle east country are petrified with fear of retribution if they utter one word of peace advocacy with Israel. And over a million Israeli Arabs, legal citizens of Israel, have no desire to move to Gaza or the West Bank, content with working side by side with Israeli citizens, doctors, nurses, business people, etc. who treat all Israeli citizens alike, - Jewish, Christian or Muslim. In preference to their reacting to today's hysterical news flash - the preferred grist for their "impartial" mill, what academe has studiously ignored and will never put in th equation is the history of the Palestine region since the mid 1800s and learn how even before 1929, Palestinian Arabs who lived side by side with Jews, when word reached them of impending riots planned by agitators horrified at the fabuolous achievements of the Jewish populace changing their lives and the lives of their Arab co-residents, hid their Jewish neighbors in their homes, while imported immigrant thugs raced through the streets of Jerusalem, Hebron, etc., indiscriminately slaughtering every Jewish man, woman and child - infants to aged - they could find.

While today's descendants of the pioneer colonists of North America, who in forming our democratic society, destroyed indigenous residents with a 25,000-year history in this continent, exiling the survivors into desolate land, never cease condemning Israelis as "occupiers", who in actuality bought land from the wealthy "effendi" - nobility class - residents of a forgotten, neglected and ungoverned possession of a dying Ottoman Empire, chortling as they dumped desert and swamp land on the enthusiastic buyers at outrageous prices. The masses of "fellahin" - virtually slave labor to the wealthy class, found new hope and the realization of a better life working side by side with the new democratic pioneer society who paid them a decent wage and whose pioneering Jewish doctors ended malaria, trachoma, glaucoma, t.b., etc. With the burgeoning economy Jewish settlers produced, downtrodden Arabs from every corner of the Crescent gave up their miserable existence to flee to a better life by immigrating to the postage-stamp area of the 1918 Palestine, long before the founding of the Jewish-founded state, while their agitating leaders clamoring for expulsion of the Jewish pioneers, with their loud vocal legerdemain and regardless of their country of origin, insisted on identifying themselves the indigenous population while branding the Jewish creators of the better life for all residents - Arab and Jewish as the occupiers. Academe's view of history is seizing on the latest headline, preferring to maintain the double standard by ignoring the unending despicable outrages committed by the Palestinian leaders and branding Israel as the culprit.

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