This week the Boston University community will face a great challenge: Israel “Apartheid” Week. I say challenge, because the organizations running and supporting this activity are engaged in one of the most astounding acts of moral hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty in the young annals of the 21st century.
Begin with hypocrisy: Palestinian spokesmen and their supporters accuse Israel of “apartheid,” and of “behaving like Nazis.” And yet Hamas and Fatah daily incite Palestinians to genocidal hatred that borrows liberally from Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. If these folks had their way, Apartheid (or legalized racialist segregation) would be the milder fate that Palestinian “governments” have in store for their Jewish minority. The solution more eagerly sought by groups like democratically elected Hamas, is extermination – just read their charter. Delegitimizing Israel (the purpose of the Apartheid accusation) is merely a tactic in this longer-term strategy.
The second group of players in IAW is those “progressives” who disseminate this vicious hypocrisy. At best, such people might plead ignorance: We had no idea that Palestinian TV – including its children’s programs - regularly incites to genocide; we had no idea that whenever the Palestinians have had power that they oppressed their own people and massacred their neighbors.
Even then, if they are not guilty of moral hypocrisy, they are guilty of intellectual dishonesty. The mantra of “human rights,” with which the pro-Palestinian community has wrapped itself conveniently, forgets the staggering violations of human rights in their Arab and Muslim states, while obsessing over every detail of Israeli violations of Palestinian rights. Take the maximal case that the Palestinians make against Israel – believe every accusation no matter how unlikely – and it does not hold a candle to what Arab power holders do to fellow Arabs, a fortiori what they would do to Israelis if only they could.
The challenge of IAW to the university community, then, is double. On the matter of intellectual honesty, the refusal of most scholars to address the Arab media’s dissemination of genocidal hatred will go down in history as a postmodern, left-radical “trahison des clercs.” And if our students cannot recognize propaganda –– like the dishonesty of “Occupation 101” with its use of neo-Nazi William Baker to position itself alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. –– we have failed. Note how the organizers of IAW do not organize debates: They can only make their case in a void.
On the matter of moral integrity, this obsession with Israel is a betrayal of human rights. We live in a world in which “soldiers” rape and kill hundreds, even thousands, daily in places like Darfur and Congo, in which states deny the most basic human rights to billions, in which some Arab nations still engage in slavery. How anyone who cares about human rights can spend their time demonizing Israel, the only country in the Middle East that has free speech, free elections, an independent judiciary, rights for women and homosexuals and the most varied population of racial and ethnic types in the world, has problems of depth perception.
If you care about human rights, if apartheid regimes disgust you, if genocidal incitement incenses you, tell the folks running Israel “Apartheid” Week to get a life as real human rights activists. Next year, let’s have a “Human Rights Week,” and see if, in comparison, Israel even makes it on to the top-100 list of violators.
Woe to a civilization in which moral hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty can flourish. Just say “no.”
Richard Landes
Boston University History Department
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