By Rabbi Dow Marmur
JERUSALEM –Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, whom I’ve come to quote lately, has written: “Emptied of its nationalist vigour and militancy, the Palestine problem, it seems, is now of little immediate interest to protesting Arabs and is instead the ultimate cause célèbre for Western liberal campaigners who like nothing more than having a victimised people they can coo over.”
The campaign, writes the left-leaning O’Neill, “is driven by a view of Palestinians as the ultimate victims, the hapless and pathetic children of the new world order, who need kindly, wizened Westerners to protect them from Big Bad Israel.”
The London School of Economics (LSE), with a long left-wing pedigree, provides a telling illustration. Israeli television has just shown a clip from a talk that Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon gave there not long ago. It was disrupted by frenetic hecklers who hurled abuse at Israel and tried to prevent him from speaking.
The clip was shown as part of an extensive news item about the current well- deserved embarrassment of the LSE in view of the millions of pounds it has received from Gaddafi of Libya. Particularly telling was another clip that showed how one of his sons was being lionized by his Jewish professor who, I believe, supervised his “PhD thesis” (!) which, it now appears, was largely written by someone else.
The son gave a passionate speech about the respect for human rights in his father’s Libya and declared it “the most democratic country in the world.” The response of the audience that looked very similar to the audience that booed Ayalon was very warm and extremely enthusiastic. The cheers were near-ecstatic.
From the top down the LSE had ignored a long memorandum, written in November 2009, by the now deceased professor of international relations, Fred Halliday, urging the school not to accept money from the dictator. The fact that several Western statesmen, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, sang Gaddafi’s praises, and his country was recognized by the United Nations as a champion of human rights, didn’t impress him. He argued that it was immoral to accept the money from this tyrant, however much the school may have needed it. The memo was ignored and/or suppressed.
Of course, now it has been fully vindicated. The Head of LSE Sir Howard Davies has already resigned and others are bound to follow. The latest effort to turn the money into scholarships for exiled Libyan students is a pathetic and hypocritical afterthought.
The fiasco cum scandal has made news outside the UK, but it’s obviously particularly interesting to Israelis as it confirms their prejudices about what’s happening in many foreign institutions of higher learning, now preparing for another spate of invective under the title “Israel Apartheid Week.” Some also suggest that assimilated Jews have bought into this calumny and are more anxious to ingratiate themselves with the locals than stand up for the Jewish people in its affirmation of what’s true and right.
Though such cynicism is, indeed, legitimate it’s also counterproductive for it tends to discard all criticism of Israel, including that of committed Zionists, as being prejudiced, hostile and, therefore, irrelevant. It leads to a hardening of Israeli political arteries and thus, ironically, plays into the hands of Israel’s real enemies who find in these extreme expressions a vindication of their own irrational hatred.
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Rabbi Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. He now divides his year between Canada and Israel. He may be contacted at dow.marmur@sdjewishworld.com