Posted on 04/03/2006 11:16:17 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
The "Protocols of the Elders of Harvard," as Roger Simon elegantly calls the now-infamous (at least in blogosphere parts) "Israel lobby" screed written by a professor/administrator from Harvard’s Kennedy School, and another academic who holds an endowed chair in the political-science department at the University of Chicago, might finally disabuse people of the conventional nonsense that professors at our "elite" schools are really smart. "The Israel Lobby" is really dumb, both intellectually and politically. It should dissuade rational Harvard and Chicago donors from giving any further money to the Kennedy School (where one author, Steven Walt, was, incredibly, the academic dean until his abrupt resignation following the publication of the unfortunate screed) or to the Chicago political-science department (where John Mearsheimer holds an endowed chair). It should also help bright high-school students and their parents realize that a lot of "top" universities are living on largely undeserved reputations.
If these are the stars of that galaxy, it’s best to send our children to a different solar system. And it is long past time to take a hard look at how such schools, and such fools, got "rated" at the very top of the educational system of this country. I wonder if the folks at U.S. News & World Report are scrambling to revise their evaluation standards. They should.
Most commentary on the screed has generally focused on the details–ranging from factual mistakes to lopsided "interpretations" — which is all to the good. But the most important thing about screed is not the errors of fact; it’s The Big Lie at its core. The same Big Lie we’ve heard for centuries: The Jews run the world, and they do it by manipulating others to carry out the Jews’ designs. The premise on which "The Israel Lobby" rests is that American foreign policy, for more than half a century, is the product of a small band of willful and clever people who have tricked the American people and every president into acting in Israel’s interests, not our own. This is anti-Semitism in the grand tradition.
But the most amazing sentence in the screed is this one: "Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." Which is to say, "Jewish" is a racial matter, not a religious one.
That is why, when Walt and Mearsheimer claim they have nothing against the Jews, it reminds me of Richard Nixon protesting "I am not a crook." He was, and they do. The ritual denial, now as then, is an expression of contempt for the listener, not an act of candor.
We’re living at a moment when hatred of religion and of religious groups is gathering momentum. Perhaps this is a reaction to the global religious revival that has been underway for two generations, but whatever its roots, it is now so common that hardly anyone notices (except, paradoxically, when it’s directed against Muslims). Some attention was given to the singularly intolerant action taken by the local regime in St. Paul, Minnesota, barring public displays of bunnies during the Eastern season. And then, to the near-total indifference of the journalistic hunting pack, in late March the San Francisco City Council, angered by Catholic opposition to gay adoption, unanimously approved a resolution that read:
It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great city’s existing and established customs and traditions, such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need.
One could almost see the torch flicker at John F. Kennedy’s gravesite across the Potomac, and one had a great impulse to yell very loudly in the fine words of Oriana Fallaci, who lies in pain in Manhattan, snarling back at the cancer that has taken over her body:
How come that, in a country where 85 percent of the citizens say to be Christian, so few rebel to the ludicrous offensive which is going on against Christmas?!? How come that so few protest when your Caviar Left speaks about abolishing Christmas holiday, Christmas-trees, Christmas-songs, the same expressions Merry Christmas and Happy Christmas?!?
That’s the sort of anger that comes from a self-described "religious atheist" like Oriana, who knows that if anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism spread again, it is only a matter of time before they will come for people like her.
As indeed they have already, with their legal briefs and their anti-hate-speech codes, dragging her off to the latest version of the Inquisition for the sin of apostasy against the Church of Political Correctness. San Francisco, under cover of "existing and established customs and traditions," bans free speech. The little reichs of San Francisco, St. Paul, and Paris ban free religion. And "top professors" at Harvard and Chicago take off after the Jews.
No wonder Ayman al Zawahiri and his buddy, the Ayatollah Khamenei, think we’re going to be an easy prey.
Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel.
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It was distressing to see this old fear repackaged in new clothes. What next? Blood libel? It's only a matter of time.
I attended Harvard back in the 50s. It was more than a little skewed then, but there were numerous top faculty.
Then came the cultural revolution, the Vietnam protests, the feminists, the race baiters, and the armies of Political Correctness. Now the departments with which I am familiar contain no one worth studying with. They are nothing but gender benders and brainwashers.
Back in the 50s, they were already trying to persuade us to be good little liberals, but at least they presented us with some basic texts and facts to make up our own minds. No longer. The Ivy colleges are broken, and it's not clear whether they can ever be fixed.
For example, the English Departments at Harvard, Columbia, and Duke were at various times put into receivership under committees brought in from outside, because they had decayed so badly and obviously were incapable of putting themselves in order. But the college administrators chose folks like Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt, and Edward Said to put them back in order. Now they are far worse than they ever were.
It's a pity. Centuries of great alumni and generous donors have been betrayed. Scholarship and truth have been betrayed. And the band plays on.
It wil take a lot of time as, unfortunately, the names Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc still open a lot of doors. With grade inflation and the watering down of the curriculum, the value of an education from these institutions is getting dubious. Even the hard sciences are not immune, as now AA and gender normalization are permeating those disciplines.
Most of us have jobs and can't afford attorneys to fight the b*st*rds in court with their ACLU allies!
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
How much do you contribute to the alumni society every year?
Hubby switched to a program last night on TV claiming that Jesus was not resurrected and lived 45 years past the crucifixion. But of course, all of the original papers were destroyed and/or are being hidden by the church. I started laughing hysterically when he said that and told Hubby he should watch the credits to see if Dan Rather produced it.
Zero. I donate to my old school every year, but not to Harvard. They are richer than Croesus and waste most of it, IMHO.
So this guy is basically an idiot.
Some of the stuff he says might be true, but only by accident.
Bingo. Now if a larger percentage of their other alums did likewise, they would buy a clue.
America's support for Israel (in an otherwise anti-Israel world) has nothing to do with liberal elites (this business should show that once and for all) or "democracy" or "a nation of immigrants" or "Jewish power" or any other such thing. It comes from those [sarcasm]horrible, bigoted, knuckle-dragging, murderous, Bible-thumping neanderthal savages[/sarcasm] who read their Bibles. The rest of the world hates them for it. Most of their fellow chr*stians hate them. The anti-Semites hate them. Most Jews hate them. And the Jews who don't hate them are uncomfortable with them. Yet they have supported Israel since the days of Increase Mather (and especially after the nineteenth century prophecy conferences) with no positive reinforcement whatsoever from any quarter. If they supported Israel for any other reason than their Biblically-based religious beliefs they would have grown tired of the way they've been treated and dumped Israel long ago.
I don't agree with their theology. Their absolute refusal to even consider Noachism (especially considering that their beliefs in chr*stendom are recent and highly idiosyncratic) breaks my heart. But I admire them for their stubborness and their faith in the G-d of Israel.
Their detractors should be ashamed of themselves.
If you go back and study history, you will find that the most virulent anti-semitism came out of the universities, not the church. The highest percentage of Nazi membership was among the faculty of German universities during the Hitler era.
The phrase "anti-semitic" was coined by a professor named Wilhelm Marr as part of the name for his anti-semitic organization in 1879, which was founded at a university (Heidelburg, I think but I am not too sure.)
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