This is Anti-Semitism: True or False?

Professor Robinson deserves a full apology from the University. The University knuckled under to the ADL and other groups who don't want free speech to exist in the University. They want to be the ones in charge of what speech is permitted. And that definitely means no speech that is remotely critical of Israel.

World wide Israel has lost much of it's good will. The attack on Gaza will go down as the beginning of the end of Israel. Robinson was right to shine a light on this issue for his students.

Give it a rest Saltzman - your virulent bias against anything the Israeli government does is showing. Robinson is not going to get an apology and he doesn't deserve one. The debate has gone on here and elsewhere for a long time - no point in repeating it yet again - let's see what the University decides. My guess is no action against him but a suggestion he refrain from so blatantly subjecting his students to his personal political views in this way in the future, without any effort to discuss or teach them.

gaviota - Israel turned Gaza over to the Palestinians lock stock and barrel years ago but rather than using the billions in aid that was showered on them by the US and others to do anything positive for the Palestinian people, Hamas and the Palestinians chose to turn Gaza into a base from which they launched thousands of rockets into Israel, indiscriminately targeting innocent civilians on farms and villages, and to send suicide bombers across the border into Israel to slaughter innocent people going about their daily lives in cafes, schools and on buses. You apparently are untroubled by any of that, would deny the Israelis the right to do anything to halt such crimes, and instead choose to whine about the poor Gazans who have no one but themselves to blame for what followed. (Please spare me the nonsense about "proportional response" and think about the realities rather than mouthing the standard party line.

I'm sorry Justice, but you are just plain wrong. The people in Gaza and the West Bank are under military occupation by Israel, and they are barricaded in by walls. They have tunnels to bring in water, food and medical supplies which are constantly being bombed by Israel. Thousands of innocent people are killed and many believe Israel is slowly committing genocide against the Palestinians. What about this is NOT like a concentration camp?? Even Republican Congressional Representative Ron Paul recently compared Gaza to a concentration camp. I'm sure you will come up with a couple of differences, but it's really not that far off.

Israel took a lot of land from the Palestinians, about 10 feet, the Israelis gave back an inch and continued their military occupation and inhuman treatment of the Palestinians. If you are going to militarily occupy a group of people, then you HAVE TO ACCEPT that there is going to be blowback. That is the REALITY of the situation. I don't blame Jewish people, I blame the Israeli government for their cruel treatment over the years.

You want to talk about terrorism?? Do you know anything about IRGUN? They were a Jewish terrorist organization in Israel back in the 1940s, blowing up Arabs. I wonder where the Palestinians learned terrorism from, hmmmm??? Because I don't remember them blowing up people around them before the Jewish terrorist organization arrived. That isn't anti-semetic, it's documented fact.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.h...

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.h...

I have nothing against Jewish people and hope that they can learn to live in peace with the Palestinians, but it's NOT going to happen by militarily occupying their land. EVER. That is a pipe dream and you need to wake up.

I am also appalled by your lack of willingness for this professor to engage in free speech.

loon - you are wrong on all counts. The walls you view as "barricading" the Palestinians in were erected in order to keep suicide bombers out of Israel - sorry, but that's what you get for years of sneaking across the border to murder hundreds of innocent Israelis over the years, something which you fail to recognize or address. Even Egypt doesn't want these murderers coming into their country and tightly regulates its border with Gaza.

Unlike Gaza which was turned over to the Palestinians years ago, other arab lands like the Golan Heights, etc. remain occupied because they still refuse to end hostilities with Israel and recognize its right to exist. That occupation came about after the combined armies of Israel's arab neighbors attacked Israel in 1967. The Israelis drove them back and occupied various territories on its borders from which war had been waged, including the Golan Heights, Gaza and the Sinai. After the war, Israel returned occupied land to any country - like Egypt, to which Israel returned the Sinai - that was willing to make peace and recognize Israel's right to exist. Syria has refused to do so as have Hamas and the Palestinians generally and until they are prepared to do so, Israel is not going to unilaterally return land to them - particularly after their disastrous experience in unilaterally turning over Gaza to the Palestinians who promptly used the opportunity and proximity to begin launching thousands of rockets onto Israel farms and villages with the express intention of randomly murdering innocent civilians.
You are very naive if you believe the tunnels are being used to bring in food and water - the tunnels are between Egypt and Gaza and the Palestinians use them to smuggle in rockets and weapons which is why they have to use tunnels rather than openly bringing in things like food, medicine and water - even the Egyptians acknowledge that reality.

