Posted on 03/27/2006 9:52:18 AM PST by goldstategop
Tel Aviv University is crawling with anti-Israel "Post-Zionist" professors and with openly communist faculty members. It would be hard to pinpoint the very worst and most outrageous of these, but Yehouda Shenhav is surely a serious contender.
Shenhav is Associate Professor and past department chairman of sociology at Tel Aviv University He was born Yehouda Shaharabani to Iraqi parents who had immigrated as refugees to Israel, and later changed his name to a less obviously Oriental one. He teaches Marxism and anti-Zionism to Tel Aviv University students and he edits the hardcore Marxist pseudo-academic Israeli journal calling itself "Theory and Criticism." It publishes anti-Israel propaganda and boilerplate Marxism (in academic Newspeak, "critical" means Marxist). "Theory and Criticism" was founded in 1990 by a gaggle of communists, Arabs and far-leftist anti-Zionists in Israel. Shenhav also sits on the board of another Marxist anti-Israel "journal" published by extremists at Israel's Ben-Gurion University.
Shenhav was a visiting faculty member at Columbia University when the extremists at Edward Said's campus were turning it into an anti-Jewish madrassah. Unsurprisingly, Shenhav did not speak out against the rising campus anti-Semitism there nor denounce the academic pogromchiki. Instead, Shenhav attended leftist antiwar events throughout the region, starring Columbia faculty and others opposed to the American war against Iraqi Baathism and Islamist terrorism. At these, Shenhav compared the war in Iraq to "Israeli acts of aggression in the West Bank," calling them "acts of colonialism" led by "crude military men." Collecting his taxpayer-financed salary at Tel Aviv University has never struck him as an immoral act of oppression and colonialism.
Shenhav is a "critical" part of the leftist junta that has taken over a one-time serious Israeli think tank, the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, turning it into a little taxpayer-supported gulag of anti-Jewish Marxist propaganda and activism. He is one of the charter members of a far-leftist group of Oriental Jews (those whose families immigrated to Israel from Islamic countries) calling itself the "Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition". The group does not publish membership rolls but it is unlikely that its entire membership could fill all the seats on a bus, and probably not even a park bench. While pretending to be a lobby group for underprivileged Oriental Jews in Israel, the "Rainbow Coalition" spends most of its time promoting the Communist Party's formula for ending "occupation" and bringing peace to a future Middle East that evidently will not contain a Jewish state. The "Rainbow" is one of the anti-Jewish Israeli groups celebrated by the Marxists at Z magazine, Noam Chomsky's favorite stomping ground. While having a picayune membership, the "Rainbow" nevertheless is awash in funds it gets from the seditious New Israel Fund and similar foreign groups.
Shenhav is clearly the star of the "Rainbow Coalition" web site, which is crouded with pieces by anti-Israel writers, including pro-terror Stanford professor Joel Beinin, "Professor" Smadar Lavie, a feminist extremist anti-Zionist who is not a professor at all, and even a Bash-Israel article by UFO crackpot conspiracist Barry Chamish! The web site publishes articles endorsing the campaign by European anti-Semites to boycott Israeli universities.
More generally, Yehousa Shenhav is among the better-known of Israel's anti-Israel leftist academic extremists. He signs many of those anti-Israel petitions, collected regularly by Israeli academic leftists, including one endorsing the Jewish leftist woman arrested for helping her Palestinian boyfriend plan terror bombings, and another proposing international intervention to end Israeli sovereignty. Shenhav's main "academic thesis" has long been the claim that Oriental/Sephardic Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries are in fact Arabs of the Mosaic persuasion, Arabs of the Jewish faith. He insists that their national identity is determined, like throughout the West, by language, whereas anyone with the slightest familiarity with the Middle East knows that nationality groups there are defined primarily by religious identity. (That is why secular Jews who do not practice Judaism are still Jews.) In trying to stake out for himself Marxist "multiculturalism" as his cosmopolitan watering hole, Shenhav in fact shows he is a victim of his own Western provinciality, lacking any understanding of so basic a fact of life!
While a Sephardic (Oriental Jewish) chauvinist himself, Shenhav's "Jewish Arabs thesis" is a purposeful and egregious misapplication of the modern European Jewish liberal posturing, designed to make Jews more accepted by claiming to be Germans (or Hungarians, or whatever) of the Jewish religion, and misapplying it in a tendentious manner to Jews from Arab countries. Arabic-speaking Jews are Jews, and not Arabs, just as Hebrew-speaking Arabs are still Arabs. Shenhav might be able to find perhaps 20 Sephardic Jews worldwide who agree with his "Jewish Arabs thesis", holding that they are Arabs of the Jewish religion, and I would not be surprised if they all turned out to be communists.
