Christian Zionism. CUNY Board Blows It Big-Time. As readers of the New York Times (and Jewish Week) already know, the Board of Trustees at City University of New York voted to table the awarding of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner after one member of the board, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, accused Kushner of supposedly "disparaging" Israel. Kushner has been critical of some Israeli policies-which hardly makes him unique among human beings, or among Jews, or even among Israelis. But none of his comments on these issues are outside the bounds of civil discourse or worthy of censure, especially by an institution that is supposed to be committed to freedom of thought and the open exchange of ideas.
If you're curious, you can read Kushner's response here. Wiesenfeld is unrepentant, by the way, and defends his attack here. For an update on the evolving situation, see Justin Elliott here. First, the main reason that hardliners like Mr. Weisenfeld go after someone like Kushner is deterrence. And why does this matter for foreign policy? Tony Kushner row deepens as supporters renounce honorary degrees | Stage. A row over the decision by a leading New York university to refuse playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree due to accusations he was too critical of Israel has deepened as several high profile honorary degree holders renounced their own awards. Kushner, who wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning Angels in America, was set to get an honorary degree from John Jay College, a campus of City University of New York.
But his name was removed from a list of other intended recipients after a CUNY trustee, pro-Israel activist Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, spoke out against it. Wiesenfeld accused Kushner of being critical of the Israeli army, supportive of a boycott of the country and of saying that Israel had been founded partly as a result of ethnic cleansing.
In an open letter to CUNY Kushner responded angrily, denying the allegations, accusing Wiesenfeld of slander and saying he was "proud to be Jewish". He criticised the university's decision. Response to CUNY Decision to Revoke Tony Kushner Honorary Degree | J Street. « Back to the Blog In response the City University of New York’s decision not to award an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner because of his views on Israel, J Street and J Street U issued the following statement: J Street and J Street U strongly object to the City University of New York Board of Trustees decision to revoke an honorary degree that was to be awarded to playwright Tony Kushner, a decision based purely on Kushner’s views on Israel.
The American university system and the Jewish community are rightly proud of their commitment to free speech and an open exchange of ideas. Political witch-hunts over what it means to be sufficiently pro-Israel run counter to our belief in freedom of speech and our commitment to open, honest dialogue. University boards should not condition academic recognition on the approval of those with differing views on any issue, and certainly not without providing an opportunity for the person affected to respond. “Mr. CUNY Blocks Honor for Tony Kushner - NYTimes.com. Exploiting the anti-Semitism smear now backfiring. A significant and potentially consequential controversy erupted last week when Politico‘s Ben Smith — seemingly out of nowhere — wrote about what he described as deviations from “the bipartisan consensus on Israel” from several writers and bloggers at two of Washington’s most well-connected Democratic political organizations: Center for American Progress and Media Matters.
Naming Matt Duss, Eli Clifton, Eric Alterman and Ali Ghraib at CAP, along with former AIPAC employee MJ Rosenberg at Media Matters, Smith wrote that they regularly offer “a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins” and added: “warm words for Israel can be hard to find on [CAP's] blogs.” The article included a quote from a former AIPAC official accusing the two groups of publishing “anti-Israel” and “borderline anti-Semitic stuff.” As it turns out — and this was rather predictable — Smith’s article did not appear out of nowhere. UPDATE: New Jersey Democratic Rep. The predictable aftermath of the anti-CAP smear - Glenn Greenwald. I’ve written several times about the coordinated smear campaign to brand writers at the Center for American Progress as “anti-Semites” in order to punish them for defying mandated orthodoxies on Israel and to deter others from doing so. While that smear campaign, having done its job, is now winding down, the predictable effects of it are only beginning: CAP is now censoring those targeted writers, and those who defended them are now being similarly smeared.
First, the self-censorship at CAP: both The Weekly Standard‘s Daniel Halper and Philip Weiss document how a post written by two of the targeted CAP writers, Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton, was censored in important, substantive ways. That post concerned a rabidly anti-Islam film, “The Third Jihad,” that was continuously shown to NYPD officials. Gharib and Clifton sought to investigate the donors behind the film, and wrote the following (emphasis added): The piece originally contained four explicit references to Israel. Right-wing listserv targets Israel's critics - Israel-Palestine. The predictable aftermath of the anti-CAP smear - Glenn Greenwald. Riding Israel: A tragicomedy.