As for Robinson, no one is trying to deny his right to free speech - I simply do not want him using my kids as a captive audience on which to dump his hateful personal views about Gaza or anything else in the world. He can stand on a soapbox anywhere he wants and say whatever he likes but when a teacher enters the classroom, he has certain responsibilities to his students and the university that go along with his right to academic freedom. Robinson continues to posture and preen about his actions and motives and has changed his story several times now - I am not buying it.

"The walls...were erected in order to keep suicide bombers out of Israel...."

You know, like the walls we build around criminals that we call prisons. That way, society is protected from the criminal element. Since every Palestinian has been tried and convicted of terrorist acts against Jews by a court of her peers, it was necessary to construct a vast prison to keep the criminal element under tight control.

Why did Germans build (eleven miles of) walls around the Warsaw ghetto? Germans needed "livingspace," so they forced Jews off their property into ghettos. Jews didn't appreciate this and various resistance groups, such as Hashomer Hatzair, took the fight to the German occupiers. If asked, many German officers would explain that containing resistance to German aggression (although they probably would explain it that way) necessitated building walls around it. The Germans set up watchtowers and checkpoints to control what went in and came out of the ghetto. There were Jews who dug tunnels under the walls to sneak in supplies and weapons. Occasionally, Jewish militants would leave the ghetto and carry out violent acts of resistance against German targets. In response, Germans periodically entered the ghetto to put down the resistance. Organized Jewish combat teams, such as the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, fiercely resisted the actions of the vastly superior German military, but in the end the resistance was put down. Had the Jews known their place, the Nazis would no doubt tell us, there would have been little need to do any of this. Indeed, the Germans developed collaborationist rule inside the ghetto to foster hegemonic control over the Jewish people there.

This case, when compared to other cases, illustrates many basic truths about power and domination. Here are two of them: First, those who dominate others recognize that a proportion of the victim population tends to resist domination, so the oppressors have to be prepared to use extraordinary violence. Second, those who dominate others typically rationalize such extraordinary violence by blaming the victim. For example, in North America, when the indigenous populations resisted the encroachment of European settlers on Indian lands, the settlers would respond with overwhelming violence so as a demonstrate to others who might resist colonization the consequence of resistance. When asked why settlers used such overwhelming violence, one often heard the rationalization that the Indians were savages who hated civilized values and civilized people, and therefore the settlers were protecting themselves from the violence nature of Indians by herding them onto reservations and periodically massacring them (sometimes on the reservations). None of this denies the brutal nature American Indian resistance often took or the belief by the settlers that God gave them that land.

"...that's what you get for years of sneaking across the border to murder hundreds of innocent Israelis over the years...."

This is forum is turning into a boxing ring!

Justice has successfully distracted everyone from the topic with a rhetoric that suggests the very bias that Ibsaltzman stands accused of!

Truth is a perception, not a fact. A fact cannot be ignored, except by a truth.

I agree with Ibsaltzman. No more BS. Does anyone remember McCarthyism? This professor deserves more than an apology.

He deserves our respect for standing up against the powers that be to protect what we can say or think tomorrow.

Just My Opinion...

wwsword - do you honestly believe the Israelis are trying to exterminate the Palestinians? If so, there is very little room for rational dialogue. The Germans were trying to exterminate the Jewish population - wipe them off the earth wherever they were - round them up, send them to concentration camps by the hundreds of thousands and exterminate them. You can posture and exaggerate all you want but you cannot possibly equate that with the situation in Gaza and to the extent you insist on doing so, you deeply offend Jews everywhere.

I know you believe you are making an argument, but you really aren't. Ask yourself these questions to see where your thought train went off the rails: How does the Judeocide erase the similarities between the Gaza and Warsaw ghettos? Who said these two cases were exactly the same? Why would Zionists need to have as the ultimate goal of their policies the extermination of the Palestinians before any comparison to Nazis could be legitimate?

