Displaying posts published in

May 2017

Napolitarianism Under Fire Even Democrats want to dump the University of California’s corrupt anti-conservative zealot. Lloyd Billingsley

From 2009-2013, Janet Napolitano headed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security but as president of the University of California she has been unable to prevent violent thugs from quashing free speech on UC campuses. Napolitano has also remained silent during the smear surge against UCLA professor Keith Fink, but that should come as no surprise.

Janet Napolitano made her public debut in the 1991 smear campaign against Clarence Thomas, in an effort to keep the conservative African American off the Supreme Court. The lead smearer, Anita Hill, accused Thomas of sexually harassing her and Napolitano, then with a Phoenix law firm, represented Hill in the matter.

The false accusations of Napolitano’s client supplied ammo for white Democrats Howard Metzenbaum, a former Communist; Ted Kennedy, who sought support from the USSR against Reagan; and Robert Byrd, a former high-profile Ku-Klucker. Napolitano’s representation of Anita Hill came up in 1993 when president Clinton appointed her as a U.S. attorney.

In the confirmation proceedings, Napolitano interrupted Hill’s witness Susan Hoerchner, who after an off-the-record conversation, “suddenly developed amnesia,” about parts of her story that contradicted Hill. Napolitano refused to answer questions whether she had persuaded Hoerchner to change her testimony.

Napolitano’s great achievement as Arizona attorney general was to ban Christmas displays on public property. As Arizona governor, she inclined to cronyism, appointing to the state supreme court her campaign attorney Scott Bales, a liberal Democrat who also worked at her former law firm. Napolitano vetoed seven bills intended to fight illegal immigration but her anti-conservative zealotry came to the fore during her stint as Department of Homeland Security boss.

Like the 44th president, Napolitano believed that radical Islam was not the primary threat. She expunged the word “terrorism” from the DHS lexicon and purged experts showing the connection between terror and jihad. She put out the DHS report Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, a sweeping indictment of conservatives for preferring limited government and constitutional measures such as the Second Amendment.

Targeted Duke Professor Resigns Administrative witch hunt drives out respected scholar. Jack Kerwick

That, of all people, Barack Obama recently received the Kennedy Library’s “Profile in Courage” award proves that the latter has about as much to do with recognizing courage as the Nobel Peace Prize, of which the former President was also a recipient, has to do with honoring peace.

This is not meant to be a knock against Obama. Rather, it is an observation that no unprejudiced spectator of the contemporary American scene could fail to make. The stone-cold truth is that there is utterly nothing courageous about being a self-avowed “progressive,” a Politically Correct leftist, in today’s Western world.

And Obama is nothing if not a leftist.

No, neither Obama nor his ideological ilk in Washington D.C., Hollywood, the (fake) news media, and academia display a scintilla of courage in their public lives. Real bravery, as all of us teach our children, is a matter of resisting groupthink—or “peer pressure,” as we call it when referring to youth. Real courage consists in daring to challenge the prevailing ideological orthodoxy—or “what’s popular,” as the kids call it.

There are indeed people who are deserving of an award affirming courage. One such person is Paul Griffiths, a divinity professor at Duke University. Professor Griffiths, whose area of specialization is Catholic theology, is a prolific writer and scholar. He has been teaching at Duke since 2008.

He will not be returning to his position in the fall.

In February, an invitation was emailed to the divinity school faculty encouraging them to attend a two-day seminar on “racial equity” training. Anathea Portier-Young, an Associate Professor of the Old Testament, replied enthusiastically: “Those who have participated in the training have described it as transformative, powerful, and life-changing,” she wrote. “We recognize that it is a significant commitment of time; we also believe that it will have great dividends for our community,” she said.

Griffiths disagreed. He copied all of his colleagues on his response. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he began. “Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show.”

Griffiths concluded: “Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual.”

Of course, Griffiths is entirely correct. “Events of this sort” are most definitely, always, profoundly anti-intellectual. They are instruments designed to totalize the groupthink, the religious-like dogma, of the academy. That Griffiths dared to defy the orthodoxy, that he dared to openly resist the “cool kids,” and that he undoubtedly knew what was to come next earns him a Profile in Courage award.

The Divinity school Dean, Elain Heath, responded to all faculty. She didn’t mention Griffiths by name. However, it was clear to all that it was he who she had in mind when she condemned the “inappropriate and unprofessional” nature of “mass emails” containing “disparaging statements—including arguments ad hominem” that are intended “to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree.”

To insure that her point wasn’t lost upon anyone, Heath was explicit: “The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.”

While Dean Heath reportedly attempted to meet with Griffiths in person, this never came to pass. Subsequently, Griffiths sent out another mass email. The subject line read: “intellectual freedom and institutional discipline.” According to The News and Observer, Griffiths revealed to his colleagues that he had become the “targets” of two disciplinary proceedings. The first involves a harassment complaint filed by Portier-Young, the Old Testament professor who couldn’t rave enough about the “racial equity training.” The other has led Dean Heath to ban him from all faculty meetings and deprive Griffiths of funding for future research and traveling expenses.

