RAEL JEAN ISAAC

SY HERSH REDUX
            
Seymour Hersh is at it again, this time with a convoluted New Yorker piece seeking to tie Donald Rumsfeld directly to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Citing interviews with anonymous intelligence officials Hersh accuses Rumsfeld of approving a highly secret operation encouraging "physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners." The Defense Department describes the article as "outlandish, conspiratorial and filled with error and anonymous conjecture."  That, of course, is par for Hersh's course. Readers of Outpost can explore Hersh's abysmal record of being taken in by conmen, spinning conspiratorial fantasies, and misquoting the responsible people whom he claims to quote by clicking on Mideastoutpost.com. 
 
MORE FROM WAHABI-ON-HUDSON
           
As Carolyn Glick, the Jerusalem Post's superb columnist and editor, puts it in a scathing letter to Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, "Columbia today is not a fount of liberalism in the spirit of John Stuart Mill but an incubator of hatred and lies," lies and hatred directed against both the U.S. and Israel.  The death of the vitriolic, imitation-terrorist Edward Said (who was caught on camera hurling rocks at Israeli forces at the Lebanon border) should have been greeted with a sigh of relief from Columbia: instead, as Glick points out, the university endowed a professorship in his name and conferred it on Rashid Khalidi, another anti-Semitic, anti-American terrorism apologist.
           
Khalidi is in congenial company.  Joseph Massad was appointed in 1999 to the same Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.  Jonathan Calt Harris in the New York Sun gives a run down on some of his "academic" contributions.  "The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist."  This was Massad in a lecture at Oxford University.  Poverty is caused by "the racist and barbaric policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." Massad ridicules the very existence of a "so-called Islamic 'threat'" and blames the United States for what passes for it: the suicide bombing in Beirut in 1983, in which 241 Marines were killed, was payback for "U.S. imperialist aggression."  The Holocaust is a self-serving Jewish rewrite of history invented for reasons of propaganda.  And on and on in the same vein.
           
As Glick points out, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitic poison are not confined to the Middle East Studies department but permeate such departments as English, History and Political Science, making Columbia "a clearinghouse for lies posing as scholarship that then enter the public sphere and infect our culture in this time of global war."  
          
Columbia is now embarked on a major fund-raising campaign from alumni as it seeks to expand its campus northward. This offers a splendid opportunity for graduates to inform Bollinger and his fund-raisers what they think of the university's direction.
 
FROM ISRAEL'S MAD HATTER
        
In his dotage, Shimon Peres becomes more unhinged by the day. Early in May, at a Labor Party meeting, Peres announced "there was no choice but to announce early elections since it was only recently made clear that the previous elections were forged."  Forged? The Likud was victorious by a landslide as the electorate repudiated Barak for his huge territorial concessions that simply had the effect of encouraging Arafat to launch outright war. Two weeks later, on May 16, The New York Times quoted Peres: "Eighty percent of Israelis want peace, and just one percent are trying to block it."  What Peres was referring to, of course, was the lopsided Likud vote to reject Sharon's "disengagement" plan, i.e. his plan to dismantle Gaza's 21 Jewish communities and other Jewish communities in Samaria in what could only be perceived in the Arab world as a huge victory for terror.   Needless to say, the majority in the Likud voted against it, not because they oppose peace, but because they believed the plan would exacerbate the ongoing Arab war against Israel. Worst of all, Sharon might yet make this malevolent clown Foreign Minister again, in some potential alliance with Labor against his own right-wing constituency.
 
CALLOUS SYMPATHY
        
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has issued a statement of sympathy in response to a recent Arab terrorist outrage: "My sympathies are with the friends and families of all the victims of this horrific attack...The perpetrators of this atrocious attack clearly have no respect for innocent lives. We cannot let the terrorists succeed."  But as writer Naomi Ragen points out, Straw was not referring to the murder of Tali Hatuel in her eighth month of pregnancy, to the point-blank shots into the head of her two year old daughter Meirav, strapped into her car seat for safety, or 7 year old daughter Roni or nine year old Hadar or eleven year old Hila.  No, Straw was talking about the attack in Saudi Arabia at an Exxon refinery resulting in the death of British and American nationals.  Straw took no notice of the murder of the Hatuel family.  Meanwhile David Hatuel spoke as he buried his entire family on a Sunday evening in a cemetery in Ashkelon.   "You were my flowers. I am all alone and there is no one left."  
 
 HONORING YOUR ENEMIES
        
In the November 1999 Outpost we published "By Those They Honor Ye Shall Know Them" chronicling the extent to which Israel's prizes for excellence were being awarded to those who undermined and denigrated the state.    
       
Israel continues to honor her enemies. This year musician Daniel Barenboim received the Wolf Foundation Prize -- and a standing ovation -- at the Knesset, as he used the occasion to launch one of his typical tirades against Israel: "I ask today whether a situation of conquest and control can be reconciled with Israel's Declaration of Independence? Is there logic to the independence of one people if the cost is a blow to the fundamental rights of another people?"  He promptly announced he was donating the $50,000 prize to the "Palestinian people." 

Meanwhile the Israel Prize was awarded to third rate sculptor Yigal Tumarkin, who defames Israel rhetorically and in his works defames Judaism (e.g. his pig wearing tefilin -- the phylacteries Jewish men wear during morning prayer). 
 
STATE DEPARTMENT ARABISTS "PROTEST"
          
Taking their cue from British former diplomats in the Arab world who sent a letter to Prime Minister Blair, fifty former American diplomats have denounced President Bush for his alleged bias toward Israel (even the British Arabists could not find much fault with Blair on this score). "By closing the door to negotiations with Palestinians and the possibility of a Palestinian state, you have proved that the United States is not an even-handed peace partner" write the diplomats.  Would that this were true. President Bush, of course, keeps reiterating his commitment both to negotiations and to a Palestinian state.  Bush is accused of "unqualified support of Sharon's extra-judicial assassinations, Israel's Berlin Wall-like barrier, its harsh military measures in the occupied territories and now your endorsement of Sharon's unilateral plan." 

The letter's bizarre "complaints" sound as if they came directly from the Arabs -- and in a sense, they do. The letter was published under the auspices of the American Educational Trust which produces the virulently anti-Israel Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, published by former U.S. ambassador to Qatar Andrew Killgore, the letter's chief signatory. And in May's Outpost Hugh Fitzgerald points out the extent to which former diplomats to Saudi Arabia wind up on the Saudi payroll.
          
As the Jerusalem Post (May 5) points out, what Americans are getting is an Arab lobby within and alongside the State Department -- and the letter "should serve as a wake-up call to Bush that he needs to ensure that his Mideast ambassadors and foreign service officers are with him, not against him. He is, after all, their boss."