The “Open-Minded” Critics of Israel

Commentary Magazine ^ | 21 August 2008 | Daniel Halper

[dmh191]

In October, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes spoke at my school, Tufts University. A strong supporter of Israel and an equally strong opponent of radical Islam, he is one of the few people in the United States academically qualified to speak about the rise of radical Islam and certainly well worth listening to whether or not one agrees with his conclusions. I assumed students would protest, and they did. But it was disturbing, indeed shocking, to discover that the protest against Pipes was cosponsored by Tufts Hillel. Why did Hillel join in a protest against a speaker who came to talk about the dangers of radical Islam and the threat it poses to Israel and other nations? Hillel’s statement of purpose proclaims the certainty of “support [for] Israel and global Jewish peoplehood.” How could Tufts Hillel try to stifle Pipes’s message?

[snip]

Complacency and moral equivocation are the best terms to describe many if not most Jewish students on campus these days. What allows a Jew not to stand behind the state of Israel—this so called “open-mindedness”—translates to nothing more than an oversight of, or lack of concern for, justice. These who indulge in this self-satisfying attitude are not rejecting Israel on moral grounds. They are not concerned with assessing topics based on what is wrong and what is right; their foremost concern is to appear “open-minded.” This is what allows them to ignore not only Zionist principles but elementary principles of human rights. After all, to follow their own logic, if Palestinians have a right to a state, then do not Jews also have a right to a state? Do we really need to insist to Jews that Jews, too, have a right to live freely?

[Convert from ECUSA]

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