As Griffiths sees it, Heath’s actions are “reprisals” against him, means by which she can “discipline” him for articulating views with which she disagrees. “Duke University,” Griffiths stated, “is now a place in which too many thoughts can’t be spoken and too many disagreements remain veiled because of fear.”

This being the case, Griffiths urged a “renunciation of fear-based discipline to those who deploy and advocate it, and its replacement with confidence in speech.”

Professor Griffiths has resigned from his position at Duke, effective next fall.

Griffiths richly deserves an award that recognizes his bravery. To be fair, however, so too does his colleague, Thomas Pfau, a professor of English and German, warrant recognition for having come to Griffiths’ defense. “Having reviewed Paul Griffiths’ note several times,” Pfau commented, “I find nothing in it that could even remotely be said to ‘express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.’ To suggest anything of the sort strikes me as either gravely imperceptive or as intellectually dishonest.”

Pfau added: “I also felt that differences of opinion, however stark, ought to be respected and engaged, rather than being used for the purpose of moral recrimination.”

Pfau describes Griffiths as “one of the pre-eminent theologians working in the United States today and a vital resource for students and colleagues engaged in rigorous theological reflection here at Duke.” He claims to “profoundly regret” Griffiths’ decision to part ways with Duke, and told him that he believed that it was a “mistake.”

Evidently, though, it is too late.

Washington Post urges colleges to censor speech if someone thinks it’s racist By Greg Piper

In response to the racist-banana incident at the private American University – now under investigation by the U.S. attorney in D.C. as well as the FBI – the editorial board has declared that all colleges should censor students if someone thinks their speech or behavior is racist:

Two-bit provocations such as hanging nooses on campuses play on emotions made raw in the wake of a presidential campaign that featured the vilification of minorities and barely veiled race-baiting. For university administrators, the challenge is to address that legitimate pain with sensitivity and make crystal clear that racist signs, symbols and speech are off-limits.

UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar, doesn’t try to explain away what appears to be a clear and chilling call for censorship from a legendary newspaper. He writes in his own Post column today:

This is an editorial, the product of carefully considered labor on the part of a group of people, not an extemporaneous remark …

And the editorial’s proposal is an awful idea. At public universities, it would violate the First Amendment; at private universities, it would violate many of the universities’ stated commitments to open debate, as well as basic principles of academic freedom.

The editorial board has no clue how wide a swath of speech it would be implicating, according to Volokh: Claims of “whites being an oppressor race” could just as easily be punished as bananas found hanging from makeshift nooses.

The same goes for criticizing Islam as illiberal, calling for stricter immigration limits or condemning Israeli policies:

All such advocacy that runs against university administrators’ political views would be deterred when “university administrators” “make crystal clear” that “racist … speech” — racist in the views of whatever disciplinary committee is making decisions — is “off-limits.”

Hans Bader, former lawyer in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, said in an email today the Post has reached the “opposite extreme” from its past position:

Once upon a time it called for Congress to pass Congressman Henry Hyde’s bill to ban campus speech codes even at private campuses. Of course, that was years ago, when moderate Democrats still existed. …

Conservative UCLA professor put through ‘star chamber’ review, says he’s being ousted by Nathan Rubbelke

A conservative professor at UCLA claims his superiors are working to get him fired because they do not like his politics. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32533/

UCLA communication studies lecturer Keith Fink’s assertion comes several months after his department chair put a cap on the number of students who could enroll in his class. That left a long line of very frustrated students saying they wanted to take his class, and there were empty seats inside Fink’s classroom, but campus administrators effectively blocked their ability to enroll.

Fink, a conservative, an attorney, and a free speech defender who has been openly critical of ways in which UCLA has trampled on students’ free speech rights, said the discrimination against him has grown worse.

Now he claims his department “has done everything it can to rig” his performance review in an attempt to oust him from teaching at his alma mater.

‘Modern day star chamber’

A vote on the popular lecturer’s excellence review took place last week, but the results might not be known for up to two weeks, teaching assistant Andrew Litt said.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Fink described last week’s closed-door meeting as akin to a “modern day star chamber.”

Lecturers at UCLA are required to go through the excellence review process by the end of their 18th quarter of teaching and the review includes compiling an “Initial Continuing Appointment” dossier.

Included within the file are items such as a curriculum vitae, list of students to be solicited for reviews, a list of those who might not provide objective evaluations, a classroom observation, and an optional list of names who may speak to the lecturer’s teaching ability.