To Justice:

I won't give it up ever. As a Jewish-American, I am ashamed of the treatment of a fellow Jew, Professor Robinson by so called Jewish organizations who are supposed to protect civil rights, but have turned into mouth pieces for the Israeli government. My post said nothing critical about Israel, though I am a critic of Israel. It was about freedom of speech the right of Professors to present provocative information.

You are being intellectually dishonest - the whole point of the comparison presented in Robinson's e-mail between the actions of the Nazis and of the Israelis is to equate the two. That is the point of the compared images and your attempt to suggest the actions of the Nazis and the Israelis are not being equated is simply nonsense. Your attempt to argue they need not be "exactly the same" is both a tacit admission they are not and a disingenuous attempt feign ignorance of the purpose of the e-mail.

Saltzman - I have read your posts here and elsewhere and I find them to be replete with nothing but hatred and vitriol towards the Israeli government and virtually anything it does. You have long since ceased to be a fair-minded commentator on Israeli-related matters and your degrading claim that "Jewish organizations" like the ADL are simply "mouthpieces" for the Israeli government is both bigoted and offensive - you should be ashamed of yourself for making such a stupid comment. I too am Jewish but I would defend Robinson's right to academic freedom whether or not he is a Jew. However, I am not about to accept without criticism anything he does and in this case, I feel strongly that he failed to fulfill or meet certain obligations which as a university professor, he owed to his students and to the university. I have made clear that I do not believe he should be sanctioned in any respect or even found "guilty" as I don't pretend to know enough about the ins and outs of UCSB's rules and regs to make that judgment but I most certainly do not believe he is owed any apology.

Why should the act of drawing an analogy between the behavior of Zionists and the behavior of Nazis result in the prosecution of the person who drew the analogy? If state actors behave like Nazis, why shouldn't professors point that out to their students? If punishing Robinson for making the analogy is itself rather Nazi-like, then what's wrong with pointing that out, too? If students disagree, then they can object. They're adults.

Now, about the character of the scientific study of history. Of course no two cases are ever exactly the same. How could they be? Who in any of this ever denied the truth of historical specificity? Is it not self-evident that history happens at different times under variable circumstances with different actors? But does the fact of specificity mean historical events don't have similarities? The Judeocide and the Great Calamity are different historical events. Are they incomparable? Apartheid and Jim Crow are different historical systems. Are they incomparable? Comparing cases allows us to identify and illustrate common processes. All science works this way.

Are there no similarities between the experience of Jews and the behavior of the Nazis around and in the Warsaw ghetto and the experience of Palestinians and the behavior of Zionists in the Gaza ghetto? Are we supposed to pretend that the miles of concrete walls, razor-wire fencing, watchtowers, checkpoints, harassment, blockades, malnutrition, massacres, targeted assassinations, collaborators, tunnels, organized resistance, and uprising - all features of the Gaza experience - are not also features of the experience of the Warsaw ghetto?

word - you failed to answer the question - do you honestly believe the Israelis are seeking to exterminate the Palestinians, as the Nazis did the Jews? You fail (or refuse) to recognize that Robinson's e-mail sought to equate the two and therein lies its (and your) intellectual dishonesty and the reason it so offends Jews in particular.

Professor Robinson, a Jew, passed along material prepared by another Jew, thereby presenting to his class a point of view held by many Jews -- such a presentation is well within the bounds of academic freedom, and the university has grossly violated academic principles and procedures in their handling of this case. The involvement of Abraham Foxman and the ADL and was totally inappropriate regardless of its politics; the fact -- known to everyone, especially its supporters, who wholeheartedly approve -- that it is a mouthpiece of the state of Israel is incidental.

Intellectually honest Jews are ashamed of ANY similarity between the treatment of Palestinians by the state of Israel and the treatment of Jews, gypsies, blacks, communists, and many others by the Nazis -- they are ashamed that such a comparison is POSSIBLE. Intellectually honest Jews recognize that pointing out such similarities does not imply that Israel is seeking to eliminate the Palestinians -- that railing against such an implication is a strawman argument, a phony ploy to deflect criticism of Israel's policies and to obscure the realities that these photographs reflect.

"it so offends Jews in particular"

It doesn't offend intellectually honest Jews.

