Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Israel, Free Speech, Feminism and Berkeley
Feminists
I am cross-posting this from Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers. It contains the text of a speech given at Yale University by Thyme Seigal.
http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/2010/09/there-is-no-free-speech-in-berkeley-if.html
Well, what a surprise! Actually, it is no surprise. This is the home of the Women in Black, a group of loony women who show up to demonstrate and screech against Israel on campus. This is where a professor heckles Jewish students on campus protesting anti-Semitism. This is the home of swastikas on bathroom walls.
The fact is that Berkeley is a joke, filled with radical drop-outs, radical students and radical professors determined to indoctrinate their students against Israel and against America as well. And if anti-Semitism toward Jewish students is the side effect, so be it.
Last year, UC Berkeley students went on a rampage over higher tuitions. Nobody should have been surprised. Their school taught them well.
And as Siegal points out, where are the vaunted American feminists when it comes to anti-Semitism? Same place they are to be found when it comes to the killing of gays and stoning of women in the Middle East.
Hiding under their desks.
Time and time again, American feminists have proven that their priority is left-wing politics-and nothing will get in the way of that-not even women being stoned or killed in so-called honor killings.
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4 comments:
Gary, this isn't really related to this post but I thought it was interesting and wanted to share:
Fidel to Ahmadinejad: 'Stop Slandering the Jews'
Looks like you and good ol' Fidel actually agree on a few things! But you know, broken clocks and all that...
On this one, I'm with Fidel.
Like the bumper sticker says "Subvert the dominant paradigm." Anything Fidel and Gary Fouse agree on, I'm 99.9% likely to join with them on.
The term "anti-Semitism" is, like "Islamophobia," becoming quite misleading. There are different criticisms of, and prejudices against, Jews, and Israel, and those are at least four different things.
Christian European anti-Semitism was dissected very well in James Carroll's book, Constantine's Sword. That book does not explain modern Sunni and Shia hostility to (a) Israel, and (b) Jews, because those hostilities have different origins and motives. Nor does either of the above have much in common with the mystical Almohade hostility to Jews, which they shared with the next dominant power on the Iberian peninsula, again for different reasons.
The reason omnibus legislation, like the recent health care reform bill, acquire so much opposition is that there is always a substantial minority opposed to any given provision, which can agglomerate into a majority generally sour on the whole thing, even when individual pieces would pass with solid cheering majorities.
So it is with "political correct" litmus tests. There are feminists who are pro-Israel. There are feminists who denounce Israel. There are conservatives who despise Jews. There are conservatives who worship Israel. Etc. Etc. Etc. When ideologues lose sight of this diversity of human opinion, they make asses of themselves as they create social litmus tests.
I'm not sure I fully agree with everything this particular feminist has to say. I think Israel does have a short-sighted government that is doing Israel and its friends a lot of damage -- which is different from saying Israel should be wiped off the map. There are a lot of Palestinians with legitimate grievances; the fact that their suffering is largely the fault of the Grand Mufti and King Abdullah and King Farouk doesn't much matter now, since those malefactors are all dead and gone.
But anyway, this woman has every right to speak, and any friends who break off contact just because they disagree are craven cowards as well as fools.
"I think Israel does have a short-sighted government"
That short-sighted goal happens to be survival.
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