In his candidate response to the department’s dossier, Fink lays out that his right to a fair review was denied. He alleges, in the document obtained by The College Fix, that the communication studies department worked to keep evaluations from students of his choice out of the file and that a teaching evaluation is “riddled with falsehoods and distorted facts,” written by a faculty member Fink deemed biased at the beginning of the excellence review process.

Big Wind Gets Spanked in Michigan Citizens in 20 localities rejected wind-power expansion. By Robert Bryce

Big Wind’s lobbyists and promoters love to claim that their projects are being welcomed by rural communities everywhere. The reality is rather different. Last Tuesday, voters in 20 rural towns in Michigan went to the polls and rejected or restricted the expansion of wind energy.

Furthermore, those same Michigan voters soundly rejected two projects being promoted by the world’s largest producer of wind energy, NextEra Energy — which, as I discussed on this site last week, has been suing rural governments in multiple states (two of them in Michigan) while at the same time collecting billions of dollars in federal tax subsidies.

Big Wind’s worst drubbing occurred in Sand Beach Township, in Huron County, where voters approved modifications to a township ordinance that will effectively ban wind development. The vote tally: 413–80. In addition, Lincoln Township voters approved an initiative that will allow it to form its own planning commission, a move that will make it far more difficult for wind projects to be developed in the township. Sand Beach and Lincoln were among 18 townships in Huron County that gunned down Big Wind’s expansion plans. (Huron County is about 130 miles due north of Detroit.) Voters in the other 16 townships went to the polls as a group and rejected two projects, including a 60-turbine project proposed by NextEra and a 70-turbine project being pushed by DTE Energy. Both proposals lost by a margin of 63 to 37 percent.

I recently talked to Kevon Martis. He is the founding director of the Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition, a group based in Blissfield, Mich., that works with rural governments in the Midwest that are resisting the encroachment of Big Wind. He was exultant. “Huron County has more than 400 turbines,” Martis said. “If wind energy is so great, why didn’t the county voters choose to have more of them?” Martis went on, saying that NextEra and DTE probably spent more than $500,000 on their efforts to get voters to approve their projects while the anti-wind forces “might have spent $3,000 or $4,000.”

Big Wind also lost on ballot questions in Marlette Township in Sanilac County and in Almer Township in Tuscola County. In Marlette, voters approved, by a margin of 53 to 47 percent, a zoning amendment that will toughen an ordinance governing wind-energy projects.

To be sure, these results haven’t been reported by mainstream media. But then, the fact that rural communities from Maine to California are rejecting Big Wind doesn’t fit the popular media’s narrative that wind energy is “green.” The Michigan results expose the fictions being peddled by Big Wind’s multitude of lobbyists. Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, who has refused to answer my e-mailed questions regarding the backlash against the wind industry, recently claimed that wind energy “boosts rural American economies in unmatched ways” and that “83 percent of Americans support more wind.” In March, Kiernan’s AWEA colleague Susan Sloan claimed that “the idea that rural America doesn’t want wind power, that’s just not what we’ve experienced.”

The fact that rural communities from Maine to California are rejecting Big Wind doesn’t fit the popular media’s narrative that wind energy is ‘green.’

Fired for Reporting the Truth Simply tweeting video of a Muslim student characterizing his religion on an interfaith panel cost me my job. By Andy Ngo

Last month, I attended an interfaith panel discussion, “Unpacking Misconceptions,” at Portland State University, where I’m a political-science graduate student. I ended up being fired as the multimedia editor of our student newspaper, the Vanguard, for tweeting about what was said there.

Much of the discussion was uncontroversial. The students on the panel mainly shared complaints of what they perceived as misconceptions about their religions. A Hindu student lampooned author Reza Aslan for his depiction of Hinduism on CNN’s Believer, which showed a minority sect’s practice of eating human flesh. A Jewish student said most Jews don’t have payot, the side curls worn by some Orthodox Jewish men. An atheist student spoke on behalf of a secular-humanist worldview and challenged the audience to think about how we as a society can develop our own moral framework without religion.

At one point, a woman in the audience asked the Muslim student if a specific verse in the Koran actually permitted the killing of non-Muslims. “I can confidently tell you, when the Koran says an innocent life, it means an innocent life, regardless of the faith, the race, like, whatever you can think about as a characteristic,” he began.

At this point, I took out my mobile phone and began recording as he continued:

And some, this, that you’re referring to, killing non-Muslims, that [to be a non-believer] is only considered a crime when the country’s law, the country is based on Koranic law — that means there is no other law than the Koran. In that case, you’re given the liberty to leave the country, you can go in a different country, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. So you can go in a different country, but in a Muslim country, in a country based on the Koranic laws, disbelieving, or being an infidel, is not allowed so you will be given the choice [to leave].