And you, JayB, are not intellectually honest - neither you nor wwsword can bring yourself to admit that the e-mail sent by Robinson equated the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and Israel's objectives re the Palestinians - a claim which is patently absurd to anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty.

BREAKING NEWS:
UCSB TERMINATES CASE AGAINST PROF. WILLIAM I. ROBINSON.

June 24, 2009.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Nearly five months after opening an investigation of University of California sociology professor William I. Robinson for alleged faculty misconduct, university officials abruptly announced today that it has dismissed all charges and terminated the case.
In fact, an Ad Hoc Committee set up by the Academic Senate to investigate the allegations had already reached the conclusion on May 15 that the charges against Robinson were without merit. The Committee is “unanimous in finding that his sending the email is in accord with the principles of academic freedom, especially when teaching a class whose content is the sociology of globalization,” stated the report.
Yet, remarkably, the top-level administration kept these results secret for six more weeks, dragging Robinson deeper into public scrutiny and further tarnishing the university’s own image. It was only on June 24 that executive vice chancellor Gene Lucas informed Robinson, without any explanation for the delay, that he “accepted the findings of the Charges Committee” and terminated the matter.
“Why did the administration wait six more weeks before ending this case,” asked Yousef Baker, of the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom. “The professor faced six more weeks of harassment and disruption of his teaching, and research, while the sense of intimidation among faculty and students only deepened. They owe us an explanation.”

(This is only a part of the long press release that was issued yesterday.)

Hopefully, UCSB will also apologize to Prof. Robinson and commit once and for all to Academic Freedom without surrendering to external political pressures

What wonderful news about Professor Robinson. this was a hatchet job by organizations that don't believe the Constitution, or the rules that govern academics at UCSB applies to them. Fortunately, it looks like justice prevails. A full apology to Professor Robinson is in order, and a commitment by the University to respect the academic freedom of their professors is also in order. The administration should reassure the other professors that they need not fear pressure groups as they teach their students.

No apology is owed Robinson and none will be forthcoming - this matter was handled without formal charges having been brought. The university acted properly upon receiving complaints about Robinson's conduct in sending the e-mail and conducted a preliminary inquiry before deciding charges were not warranted, rather than simply dismissing the complaints in knee-jerk fashion as some would have had them do. The only people guilty of engaging in a "hatchet job" are those like Saltzman, an Israel-hater who insists on smearing what he calls "Jewish organizations" and "mouthpieces" for the Israeli government - a claim unbefitting anyone with a half a brain and an ounce of knowledge about the work ADL has done to fight discrimination on behalf of Jews and non-Jews alike around the world.

"Justice,"

Any reasonably intelligent person recognizes that there is no requirement that Zionists have as their motive the extermination of all Palestinians before any comparison with the behavior of Nazis and the experience of Jews in Warsaw may be made. I've listed numerous empirical similarities. You refuse to deny them because you know they're accurate. Instead you make the absurd demand that Israel's behavior be exactly the same as German's behavior before comparisons can be made (raising the paradox that you can't know this until you compare them). What lies in back of your pathetic attempts to be slippery is the obvious question that arises when one compares the images Robinson sent to his students: Why would the descendants of the victims of the Nazis behave in a similar fashion?

The wrongful actions taken against Palestinians have been in pursuit of the ethnonationalist goals of Zionism. Zionists have colonized and are colonizing Palestine, engaging in widespread ethnic cleansing and oppression of the indigenous people there. This has been admitted to and documented by pro-Israel historians. But we hardly need their confessions. We can see for ourselves the house demolitions and the construction of Jewish settlements and the misery this visits on Palestinians. Although Israel tried to censor the Gaza massacre, we nonetheless know what happened.

The result of deliberate behavior, the Zionists have eliminated most Palestinians in what is now Israel. According to Benny Morris, the mistake of the Zionists is not the crime of ethnic cleansing but their failure to eliminate every single Palestinian from Israel (a desire he says proves Zionism is not an ideology of racial supremacy). The history of Zionists behavior towards Palestinians indicates that the ultimate goal is the incorporation of all of Palestine into Israeli territory. Even if this does not ultimately happen, it is certain that Palestinian territory never mandated to Israel will be incorporated in a greater Israel state.

