US President Donald Trump with an executive order regarding anti-Semitism at a Hanukkah reception in the East Room of the White House Dec 11, 2019. Photo: AFP
Gerald A. Honigman | Exclusive to Ekurd.net
A good friend asked me if I ever asked folks like “Progressive” professors—especially Jewish ones—why they oppose such things as President Trump’s potentially very positive decision to issue a new Executive Order on December 11th regarding aiding and abetting antisemitism, in all of its overt and camouflaged forms, in academia. The following is a result of that conversation…
President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order on December 11, 2019 which has the potential, if properly enforced, to change “business-as-usual” on too many campuses these days.
Unfortunately, this wonderful development hits very close to home for this author.
As an advanced doctoral student who, four decades ago, naively believed that the university was a place for open and free exchange of differing ideas, I was denied a Ph.D dissertation advisor by the tenured chief honcho who—like too many others in Middle East Studies Association professor bully pulpit-run classrooms—routinely used one set of lenses for the study of Israel and Zionism, and a completely different set when dealing with just about everyone else in the neighborhood.
I asked the taboo questions and raised the wrong issues in seminars in which, among other things, I would be informed about such things as alleged “fascist Zionists” at the same time that the class listened to a glowing, white-washed presentation, under his adoring eye, of Hitler’s ally and good buddy, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was placed in charge of the Nazi Waffen SS Division for the Balkans which victimized Jews, Serbs, Gypsies, and others not of the Arabs and Nazis’ liking.
As just one other example of the duplicity routinely practiced in such classrooms, at the same the same time that this would-be source of ethical enlightenment—a recognized specialist on Turkey as well—was skewing his courses and program via required reading lists, what was covered and what was not on course syllabi,lecture material, and so forth regarding the Arab-Jewish conflict over the Mandate of Palestine, this same expert on Turkey, when discussing the latter, managed to offer no spoken nor written material regarding some 23 million Anatolian Kurds (of about 40 million truly stateless Kurds total) whose very language and culture were outlawed by Ankara and whom were renamed “Mountain Turks” to deny their very existence as a separate people.
Arabic has been the second national language of Israel; Arabs who side with groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. which call for Israel’s destruction and the murder of Jews are elected to serve in Israel’s Parliament. Arabs in Israel are the freest anywhere in that region.
While every real and imagined sin of the Jews were (are) presented for scrutiny, such other issues as seen above were simply ignored or, at best, whitewashed.
Due to such puzzling and disturbing gaps, I naively (and foolishly) raised the off limits questions and added pertinent missing links to such discussions myself…and wound up being denied a Ph.D. dissertation advisor.
Those were the days when Dr. Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum’s “Campus Watch” did not exist, Dr. Martin Kramer’s book, “ Ivory Towers On Sand…,” was not written, the late, esteemed Professors Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis’s breakaway scholarly organization, ASMEA (where my own book would introduced into academia), was not yet created, and so forth. And the Jews on staff knew what had to be done to toe the line and make folks happy for either tenure’s sake and/or their same ideological beliefs.
Fast forward to President Trump’s new Executive Order…
No sooner than the ink dried, “Progressive” Hebrews condemned it. They did likewise when President Trump recognized the same city that King David purchased for his capital 3,000 years ago—before most other peoples made their historical debuts—as the capital of the sole, resurrected Jewish State…Jerusalem. And then failed to ask them permission to move America’s embassy there as well.
Trump’s subsequent decisions about the Golan Heights, used by Syria for decades to blast Israeli farmers below; defunding the pay-to-slay alleged “moderates“ of Mahmoud Abbas’s PA/PLO/Fatah; defunding the Jew-hate promoting UNRWA; and so forth, angered these nauseating excuses for Jews as well…whatever their phony, lame reasoning has been.
My new, dear friend Allen then asked me why I thought these folks really felt this way—in academia or elsewhere. So, please strap yourselves in for my response…
Communism is a post-nationalist ideology.
While many sins have been committed in the name of nationalism, like it or not, Jews were forced to embrace it since their historical attempts to be accepted in others’ lands usually had tragic results. The pre-Herzl, Russian Jewish physician, Leo Pinkser, spelled this out hauntingly in his treatise, “Auto-Emancipation…”
Leftist movements regard Jewish National—Zionism—as reactionary.
Hence, Zionism emerged successful just at a time when post-national Socialist and Communist movements were arising.
While religious Jews saw G_d’s long-awaited Prophetic Hand in Israel’s rebirth, many other, more secular Jews embraced these ideologies. They had the potential to serve as protective umbrellas under and within which oppressed minorities—especially Christianity’s “deicide people”—could blend.
For Jews, however, this turned out to be a pipe dream.
Stalin, the Communist, wound up slaughtering those non-Jew, Jews anyway.
So, whether they were murdered and otherwise victimized proto-nationalist Czarist Russia, or in Soviet atheist Commieland…they were still simply DIRTY JEWS.
Comprenden mis amigos?
Progressive Jews are appalled by Jewish Jews. The latter remind them and the Gentiles that Jews are a distinct people—something used too often in the past to demonize, ghettoize, dehumanize, and massacre them. Since Napoleon freed them from the ghetto, a return to such existence had always been a nightmare. The birth of the Reform Movement in Judaism was itself a reaction to this, with the latter even proposing changing the Sabbath to Sunday to avoid the perception of Jewish uniqueness.
The Lefties don’t want to be reminded about who they are…like German Jewish WWI vets proclaiming their German loyalties and showing laughing Nazis their war medals before being sent off to the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz.
While the above does not tell the entire story about why too many Jews oppose President Trump’s fair and favorable actions towards Israel and the Jewish people, it does go far in explaining much of it.
We tragically live in an age when increasing world-wide antisemitism is accompanied by cowardly Hebrews who aid and abet such actions themselves.
Gerald A. Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs. He has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated many Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world. You can visit his website at geraldahonigman.com Gerald A. Honigman is a longtime senior contributing writer, from 2007, and columnist for Ekurd.net. Honigman has published a major book, “The Quest For Justice In The Middle East–The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective.” For more see below.
The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Ekurd.net or its editors.
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