The film "Mission Impossible 4" opened in US theatres in recent weeks, starring BMW, Apple and Tom Cruise. A two-hour-long commercial on steroids. If you are unfamiliar with it, Paid Product Placement (PPP) is a big thing in the movie industry. This is how it works: Hollywood places in its movies certain watches, cars or a laptop brands; preferably worn by George Clooney, driven by Angelina Jolie or placed in front of Meg Ryan. In "The Transformers", for example, GM’s Cameros lead with Megan Fox. PPP is indirect marketing that targets oblivious movie viewers, gender notwithstanding, Catherine Banning or Will Smith could be drinking Pepsi.
The spirit and soul of a movie are sometimes compromised when its script and shooting are shaped by commercial, rather than artistic, considerations. PPP allows for extra budgets to produce costlier gimmicks that, in turn, bring more profit. The same logic seems to apply to politics. Israel placement Some jumped on him, others defended him. 'Invented' Palestinian confronts Gingrich at GOP debates. Finally, weeks after Newt Gingrich’s remarks citing Palestinians as an “invented people,” in last night’s Florida presidential debate, the GOP candidates were confronted by a Palestinian—and a Republican Palestinian too!
The man, Abraham Hassan respectfully affirmed that he does exists and asked Republican candidates to explain how they will bring peace to the Middle East. Hassan’s question: Abraham Hassan from Jacksonville, Florida. How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian American Republican I’m here to tell you we do exist. Before Romney spoke, the first of the presidential hopefuls to respond, the crowd applauded Hassan’s question. Romney evaded the “invented” comment, and suggested Palestinian “aggression” was caused by Obama: Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) fact-checked Romeny’s comments, catching him in a lie regarding Obama.
Gingrich continues: GOP Candidates Harm Israeli Security by Pushing for Impractical "Greater Israel" The Republican candidates for president once again tried to out-do the Likud Party in their devotion to the doctrine of the Iron Wall and their attempt to erase the Palestinian people from history and justify their being kept in a condition of statelessness and lack of citizenship in any state. (The first thing the National Socialists in Germany did to the Jews was to strip them of citizenship, understanding that a stateless people is “flotsam” that no one wants and which lacks any legal standing).
Israel is in a race with time. The 11 million Palestinians are not going to go away, and those in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon have gained powerful new friends because of the Arab uprisings of 2011. Israel can only survive in some recognizable form if it achieves peace with the Palestinian people and with their supporters in the Muslim world, which means making arrangements for Palestinians to have citizenship in a state. So here is what Romney said in the debate: No, Newt and JPost, there is no Santa Claus: how national identities are really formed | Ibishblog. What's most interesting about the brouhaha regarding Newt Gingrich's outrageous comments about Palestinians being “an invented people” — which he then augmented by describing them in general as “terrorists" — isn't the rebuttals or defenses of these comments.
Almost every responsible, sane and rational actor has dismissed Gingrich's remarks as preposterous, not because the Palestinians are not in some sense “invented” but because all modern national identities plainly are, in the same ways. This is not only obvious at first glance, it's also been thoroughly dissected and documented by a host of academics in multiple disciplines over the past 30 years.
Over the summer, I wrote two lengthy essays (read them here and here) about how this process works in both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms, both of which can draw in ancient sources, but both of which are of course entirely modern and essentially 20th-century phenomena. So far, so good, one would think. The real 'invented' people. It is hard to believe that anyone who defends Israel's legitimacy as a state would buy into former Speaker Newt Gingrich's argument that Palestine is an "invented nation".
The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not born until 1882. His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the Bible. The founder of the Israeli state was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), an assimilated Viennese writer who was convinced by the Dreyfus trial in France - and the horrendous right-wing anti-Semitism that resulted from it - that Jews had to get out of Europe. In 1897, he wrote the book that would essentially inaugurate the Zionist movement. He didn't specify where the Jewish homeland should be. The reaction to Herzl's idea was primarily that he was a bit crazy.
West of Eden-Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News source.