Genocide is killing and/or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group, as well as deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Driving people off their land, razing their towns and cities, ghettoizing them, building walls around them, dividing their families, restricting the flow of needed supplies to their communities, periodically invading their neighborhoods and massacring them, destroying their civilian infrastructure is bringing about the physical destruction of them, if not in whole, then definitely in part.

wwsword - you are now starting to reveal what I gather are your true colors, ranting about Zionists (you could be a speech-writer for Ahmadinejad or bin Laden) and throwing around ridiculous charges about the evil Zionists seeking to "colonize" the Palestinians and carry out "ethnic cleansing". I have vastly over-estimated you - really, how could anyone with a modicum of intelligence or intellectual integrity state that "the Zionists have eliminated most Palestinians in what is now Israel". The fact is they are today living in and citizens of Israel.
As to the issue at hand, Robinson's e-mail, I would say only that you can repeat your lame argument about non-equivalent comparisons as many times as you like but it simply doesn't wash for the reasons I have tried politely to explain to you - the purpose of the e-mail (which Robinson didn't himself write, as I understand it) was to EQUATE what the Nazis did and what Israel did. Your vitriolic and hateful comments about "evil Zionists" engaged in ethnic cleansing and colonization reveal that you too equate the Nazis and the Israelis and explain why you strongly support Robinson's e-mail rather than being truly exorcized about academic freedom. Your refusal to admit the objective and the real message conveyed by the e-mail now makes sense and further confirms your dishonesty, quite apart from your extremist views about Zionism, Israel, etc. - ultimately you are simply a hateful mis-informed zealot.

So you are now denying the existence of Zionism, the ethnonationalist ideology advocating the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and Jewish control over Palestine? Zionism is something Ahmadinejad has imagined? This is a very strange denial coming from somebody so dedicated to the uncritical defense of Israel. I would think you would be glorifying Zionism, not denying its existence.

Equally strange is your denial that Zionists have been for the past century colonizing Palestine. Have we been imagining the past century? All those Jewish colonies throughout Palestine, built after the indigenous populations were driven away, do not actually exist? Al-Nakba is a myth? (You don't know what that is, do you?) The Jewish settlers really didn't drive hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their property in 1948, expelling them from Israel, and confiscating their property?

Strange indeed. Why did the United Nations in 1948 recognize the expulsion of Arabs from their land and demand that Israel allow any Arab wishing to return to do so, as well as compensate those who did not wish to return? Is this because there was no ethnic cleansing? Odd that the United Nation would based policy on something that never happened. (You've never wondered what all this business about "right of return" means?)

How is it that Palestinian historians, such as Rhashid Khalidi, and Israeli historians, for example, Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, can document ethnic cleansing in Palestine when it really didn't happen? These scholars claim that have identified around 400 villages and towns that were evacuated and destroyed by Israelis. Abu Sitta finds that the number is greater than 500. Israeli settlements were built on top of them. You don't know about this? Do you know about Plan Dalet, devised by the Haganah (the forerunner of the IDF), the "prime directive" of which, according to Ben-Gurion, in a letter to Haganah commanders in May 1948, was "the cleansing of Palestine.”

I am not going to assume that you are an apologist for ethnonationalist oppression and terror. I am going to assume that you're ignorant of history. So I will encourage you to study history so that you may become enlightened. It may not change your mind, but at least then you can own your side with full knowledge of its crimes and motives.

"And you, JayB, are not intellectually honest - neither you nor wwsword can bring yourself to admit that the e-mail sent by Robinson equated the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and Israel's objectives re the Palestinians"

It's intellectually dishonest to insist that anyone who doesn't agree with you is intellectually dishonest. And, as I said, attacking Robinson's email as implying that Israel is trying to exterminate the Palestinians is a strawman attack -- it doesn't imply any such thing; that you insist on inferring it is simply a dishonest rhetorical ploy. You keep repeating your claims and ignoring all counterarguments -- calling you intellectually dishonest is generous, and it's pointless to waste anymore time on someone so fixed in his views.

"ultimately you are simply a hateful mis-informed zealot."

Ironic coming from a clearly misinformed zealot whose postings are brimming with hate.