"’The Case for Israel’ is indispensable reading for those of us who are deeply disturbed by the rise of anti-Semitism in American society, even on college campuses." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Chairman, Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard
(hat tip Ami Eden, JTA)
From Beyond Chutzpah, by Norman Finkelstein:
"The point, of course, is not that Dershowitz is a charlatan. Rather, it’s the systematic institutional bias that allow for books like The Case for Israel to become national best sellers. Were it not for Dershowitz’s Harvard pedigree, the praise heaped on this book by Mario Cuomo, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Elie Wiesel, and Floyd Abrams, the favorable notice in media outlets like the New York Times and Boston Globe, and so on, The Case for Israel would have had the same shelf life of a publication of the Flat-Earth society." [page 17]
Well, Gates knows how to get ahead as an academic at Harvard.
To me, the Gates-Cop conundrum was at least as much a reflection of class entitlement as it was of racial bigotry.
And here, I am not justifying the cop’s behavior, just reflecting on the nature of Gates’s outrage.
He is what Malcolm X would called a house negro. He knows how to kiss ass to get ahead.
Malcolm X: House Negro vs. the Field Negro
that is so Harvard
Gates is a black Alvy Singer.
I liked Michelle Malkin’s nutshell description of Gates Yesterday morning on CSPAN’s Washington Journal: “racial opportunist.”
The sergeant was subjected to racial derision by Gates while Gates theatrically stonewalled and denied the sergeant’s request for an ID. This according to the supplemental police report filed by the officer who came in behind the sergeant. At this point according to standard police procedure, couldn’t the sergeant have arrested Gates rightfully? OTH, once Gates did produce his ID with a photo, shouldn’t the sergeant have left the house since the ID would show Gates was not a tresspasser, but the owner (lessee) of the house? I think the combined police reports indicate the sergeant did start to leave the house, while Gates kept demanding the sergeant to show his ID (after the sergeant had orally repeatedly given his name; I imagine his badge and name tag etc were in plain sight). Gates then said he would if Gates would follow him outside. Once Gates was outside on the porch he commenced to play loudly to the crowd. There is a Supreme Court of South Dakota ruling on the issue of free speech in the context of cops passing by irate, name calling citizens deriding the cops on the public way. That court said they had a constitutional right to yell insults at the cops; the dissent was a good one though. To my knowledge, SCOTUS has not ruled on the issue. Of course there are some cops who use vaguely worded public nuisance/disorderly conduct type ordinances to arrest citizens that simply voice their disrespect for the cops. It seems the sergeant lost his cool at the time he had Gates arrested knowing Gates was at his home. Of course Gates lost his immediately when first questioned by the sergeant.
I am really puzzled by the amount of attention this whole story gets. The meeting of the two wranglers plus Obama, plus ? in the White House garden over beer made it into German public channel news. It in fact was one of the three announced top news. This is absolutely crazy.
The SCOTUS Lewis v. City Of New Orleans 1974 case is also relevant as it is about the limits of free speech versus the limits of the police power: I found it: link to supreme.justia.com
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From the St Petersburg Times, an astute practical analysis:
Cops and turning the other cheek
By Robyn E. Blumner, Times Columnist
In Print: Sunday, August 2, 2009
Salud. L’Chaim. Cheers. Whatever the toast, the beer summit seems to have engendered a detente between Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police. Forgive me for prolonging the controversy over Gates’ arrest by Crowley, but as I see it, people have been focusing on the wrong thing. The issue is not so much race or class but the law itself.
Let’s just say for argument’s sake that Gates did raise his voice to Crowley and call the man a racist and talk about his mama. So? You should see my hate mail. Crowley got it mild.
People call me all manner of names, emphasizing colorful pejoratives associated with my Jewish heritage and female gender, but I don’t think for a moment they should be arrested for their lack of couth. Nasty vitriol from certain types of readers comes with the territory.
Ask any woman about the insulting, sexualized comments and gestures she gets when walking down a city street. It’s all part of living in a society where free speech is protected. In other words, any police officer who can’t stand being angrily berated should find another line of work.
But we know that police are human. Some of them, including apparently Crowley, will resort to their trump cards of handcuffs and state authority when being affronted. The problem is that there is a law so vague and broad that police can use it to punish impertinence.
Gates was charged with “disorderly conduct” (a charge later dropped). The courts in Massachusetts have said this statute is violated when a person engages in fighting, threatening, violent or “tumultuous” behavior in public. Crowley even used the term “tumultuous” in his police report to describe Gates’ conduct. Its inherent vagueness invites police to use it as a catchall when there is nothing else to charge.
Back in 1972, one of the most clear-eyed civil libertarians to ever sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, wrote a decision invalidating a vagrancy ordinance from Jacksonville.
He said the ordinance violated due process and was “void for vagueness.” “All persons,” Douglas wrote, “are entitled to be informed as to what the state commands or forbids.” But the ordinance was so broad that it failed to give a person of average intelligence notice of what conduct violates it. This, Douglas warned, “encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions.”
Bingo. That’s just what’s wrong with disorderly conduct laws. There is no way to know ahead of time what conduct will land one in handcuffs.
Stories abound about the abuse of these statutes.
They are used to stifle protests, such those in Miami in 2003 where union members and elderly protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct during the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial meetings — charges that were later dropped.
They are used to punish people who annoy public officials, such as the case of Greg Kachka, a disabled veteran, who was charged last year with disorderly conduct for making a gun gesture toward officials from the village of Island Lake, Ill., during a public hearing. Again the charges were dropped.
And most frequently, disorderly conduct statutes are abused by police in what University of South Florida criminology professor Lorie Fridell describes as “contempt of cop” situations. “(The laws give) police way too much power and allow them to intervene with arrest for verbal abuse of state agents,” Fridell says. “Police need to be able to put up with people yelling at them.”
Eugene O’Donnell, professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says disorderly conduct statutes encompass so much conduct that “the law becomes (the cops’) gut reaction to where somebody crosses their line.”
True freedom is the right to question authority, boisterously and even offensively, and yet be left alone. Living under a law that essentially punishes any conduct that a police officer doesn’t like is no freedom at all. It condemns us all to the whims of police officer pique.
In the Dickensian telling of the Gates/Crowley affair, the law is a ass.
Guys, c’mon, some of these remarks are going too far. What you may or may not know is that colleagues in academia are often called on to support or blurb a colleague’s book, even when (usually, actually) he or she hasn’t read the book. You and I may agree that Prof. Finkelstein totally exposed Derschowitz’s book, but that doesn’t make Gates a bad guy. Or rather, it does, but no worse than virtually every other member of academia when it comes to settling these things.
Gates sees anti-semitism everywhere but he didn’t see this: link to field-negro.blogspot.com
He sounds like our ‘community leaders’ – slimy opportunists.
To some extent, sure. Everyone knows that, or should. But it doesn’t mean “the ivy league” as an undifferentiated mass is a bunch of whores. It just means, right or wrong, that there’s solidarity among academics. You may not like that, or resent it, or want to change it. But it shouldn’t surprise you.
At the same time, I wouldn’t quite call this hypocrisy. I’m sure Prof. Gates really thinks there is anti-Semitism in the world, and probably wants to help combat it. He just may not know the particulars of the history of Israel. That’s no different than people joining in solidarity over any cause that they aren’t especially informed about, but which they think they should support for whatever personal or ideological reasons. To call him a “house negro”, as someone did above, is attributing his all-too-human motivations to some sort of servile racist motivation, and it’s sad.
You make good points, but I think you take them too far. I doubt Gates could be quite so ignorant about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the way it impacts on domestic politics as he would have to be to praise Dershowitz in good faith. It might be right that Harvard academics stick together even if it involves hypocrisy, but that doesn’t make it any less ugly. As for speaking out against anti-semitism, if he doesn’t know that critics of Israel are often falsely accused of anti-semitism than it is a case of deliberate blindness.
On the Crowley/Gates issue, there’s no reason why one can’t criticize both men, but I don’t want to get into that issue in any detail.
It’s not so much that he doesn’t know the particulars of the I-P scenario over the decades, as it is he does know what’s good good to know for his career. Same as Obama. Eichmann the careerist is a universal figure.
Skip Gates has made a career of putting Jewish interests ahead of those of his own people. Tony Martin:
“Whenever the other folks have wanted anybody to beat the rest of the race over the head with, Brer Gates has been on the scene, like an HNIC machine. They gave him an unprecedented full page op-ed in the New York Times to attack the Nation of Islam’s Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. This op-ed was actually typeset in the shape of a Star of David. There is no evidence that Gates even read the book, but he pulled together some platitudes attacking it anyway. When Black folk in Toronto were arrested protesting the revival of the racist Broadway musical Showboat, they flew Gates up to take the Jewish line against the Black protesters. (In the original Broadway production Paul Robeson, who the press is crying crocodile tears over these days, sang “Niggers All Work on the Mississippi” in the show’s hit song, “Ole Man River.”)”
link to blacksandjews.com
Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to Professor Tony Martin.
I think the most serious damage done in this whole incident is thinking that the issue can be swept under the rug with a beer. You know, after Antebellum slavery there was an entire period after the reconstruction soldier left all the way up to WW2, where excuses like “disorderly conduct” were used to round up blacks and re-enslave them through debt peonage. The period is so vast, and so severe that it is the primary reason for migration of the black population to the North (and not much better treatment). The only thing that stopped this process was the prospect of the “enemy” during WW2 taking advantage of the treatment of the black population.
To think that this can be swept away by a beer is tantamount to thinking you can kill an elephant with a pea shooter. If you think this has passed than I recommend you visit the local prison industrial complex and see who the majority of the inmates are, which is nothing but a testimony to the deep currents of racism beneath the structure of “law and order.”
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
While you are at it, you might check out where the police force originates. If you do not know the beginning of the police department, you certainly are not going to be able to understand the consequent acts –
BAD BOYZ, WHATCHA GONNA DO?
Just a recommendation
Oh, one other link which I think is informative –
INTERVIEW