Thursday, May 27, 2010
"Destroy Israel" Day at the University of Haifa
1. Remember "Father" Capucci, the gun-running one-time archbishop of Jerusalem?
Greek Catholic (Maronite) archbishop Hilarion Capucci smuggled weapons for the PLO from Lebanon to Israel in 1974. He was arrested, jailed, but released under pressure of the Vatican. Pope Paul VI later said his time in prison had been endured "for peace and reconciliation among the peoples of the Middle East".
He's decided to join the "Free Gaza" flotilla terrorist joyriders.
http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=24930
background
http://christianactionforisrael.org/medigest/feb97/marafat3.html
http://www.washington-report.org/digital-issue/3085.html
2. Isi Leibler on leftists who whine about their critics being "McCarthyists":
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/Leibler/entry/bogus_pro_peace_organizations_undermine
University of Haifa - Ron Kuzar (Dept of English Literature) Stars at the Conference Demanding the Destruction of Israel
The University of Haifa event was evidently an initiative once again of the Arab student union. Held in the large Safdia Auditorium on campus with about 30 people in the audience, the "conference" consisted of two anti-Israel Arab speakers and one anti-Israel Jewish speaker. This is pluralism and balance these days in Israeli academia.
Kuzar states: "Israeli-Zionist ethnicity is an injurious discriminatory one inside Israel, a thieving and apartheid set of policies towards Palestinians."
University of Haifa - Ron Kuzar (Dept of English Literature) Stars at the Conference Demanding the Destruction of Israel
By Steven Plaut
27/5/2010
A year ago the Arab students at the University hosted the head of the Israeli Arab Islamofascist movement, the Sheikh Raed Salah. The Islamic movement is a poorly disguised front group for the Hamas. The Sheikh spoke to an audience in a lecture hall from which guards prevented by force Jewish students entering. The Sheikh called upon Arab students to become suicide bombers and to murder Jews. University officials falsely denied that guards had been ordered to prevent Jewish students from entering the hall in a cover-up.
Well, this year the very same University decided to host a sort of an encore for that event. On May 24, 2010 a "conference" was held at the University of Haifa about the importance and desirability of destroying Israel. Really. The official title of the conference was: "How to Resolve the Conflict? The One-State Solution – Moving from the Existing Situation to a Just Vision."
The translation of that for those unfamiliar with the term is this. When anti-Israel radicals use the term "One-State Solution," they mean a Rwanda-style solution in which Israel will cease to exist as a state and will be enfolded within a larger Arab-Muslim state, and in which ethnic differences and the existence of Jews will be resolved the same way ethnic problems were resolved in Rwanda. Other "conferences" on the best way to destroy Israel have been held elsewhere, including one at York University last year. The University of Haifa's Sami Smooha is a regular participant in these.
The University of Haifa event was evidently an initiative once again of the Arab student union. Held in the large Safdia Auditorium on campus with about 30 people in the audience, the "conference" consisted of two anti-Israel Arab speakers and one anti-Israel Jewish speaker. This is pluralism and balance these days in Israeli academia.
The speakers were Salman Natur, the "culture" editor of the Arabic newspaper of the Israeli communist party Alittihad, Raja Zuabi Omari, an anti-Israel activist, and Dr. Ron Kuzar, a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Haifa. In the past Kuzar has promoted boycotts of Israeli institutions and came out against Israel's existence.
At the "conference," the first two speakers presented a boilerplate attack on Israel, Zionism and Jews. All the usual rhetoric was heard, about Israel being an apartheid state that had conducted ethnic cleansing of Arabs, one established in an unjustified and illegitimate way, one that has no right to exist, resembles the Nazi regime, about how "millions" of Palestinian refugees have the right to "return" to Israel, and so on. Later when one of the two or three Jews in the audience challenged Zuabi Omari to provide evidence that Israel had ever carried out any ethnic cleansing, she said she refused to do so.