Shenhav has promoted his view that Oriental Jews are Arabs in numerous articles and in a recent book: "The Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and Ethnicity", which got raving reviews from Arab extremists and from PLO front groups. I keep waiting for him to approach some Sephardic toughs from some gang in a working-class Israeli neighborhood or development town and then for him to explain to them that they are really Jewish Arabs. It should be fun picking up the pieces.
Shenhav considers Zionism to be a form of colonialism. His writings are carried with affection by Al-Jazeera and by the web site of the anti-Semitic pseudo-Jewish cult Neturei Karta. Shenhav is celebrated on PLO propaganda web sites and has been at the forefront of those leftists OPPOSING the idea of conditioning any Israeli compensation, reparations, or financial tribute to the "Palestinians" on offsetting reparations paid to Jewish refugees from the Arab countries (or to their children).
Shenhav has long argued that Oriental Jews and Palestinians need to unite to fight Zionism, that old "common cause" of the communist party in "Palestine" from the 1920s onward. Indeed, Oriental Jews and Palestinians are, in his view, two wings of the same struggle in absolutely everything except Oriental Jews getting compensation from Arabs. As the child of immigrants to Israel from Iraq, Shenhav wants his own family and those of all other Jewish refugees from Arab countries to be denied their due rights to compensation for property stolen from them, while at the same time he endorses unlimited rights to "compensation" for Palestinians and even their "right of return" to Israeli territory AFTER a Palestinian state is created. This is all the moral equivalent of someone insisting that Germans have the right to compensation for losses during World War II while neither Jews nor Czechs do. Shenhav has been denounced by "Justice for Jews from Arab Countries" and similar pro-Sephardic groups.
While a prominent Tel Aviv University professor, Shenhav has a long track record of promoting crackpot and lunatic "theories" about a variety of matters. He has promoted the long-discredited conspiracist "theory" holding that Yemenite Jewish children from families who came to Israel in its early years were "kidnapped" and surreptitiously handed over for adoption to European Jews. Not a shred of evidence that any such "kidnappings" took place has ever surfaced, including via DNA tests. This makes Shenhav the academic equivalent of a UFO conspiracist.
Shenhav's latest Cause Célèbre is the struggle against "neo-liberalism". Those of you living in the real world – meaning outside of campuses - might be confused by that terminology. As you know, back in the 19th century liberalism used to mean free markets, democracy, and the right to pursue equal opportunity. By the 1960s, American "liberalism" had come to mean the very opposite of traditional liberalism, while the banners of 19th century liberalism had been adopted by American conservatives. Then the Far Left in recent years adopted "neo-liberalism" as its favorite nonsense term, and its main political crusade today is directed toward attacking what it calls - at one and the same time - "neo-liberalism" and "neo-conservatives". To paraphrase George Orwell, some ideas are so stupid that one can only learn about them from professors.
Shenhav is part of that crusade. What he and his ilk really mean by "neo-liberalism" is economic freedom. They may not understand first-year economics but certainly they know that economic freedom is evil and must be suppressed at all costs. Writing in Haaretz, March 22, 2006, Shenhav declares that "neo-liberalism" is a "destructive" form of "religious-like fundamentalism," a "new form of global imperialism controlled by multinational corporations," which develop "anti-democratic styles of management, laws, justice and morality," all designed to oppress the poor workers. He has said, "Patriotism and national solidarity are eroded from below by social injustice, and from above by globalization."
Shenhav, who could probably not pass a spot quiz in any Principles of Economics course, pronounces sociological pontifications on how he thinks markets operate, recites long-discredited Marxist "theories," all the while singing sycophantic praises of the recent book "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" by David Harvey. His guru Harvey is a Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a far-leftist moonbat, someone who writes books full of Newspeak about the "Conditions of Postmodernity" (another favorite leftist nonsense word) and "imperialism."
For Shenhav and the rest of the cadre of Marxists in the sociology and political science departments at Tel Aviv University, the solution to "neoliberalism" is the same as the solution to the problems of the Palestinians and the "Jewish Arabs". It is to convert the Middle East, Western Europe and North America into large communist gulags, modeled upon Belarus and similar progressive egalitarian societies.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Send him to Hamslamistan..
Its apity we cant send him into a time machine and trade him for a good Jew in the death camps. Asa matter of fact I would volunteer to be his kapo and would use the soap to clean my dogs .
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
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A looney like this guy and the others would have been among the first to have been purged by Stalin and Beria and sent to the gulags to be worked to death!
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
Sounds like Buchanan's, Sobran's, and Reese's perfect picture of a "right-wing [ie, anti-Zionist] Jew."
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