I would like offer some comments on Professor Samuel Rabino’s article in the Northeastern News, October 30, 2002.
Professor Rabino charges that my “facts” are “very selective.” I thank him for accepting my facts, a welcome departure from past practice which denied all facts concerning Israel. And I will readily admit that my facts are “selective,” since I think of myself as a counsel for the victim, not the victimizer. I will leave it to Professor Rabino to defend the victimizer.
The Professor is quite unabashed in taking up the cause of Campus-Watch.Org (CW), which seeks to victimize academics who oppose the Israeli Occupation. In defense of this McCarthyist website, he can do no better than quote from its advertised aims. I would think a professor of marketing would be less credulous. Has any McCarthyite advertised his true intentions?
When it was launched, CW carried a dossier on professors, which invited students to spy and report on the “un-American” activities of their professors. A dossier on professors? It reminded some of the dossiers the Gestapo maintained on its victims. This was too embarrassing even for CW, and the dossier was closed, its contents shifted to other folders. Not to be mistaken for a softie, however, CW set up a new dossier on professors who had offered to be listed on their first dossier.
Soon after their names appeared on the CW, each of the targeted professors began to receive hundreds of spams each day, containing crude anti-Semitic or Islamophobic material. This was followed by spoofs: e-mails with anti-Semitic and anti-American messages sent out under our names. I suspect Professor Rabino will claim that these illegal, defamatory attacks were coincidental; they were not provoked by CW.
The professor accuses us of doing our “best to blacklist, defile and discredit” Israel. I have a feeling that I never had the power, and much less the inclination, to blacklist anyone; that is a CW specialty. As for defiling, I thought that is what the Israeli soldiers did when they entered schools in the West Bank last April, defecating in drawers and smearing walls with feces. Yes, we do seek to discredit the fabricated narratives that have for fifty years dressed up Israel as a victim of Palestinian violence.
Professor Rabino urges me to “consider supporting free expression” in the Arab dictatorships. Right now I worry more about free speech at home. More to the point, Israel is not exactly a paragon of free speech. In a recent ranking of press freedom, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, Israel was ranked 92nd out of 168 nations.
Professor Rabino repeats the canard about Israel’s outburst of generosity at Camp David and the Palestinians who rejected it. Let us set the record straight. What the Palestinians rejected was life in permanent Bantustans; with the menace of the armed settler camps all around them; without East Jerusalem; without sovereign control over their borders, waters, and airspace; without the right to return to their homes. What the Palestinians rejected was servitude under Israeli apartheid.
Finally, Professor Rabino complains that I have not quite earned the honorific “Professor Blacklisted” bestowed on me by Northeastern News. His logic: I still hold my job. Do I owe this to the generosity of my detractors? Perhaps, this is the result of a quaint institution called tenure.