All three speakers supported the elimination of Israel. Their "debate" was between the first two, who wanted it done today if not yesterday by force (Zoabi Omari called for a union between the PLO and Hamas to fight Israel), and Kuzar, who wanted it done in two stages. He proposed first two "democratic" states alongside one another, one for Palestinian Arabs and presumably the other for Israelis, and that these two would then merge into a nice new country that encompasses both. The new state would be post-Israel, and Kuzar repeated endorsed post-Zionism. All supported the idea of a "democratic secular state," the old slogan invented by the PLO that refers to the elimination of Israel and its replacement by an Islamofascist Arab state.
Ron Kuzar was the keynote speaker, the token Jew endorsing the anti-Israel political agenda. He has built part of his academic career writing about the "Canaanite" movement that operated in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, although how that counts as English literature escapes us. Be that as it may, this was a movement of Jews proposing that a new post-Jewish Israeli be created, one that could encompass erstwhile Arabs and former Jews, who would transcend their narrow ethnic-national-religious identities to become the New Israeli. Significantly the movement never had more than a handful of members and advocates, all of them Jews.
Kuzar in the past has stated publicly that he just studies the "Canaanite" movement as a phenomenon but does not consider himself one of the advocates of the "Canaanite idea." Well, he certainly put that claim to rest at the "One-State" conference on May 24. Oh, and lest he consider denying what we are about to cite, let us point out that Isracampus has Kuzar's words from the Destroy-Israel conference in the University on tape.
Kuzar began with his Canaanite argument that all ethnic identity and nationalism is evil, although did not offer any objections to it being the basis of 22 Arab countries. He switched back and forth freely between the word "Leumiut" or nationalism and "Leumanut" or chauvinism when referring to Zionism. He insisted that there are no nations on earth besides Israel that have an ethnic-nationalist identity, which raises some questions as to which planet he has lived on all these years. He insisted that all countries on earth are like the United States, a mere territorially-defined entity with no ethnic identity. [In reality of course, the United States is the great exception to what exists on earth.] He attempted to identify a second country that has "no ethnic identity" and mentioned France. We repeat, this is a person who is unaware that France is a nation-state and he teaches at the University of Haifa.
He then launched his broadside against Zionism and Israeli-Jewish ethnicity. He said:
"הלאומיות האתנית הישראלית-הציונית היא לאומיות פוגעת ומפלה בתוך ישראל, עושקת ונוקטת במדיניות של אפרטהייד כלפי הפלשתינאים."
Translation: "Israeli-Zionist ethnicity is an injurious discriminatory one inside Israel, a thieving and apartheid set of policies towards Palestinians."
Kuzar repeatedly referred to the Jews as oppressors and the Arabs as the oppressed. He described Israel's own Arabs as "in a sense under occupation/conquest." He denounced the evil (רוע) in Zionism, and repeatedly labeled it chauvinism. He called for a "New Israeli" (echoes of "Canaanitism") that would be a "shatnaz" of mixed identities in which Jewish Israelis would become partially Arabs and Arabs would become partially Jews, and curiously the Arabs in the audience failed to applaud this. None of the speakers, by the way, called for ending the existence of any of the 22 Arab nation-states.
Kuzar concluded by joining the first two speakers in insisting that it is "legitimate" to propose a "One State Solution" in which Israel would cease to exist.
Want to let the heads of Haifa University know what you think of all this? Write to
President of the University of Haifa
Prof. Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
University of Haifa
Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel
Tel: 972-4-8240101
Fax: 972-4-8240281
E-mail: abenzeev@univ.haifa.ac.il
Rector of the University of Haifa
Prof. Yossi Ben-Artzi
University of Haifa
Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel
Tel: 972-4-8240405
Fax: 972-4-8342101
Email: yossib@univ.haifa.ac.il
Rector-Elect:
David Faraggi
Fax: 972-4-8253849
E. mail: faraggi@stat.haifa.ac.il
Chairman of the Board of Governors
Mr. Leon Charney
Law Office of Leon H. Charney
Broadway 1441
New York, NY 10018
Phone: 212-819-0994
E-mail: charney@lhcharney.com
University "Friends of" Offices Outside Israel are listed here: http://www.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/friends.htm
