One of the most shocking aspects of the campaign to demonise and delegitimise the state of Israel is the part played in this diabolical endeavour by Jewish and Israeli academics on the political left. We’re not talking here about people who are merely critical of Israeli policies. We’re talking about people who lend their names and academic credentials to lies, libels, distortions, fabrications, misrepresentations and other malicious fantasies in order to demonise and delegitimise Israel, treatment they afford to no other country.
Why do they do this? Why, especially since they themselves are Jews and Israelis? Many reasons suggest themselves, ranging from the craven desire for access to a fashionable society itself riddled with this prejudice, through naivety, ignorance of Judaism and history not to mention sheer benighted stupidity, by way of a bitterly warped psychopathology all the way to the closed ideological thought system of the left for which Israel is doubly damned – as a western nation and a Jewish western nation.
The part played by these Jews in the global bullying of Israel, and the tacit or explicit support they are thus lending to those whose aim is the extermination of the Jewish state, cannot be overstated. For those in the wider world who want Israel destroyed not only use the bogus arguments of these Jewish Israel-bashers but also use their Jewishness as a human shield, to insulate themselves against the charge of Jew-hatred.
How can there be anything bigoted about these arguments, they say, if Jews and Israelis are themselves using them? Very easily, actually; throughout the long centuries of Jewish persecution, the terrible fact is that Jews themselves have always been prominent in such murderous campaigns. The Judeophobic malice of today’s left, indeed, which can be traced back to the French Revolution, was supplied with rocket fuel by Karl Marx whose own Jewish ancestry managed to morph into virulent hatred of Judaism and the Jewish people.
Within Israel itself, the demonisation of their own country by Israeli academics has to be seen to be believed – not least for the free rein they are usually given to debauch the role of a university and substitute lies and propaganda for facts and knowledge. If anyone challenges them, they start screaming that they are being demonised. Not surprisingly, a steady stream of them find their way onto the campuses of Britain, where the already Judeophobic atmosphere supplies them with an unlimited supply of the oxygen of hatred. The IsraCampus website is doing sterling work recording this systematic corruption of the academy by Jewish academics both within Israel and abroad. It is a deeply tragic and unique phenomenon. As Professor Steven Plaut has written on that site:
‘Among the most malicious and venomous of all bigots, the Jewish antisemites are at the forefront of each and every smear campaign against Israel and other Jews. Jews today are leaders in the campaigns to boycott and divest from Israel, including the Solidarity with Terrorists groups. They make pilgrimage to the terrorist camps of the Hamas and the HezbAllah, cheering on terrorist atrocities against Jews. They pioneered the smear campaign to paint Israel as an apartheid regime and denouncing Israel as equivalent to Nazi Germany is their favorite pastime.
‘... The creation of Israel was supposed to turn Jews into a normal people. But the psychosis of Jewish antisemitism has no comparable analogue among the nations, making the Jews a therapist’s sui generis. The disease of Jewish antisemitism not only illustrates the absence of normality among 21st century Jewry, it threatens the very survival of Israel and of Jewish communities around the world.’
Bizarre? Grotesque? Suicidal? Sure. Yet astonishingly, all but ignored by Jews in Israel and elsewhere, who choose to pretend this is not happening. IsraCampus is fighting back. Where are all the rest?
