The New York Post, the sensationalistic right-wing daily in New York, is joining the smear campaign against Moustafa Bayoumi, the Brooklyn College professor and the editor of the newly released book titled Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict.
In an opinion piece for the Post, Ronald Radosh, a neo-conservative adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, argues that the Bayoumi book assigned to all incoming freshmen, How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, is “extremely slanted.” Radosh argues that, while it may be legitimate to assign Bayoumi’s book, what’s also needed is “a contrasting opinion, one challenging the view that Americans and New Yorkers in particular are completely Islamaphobic.”
Reading the whole column, it’s clear that underneath all the concern for Brooklyn College students being “indoctrinated” is an aversion that Radosh feels to any airing of criticism against Israel, especially if it comes from an Arab or Palestinian point of view.
Radosh mentions Bayoumi’s associations with Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, without explaining why that is relevant to what he terms the “scandal” at the college. The mention of Said and Khalidi are really a wink and nudge to hard-line supporters of Israel who don’t want to hear Khalidi’s and Said’s perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He also goes after Bayoumi for editing Midnight on the Mavi Marmara, which is about the Israeli attack on the flotilla last May. Radosh labels the book as a ”pro-Islamist” work that includes “selections from such noted foes of Israel as Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Max Blumenthal, Philip Weiss and scores of Arab authors.” Radosh is too polite to really say what he’s thinking, but he apparently thinks there’s a problem with “scores of Arab authors” criticizing the Israeli raid that killed 9 people in international waters.
The reason why it matters that the Post is joining in on the campaign is that the flexing of their Zionist and Islamophobic muscles has power. The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper has played a central role in ginning up anti-Muslim hysteria over the community center near Ground Zero. And it was the Post which brought down Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy.
Watch for the campaign against Bayoumi to heat up in the coming weeks.
This article originally appeared on Alex Kane's blog.
So apparently anti-Semitism didn’t die. It merely metastasized. Or was recycled and rebranded, depending on how you look at it.
Is this what it was like during the last days of the Weimar Republic?
RE: “such noted foes of Israel as Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Max Blumenthal, Philip Weiss and scores of Arab authors” – Radosh
MY COMMENT: Tsk-tsk! A rogues gallery of infamy? And why is Adam H. always slighted? Doesn’t he deserve some of the limelight?
I don’t know where the Post, or AIPAC in particular, get their ideas, but I’ve just finished watching the movie “Good”, Starring Viggo Mortensenin as John Halder the university professor who writes a novel, a work of fiction, about mercy killings.
Set in the 1930s, the movie shows us how the Reich quickly finds out about his book and hires him as a “consultant”. He is given an honorary rank as an S.S. officer and asked to write a paper which argues for the humanitarian aspect of killing the mentally challenged and terminally ill.
Naively at first, he does not realize that the state is going to use his paper in its Orwellian propaganda campaign. He begins to enjoy the attention his novel garners him, as well as the power and privilege it earns him within the high ranks of the Reich. Shaking hands with Joseph Goebbels as he is being introduced to him leaves him enthralled.
In the meantime, his lifelong friend, Maurice Gluckstein, finds himself marginalized and persecuted by the state. Having fought together in the trenches of WWI, Maurice and John Halder’s friendship is quickly tested. John’s work with Hitler’s Reich leaves Maurice frustrated, ashamed and angry.
Soon, Maurice starts to feel the brunt of the regime that which his friend helped empower. Maurice has his license as a practicing psychologist revoked, his house is vandalized, and his possessions and valuable personal artifacts are confiscated by the state. Hence, he is transformed from a respectable, native German-born, free psychologist to a persecuted, unemployed, figuratively voiceless and marginal outsider and an underclass of a man, an animal, in the eyes of the Reich.
The shooting of a Nazi German official at the Paris embassy by an alleged Jew, sets in motion a series of events that results in Jews, gypsies and all the other undesirables being rounded-up and put in camps.
By then, John’s efforts to locate his friend, Maurice, and help him escape Germany are fruitless as he finds Maurice’s apartment empty. Feeling guilty for refusing to help his friend escape Germany earlier while he still could, he sets out to find him through the Gestapo’s well-kept records. Maurice, however, disappeared into the death camps among the millions of other undesirables. John Halder could not locate him.
In the end, we learn that Maurice showed up at John’s house one evening, some several years earlier when John Halder was out assisting the S.S. in rounding up people as riots broke-out. Alas, John’s wife had turned him in to the Gestapo. She did her duty as a good citizen of the state.
Radosh is right. Professor Bayoumi needs to discuss the influence that such neo-conservative Zionists have on Americans and New Yorkers. Had there been no neo-conservative Zionists like Radosh, perhaps Americans and New Yorkers would not have been “completely Islamophobic.”
Essentially, Radosh is saying, “I’m part of the problem, but since I can’t go after Bayoumi on the basis of sound reasoning and logical argumentation, I will attempt to smear him and call him names in hopes that the Islamophobic masses will do the dirty work for me.
This is what political discourse has come to in this country.
Zionist intimidation is all about making people too scared to speak up. “Goldstoned” should be a verb by now.
In an opinion piece for the Post, Ronald Radosh, a neo-conservative adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute,
oh really? would that be the same as this hudson institute?
the last sentence in that blockquote is mine.
On this occasion it is pretty easy to guess from context which country potsherd means by “this country”, but may I suggest that, since this blog has readers and contributors in a number of countries, contributors should name the countries they are referring to.
Somebody should remind the paper and the author that indoctrination by 52 Jewsih organizations ( The State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America
by James Petras / September 1st, 2010
link to dissidentvoice.org
have been going on in the campus for many decades.
“selections from such noted foes of Israel as Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Max Blumenthal, Philip Weiss and scores of Arab authors.”
Wow, that’s some pretty exalted literary company Phil is keeping these days.
We should all be so lucky to get trashed this way. ;-)
Didn’t Rupert Murdoch’s father marry into a very wealthy orthodox Jewish family? And didn’t Rupert’s mother devout raise him in that faith? Don’t bother to look at wikipedia for the answer. Inquiring minds want to know, given the power of Fox News Channel, NY Post, WSJ etc. All the talking heads there sing the same tune when it comes to Israel.
“Mideast peace within reach” – President Obama, in a statement yesterday
Other than the powers that be, within reach of whom? Definitely not the almost seven billion human inhabitants of planet earth, nor us Americans, and most certainly nor the people whose struggle to regain their birthright homeland, Palestine, for one moment now has the attention of the entire world. No, Mr. President, anything that comes out of this meeting has to be bogus, what with the selected Mideast despots and puppets in attendance, not to mention, AIPAC & friends hovering over them, representing, as they do, only themselves and their interests? What’s more more it’ll disappear down the drain even faster than did the Oslo Agreement. Reason being that the Palestinian people, aware that once again they’ve been sold out, will rise up en masse and overthrow their leaders, with the rest of the Mideast following suit, as per the domino effect that the collapse of Communist East Germany had on the Soviet Empire. Except this time it’ll be Empire USA taking the big fall, and not just in the Mideast. Of course it doesn’t have to go this potentially doomsday route (assuming here that Empire USA stays the course in its mad dash to Armageddon). After all there is a peaceful way to resolve the Mideast conflict, which is for Jewish colonizer and colonized Palestinian to sit down together for the purpose of working things out on the basis of one equals one with liberty and justice for all. And there is no alternative, not if doomsday is to be averted.
Mitchel’s first press speech yesterday following commencement of the peace talks told us procedure and substance are entangled. His way to saying he would not talk about the substance of anything discussed triparty.