In two weeks Columbia/Barnard Hillel will have a program called "South Africa Update" at its lavish center on 115th Street, in connection with the "Helen Suzman Exhibition" at Barnard/Columbia. The Helen Suzman exhibition honors a Jewish South African who was a leader in the fight against apartheid. The "South Africa Update" program will feature Johnny Moloto, deputy chief of mission of the South African Embassy, introduced by a fellow from the American Jewish World Service (which is dedicated to major global problems but says nothing about Gaza).
Last week Columbia/Barnard Hillel issued a statement denouncing the charge that Israel is practicing apartheid in the West Bank.
It is therefore slanderous to suggest that Israel is an apartheid state when Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East. While Israel– as with all nations–is far from perfect–to call for divestment from Israel equates it with Apartheid South Africa, an accusation that… is factually inaccurate and malicious.
[P.S. I participated in the great leap forward of young Jews in the last generation, on Ivy League campuses. We prized our intelligence and wit. We thought of ourselves as free thinkers, and did pretty good at that. No one was standing over us, telling us to say that Black is White. Thus does the Israel lobby destroy the great human capital of American Jewish tradition.]
If that’s the best they can do, their minds are definitely wasted.
Phil: You may not have participated in the pro-Israel brainwashing while in college, but according to Donna Nevel, it was already happening amongst (some) Jewish students: “As a college student in the 1970s, I defined myself as a socialist Zionist and attended Israeli consulate-sponsored “hasbara” workshops.”
I am not old enough to know for sure, but this tell me that perhaps the college campus hasbara movement is not so recent.
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At Columbia University in the early eighties I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Zionism, etc….
It seems like nothing has changed at Columbia since I was at graduate school there. The same self-congratulatory Zionist bullshit. I still remember the hate I received for having Yasser Arafat’s photo on the wall of my studio, especially since 65% of the students in the program were Jewish.
Hillel has always been a brainwashing unit of Zionism.
The creation of Israel has led to really dumbing down of Jewish thought in the USA.
Could the Helen Suzman exhibition be any more hypocritical?
Me too, Larry. I was a grad student at Columbia then too. I saw what you’re saying.
But I didn’t REALLY realize it until seven years ago, when I woke up.
This was from 1981 to 1983. Ironically there was one young woman who understood. She was German Jewish born in South Africa. Her grandparents had died in the Holocaust and her mother as an orphan had been sent to South Africa after WW II. She also studied with Edward Said at that time at Columbia as well.
The photo of Arafat in my studio pissed off a lot of Jewish students. One woman screamed about how corrupt Arafat and the PLO were. I remember thinking to myself “And how does this change the situation vis-à-vis the plight of the Palestinians?” It was a total “Hillel” response to reality.
It’s amazing to see Zionists lionize any Jew they can put their hands on, and in the same breath totally denounce every native South African who has compared the apartheid they lived under to what Palestinians endure (and often, characterize the latter to be worse).
Talk about “white man’s burden.”
It is therefore slanderous to suggest that Israel is an apartheid state when Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East.
You can’t get a more Hasbara-esque response than that.
“You can’t suggest that the IDF is a terrorist unit when it is the most moral army in the world.”
This isn’t constructive debate, this is simply brainwashing and it displays an astounding lack of the understanding of the basics of argumentative logic.
Whether the only one or not, Israel is a democracy in the middle east.
If there are imperfections in their laws and in the manner that they apply those laws, that is the content area of dissent that is oriented to reform.
And, certainly it is a region in which democratic values and democratic forms are rare.
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RICHARD WITTY- Are you not aware that for Israel to become a nominal democracy for Israeli Jews (Jewish and democratic), necessitated the Nakba to murder, terrorize, and ethnically cleanse the native Palestinians so that the Jews would be the overwhelming majority of those remaining to permit the democratic trappings of the Jewish state? Are you not aware that due to the higher birthrate of the native Palestinians, that to deal with the “demographic problem” confronting the “Jewish and democratic” state essentially requires some form of ongoing ethnic cleansing? Are you not aware that in lauding the democratic nature of the Jewish state you are in effect supporting ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians?