Chris Hedges is blackballed by Penn after likening ISIS to Israel

Chris Hedges was invited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania. Then he likened Israel to ISIS, and got disinvited. At Truthdig (12/21), he reports this latest scandal:

I had been invited to talk next April 3 at the University of Pennsylvania at a peace conference sponsored by the International Affairs Association, but last week after Truthdig published my column “ISIS—the New Israel” the lecture agency that set up the event received this email from Zachary Michael Belnavis, who is part of the student group:

“We’re sorry to inform you that we don’t think that Chris Hedges would be a suitable fit for our upcoming peace conference. We’re saying this in light of a recent article he’s written in which he compares the organization ISIS to Israel (here’s the article in question). In light of this comparison we don’t believe he would be suitable to a co-existence speaker based on this stance he’s taken.”

Being banned from speaking about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, especially at universities, is familiar to anyone who attempts to challenge the narrative of the Israel lobby. This is not the first time one of my speaking offers has been revoked and it will not be the last. However, the charge of Belnavis and the International Affairs Association that I do not believe in coexistence between the Palestinians and Israel is false. I oppose violence by either party. I have condemned Hamas rocket attacks as war crimes. And I support Israel’s right to exist within the pre-1967 borders.

Here’s a portion of Hedges’s December 15th piece titled “ISIS–the new Israel”:

Its quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948. Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, to create Israel. Antagonistic ISIS and Israeli states, infected by religious fundamentalism, would be irreconcilable neighbors. This is a recipe for apocalyptic warfare. We provided the ingredients.

Bringing the Debate to YouHedges’s banning is a reminder that none of the rules apply when it comes to Israel. Americans are allowed to mock and satirize any country we like– or even make a movie about assassinating a foreign dictator, and the president will stand up for you against efforts to suppress it– but don’t touch a hair on Israel’s chinny chin chin. So Ari Roth is gone from the theater company he built at the DC Jewish Community Center because he dared to broach the Nakba, and at Penn, an intellectual is blacklisted because of his criticism of Israel’s origins in ethnic cleansing and its constitutional failure to separate church and state– a great American principle. This is McCarthyism, on a broader scale than the original in the ’50s. Today on WNYC radio, Brian Lehrer argued that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 prediction of the end of history has been proven wrong in recent years by the rise of ISIS and radical Islam, also by Iran’s history since its revolution. All these political conditions are a contradiction of liberal democracy, Lehrer said. Well jeez, if you are going to speak about religious states, why not address the one in your back pocket, Israel, which surely has helped to sow the seeds of apocalyptic nation-building in the Middle East. It’s not just the Israel lobby that effects this silence. It’s western guilt over the Holocaust and the Jewish question in Europe that keeps Israel a sacred cow. Major spiritual damage there. So shouldn’t Penn be hosting Chris Hedges to talk about this kind of thing?

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“Brian Lehrer argued that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 prediction of the end of history has been proven wrong in recent years by the rise of ISIS and radical Islam, also by Iran’s history since its revolution.”

Almost laughed out loud at this. Why did anyone anywhere ever take Fukuyama’s absurd notion seriously?

My guess is that Max B. won’t be invited to Penn, either. The hypocrisy continues apace. The good news is that MW and others are here to stay, and Chris Hedges can’t and won’t be silenced. In the old days, a “banning” would effectively cut off debate and information sharing. They are being exposed for what they are now…
Thanks, Phil.

I’m going to re-post this in case anyone missed it over the holiday celebrations. It’s the gift that keeps on giving to me, anyway. I shared it with many over the past couple of days with resultant peals of laughter and disbelief. From the Dersh:

“Nobody should be surprised that the dictatorial ruler of North Korea would want to censor a film that offended him, or even that he would feel entitled to break the law by threatening reprisals against the offenders. His actions emulate those of hard-left feminists, radical Muslims, university administrators, and others who seek to prevent the publication or distribution of material they deem offensive.

I recall an incident several years ago when radical feminists fired bullets through the windows of a Harvard Square bookstore to protest its sale of Playboy Magazine. I also recall being physically threatened by a group called “Dykes on Bikes” – a feminist motorcycle gang – for providing legal representation of alleged pornographers.

Then there is radical Islamic censorship that has become far more deadly. When some radical Muslims were offended by Theo Van Gogh’s film “Submission,” which exposed Islam’s demeaning views toward women, Van Gogh was murdered in cold blood and his co-producer’s life threatened by a Fatwa. Salman Rushdie had to go into hiding when a Fatwa was issued against him and his book, “The Satanic Verses.” The Yale University Press, fearful of threats of violence, censored the actual cartoons depicting Mohammed from a book about that subject, following violent reaction to the publication of the cartoons in Scandinavia.

More recently, radical anti-Israel students tried to get SodaStream products banned from Harvard dining halls, because they were offended by the “micro-aggression” represented by the location of the company’s factory beyond Israel’s Green Line. So instead of simply not drinking the product themselves, they tried to prevent everyone else from drinking it or even seeing its name!

The National Office of Amnesty International recently rescinded an invitation I had received from the Columbia University branch of the organization because they were offended by some of my views. And several universities, including Brandeis, rescinded offers of honorary degrees from proposed recipients because some students regarded their views as offensive. Other deserving candidates have been passed over for fear of offending some.

We live in an age in which censoring material that is deemed offensive by some is becoming widely accepted, especially among young people on the left.

There are, of course, major differences between using criminal means (violence, hacking, threats) and using arguably lawful means (speech codes, rescinding invitations) to achieve the censorship of offending material, but the results may be similar: self-censorship.

In my book “Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law,” published last year, I predicted that “self-censorship that results from fear of violent responses” will give “those who threaten violence an effective veto over what can be published in the United States.” Unfortunately, events since I wrote those words have confirmed their accuracy.

So why are we surprised when a foreign dictator tries to achieve what mainstream Americans – and indeed mainstream leftists around the globe – are trying to achieve: namely the “right” to be free from being offended.

This alleged “right” is, of course, in direct conflict with the most basic of rights in any democracy: the right to express views deemed offensive by some, and the corollary right to hear or see such views.

So if we really want any right to delegitimize what the North Korean dictator is ostensibly trying to do to us, we should begin at home: by delegitimizing the efforts of our own citizens to censor material that they find offensive.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.633631

Soldier on, Mr. Hedges~ lots of us have your back!

It’s never correct to object to a mere comparison of one thing to another (“Are you comparing Jesus to Hitler!”). Any two things will have differences otherwise they would be one thing. But any two things (the Pythagorean theorem and the Mississippi River) will have similarities (an infinite number actually), both were discovered more than two years ago, for example. So yes, Israel and ISIS can be compared, they both have killed Arabs and both have women members and both (as Hedges writes) are driven by fundamentalist religious convictions. And yes, Hitler and Jesus were similar, they both were human and both had followers.

“Brian Lehrer argued that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 prediction of the end of history has been proven wrong in recent years by the rise of…”

The sun on each new day? Didn’t count on that, did you Francis?

“don’t touch a hair on Israel’s chinny chin chin” should be “speak the truth”