The New McCarthyism

28Oct07

A moral giant of our times:

“From my experience in South Africa I know that truth-telling is hard. It has grave consequences for one’s life and reputation. It stretches one’s faith, tests one’s capacity to love, and pushes hope to the limit. At times, the difficulty of this work can make you wonder if people are right about you, that you are a fool.

No one takes up this work on a do-gooder’s whim. It is not a choice. One feels compelled into it. Neither is it work for a little while, but rather for a lifetime – and for more than a lifetime. It is a project bigger than any one life. This long view is a source of encouragement and perseverance. The knowledge that the work preceded us and will go on after us is a fountain of deep gladness that no circumstance can alter.

Nothing, however, diminishes the fear and trembling that accompany speaking the truth to power in love. An acute awareness of fallibility is a constant companion in this task, but because nothing is more important in the current situation than to speak as truthfully as one can, there can be no shrinking from testifying to what one sees and hears.

What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people’s souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.”

Conversely, a moral midget:

“Desmond Tutu is an anti-Semite who hates Jews and is obsessed with demeaning and smearing the Jewish state”.

The Zionist lobby is becoming increasingly erratic in its attacks on critics of Israel (it’s even targeting Ha’aretz! – what’s next: ‘The Israel Lobby attacks Israel for pro-Palestinian bias‘?). I’d like to think Philip Weiss is correct to conclude that this is actually a sign of desperation, as the lobby realises it is losing the argument – certainly, Walt and Mearsheimer appear to have given others the courage to speak out against it, which is a significant and positive consequence of the the publication of their book (regardless of the flaws in its thesis). Weiss paid the $40 entrance fee to attend a recent CAMERA conference on “Jewish defamers of Israel” (similar in spirit to the infamous S.H.I.T list), and found it “enormously encouraging”:

“For one thing, the group was almost all older generation. I put the average age at 62. Even the snacks were out of date, all brownies and sweet muffins and cupcakes with a quarter inch of icing. This group is more out of the mainstream than I am!…

The CAMERA people are losing and they know it. Near the end Cynthia Ozick was asked how we should go about delegitimizing the delegitimizers of the Jewish state and she sighed and said, ?It?s hopeless.? Alvin Rosenfeld, the author of the disgraceful report on Jewish anti-Semitism put out by the American Jewish Committee, was mildly more optimistic. He said exactly what I say: “We are in a furious intellectual struggle. There is a war of ideas going on… it won’t end quickly…. It is steady work.” And it is “serious and worrisome” inasmuch as these ideas may now “enter the mainstream.” Amen.”

Still, there is absolutely no reason to become complacent. The lobby may have lost the battle over Tutu, but the fact remains that the sympathies of most Americans in the Israel/Palestine conflict remain with Israel, due in no small part to media bias and misinformation. Furthermore, the lobby’s chilling effect on academic discourse is still very much intact. As Larry Cohler-Esses writes,

“Under pressure from these assaults, some academic institutions buckle and a professor’s career is derailed; in other cases it is permanently stained. More insidious, even when tenure puts an academic beyond the reach of his or her assailants, more vulnerable junior faculty and grad students take note. “There certainly is a sense among faculty and grad students that they’re being watched, monitored,” said Zachary Lockman, president of the Middle East Studies Association. “People are always looking over their shoulder, feeling that whatever they say–in accurate or, more likely, distorted form–can end up on a website. It definitely has a chilling effect.”

This is the modus operandi of the New McCarthyism. It targets a new enemy for our era: Muslims, Arabs and others in the Middle East field who are identified as stepping over an unstated line in criticizing Israel, as radical Islamists, as just plain radical or as in some way sympathetic to terrorists. Its purveyors include Campus Watch, run by Arab studies scholar Daniel Pipes; the David Project, supported by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation; and David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine (in October Horowitz organized an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on campuses across the nation)…

“I’m worried about untenured professors trying to get tenure,” said Doumani, co-chair of the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom. “I’m worried about entire departments saying, ‘We need people in Middle East positions, but we’re not going to hire certain kinds of people. It involves too much headache, too much risk.’ How do you quantify that? You can’t. But it’s going around. I can tell you, it’s a real issue.”"

Read the rest here. Indeed, the lobby’s influence has gone international. First, Alan Dershowitz, along with British lawyer Anthony Julius and others, threatened to “devastate and bankrupt” anyone thinking of boycotting Israeli universities in protest against the brutal occupation. They succeeded – the UCU leadership backed down from the proposal, in defiance of its members wishes, on spurious “legal” grounds. Dershowitz, apparently unsatisfied with forcing DePaul university to deny Norman Finkelstein tenure, was also apparently behind the recent decision of the Oxford Union to drop Finkelstein from a debate on the one-state settlement. As academic Ghada Karmi writes,

“All this is understandable, but it is exactly the wrong response. Appeasing bullies like Dershowitz will not stop them. It will rather encourage them to go further. The question is, do we in this country want a McCarthyite witch hunt? If not, then we must confront the bullies and expose them for the intellectual terrorists they are, bent on destroying the values of a free society. To do otherwise will invite the fate of all repressed people, cowed and intimidated, hating their tormentors, but too afraid to say so.”

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian, US   |  2 Comments
Tags: academic freedom, Free Speech, lobby, McCarthyism, Norman Finkelstein