Although I was not there officially as a reporter to cover the event, I shared a 40-second snippet of the video on my personal Twitter account, with a message that conveyed my understanding of the speaker’s meaning — namely, that non-Muslims would be killed or banished in a state governed by Koranic law:

At @Portland_State interfaith panel today, the Muslim student speaker said that apostates will be killed or banished in an Islamic state. pic.twitter.com/YpsVSB1w9P
— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 27, 2017

I later posted a longer version of the video in a follow-up tweet to provide more context:

.@Portland_State Here is full clip that I recorded. An audience member asked about Quran 5:51 & “infidels.” He summarizes Quran 5:32 just before video starts pic.twitter.com/7FMgsPbFR6
— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 27, 2017

This longer video includes a response by someone in the audience who disagreed with the speaker, saying it was “perfectly okay for non-Muslims to live in Muslim lands.” The audience member cited the existence of religious-minority communities in the Middle East as an example of Islamic tolerance.

The Comey Aftermath Appointing a respected FBI director is crucial. By Robert Delahunty & John Yoo

President Trump’s decisive removal of FBI director James Comey predictably triggered an avalanche of Democratic-party criticism. Dropping their own bitter attacks of Comey without missing a beat, Democrats rallied to Comey’s defense. They compared Trump’s decision to Richard Nixon’s discharge of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate investigation and claimed that, in Jeffrey Toobin’s words, the U.S. was undergoing “the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.” “They will put in a stooge who will shut down this investigation,” Toobin sagely opined.

Trump’s critics are the captives of their overwrought imaginations. The Watergate analogy is hackneyed. Trump made the right call. Comey had to go for the nation’s best interests. Indeed, Trump’s biggest mistake was one of timing – he should have told Comey to pack his bags on January 21, 2017, rather than waiting until the White House had become embroiled in controversy over the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Several months ago, we urged Comey to do the nation the service of resigning. We argued that his repeated and clumsy interventions in last year’s presidential election had lost him the confidence of the public at large — left, right, and center. No FBI director – certainly none who professed to be concerned with the Bureau’s integrity and good standing – should have remained in office under those circumstances. By resigning, Comey would not have had to admit any fault on his part. Instead, he chose to stay on, apparently considering himself to be at once politically unassailable and also indispensable to the investigation of Trump’s campaign. He was dead wrong on both counts. His arrogance has cost him dear. Captain Ahab, meet Moby Dick.

Critics claim that, by firing Comey, Trump has attempted to abort the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s files and efforts to influence the presidential election. Color us skeptical about the alleged political collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that any of Vladimir Putin’s schemes actually affected the outcome of the election. We are also unsure what federal law President Trump allegedly violated. Even if some of his campaign aides might have failed to register as foreign agents, or, in a worst-case scenario, even might have colluded with foreign powers, there appears to be no evidence that these alleged ties influenced the Trump campaign or the White House. Hillary Clinton lost because she was a terrible candidate and Trump won because he appealed to parts of the electorate that have suffered from economic globalization.

James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor By Joan Swirsky —

(Author’s note: In August 2016, I wrote an article entitled “James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor,” warning readers that the Comey fish was already rotting and that things were bound to get worse. Clearly, they just did. And it’s just as clear that the uncontrolled hysteria we are witnessing from Democrats has to do not with bogus accusations about Russia but about the criminal indictments coming down the pike for the people they’ve blindly defended for decades—that would be Bill & Hill Clinton—and possibly against even bigger fish! I’ve updated this article by abbreviating its length but also adding a few sentences. -JS)

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he headed is among the most influential, powerful and scary companies in the world—the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for a far-left Alinsky acolyte like Barack Obama, makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient—and also subservient—accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things—“straight-shooter,” “unbiased,” “fair-minded,” “non-partisan” “man of his word”—don’t be fooled. That’s Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in yet another Clinton fiasco case last summer, allow her to…

1. Create out of whole cloth an “intent” criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician––that would be Hillary––off the hook, and,

2. Appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI’s investigation should be.

While citing Hillary’s “extreme negligence” in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her email account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was “extremely careless” and “unsophisticated,” among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!Comey’s friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, said that the FBI director’s decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. “There is no way of getting around this,” McCarthy wrote. “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation…in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.”

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of AmericanThinker.com, wrapped the entire debacle up neatly, saying that “the director of the FBI offered 15 of the most puzzling minutes in the history of American law enforcement. James Comey spent the first 12 minutes or so laying out a devastating case dismantling Hillary Clinton’s email defense. Then, “in a whiplash-inducing change of narrative, he announced that `no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case he had just outlined, an assertion that was contradicted within hours by luminaries including former U.S. attorney (and NY City mayor) Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office.”

Which begs the question: Why would Comey act contrary to the wisdom of virtually every legal scholar who has written or spoken about this case?

It is certainly not because he wasn’t taught by his upstanding parents the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral. One could make the case—and many have—that he is as close to a moral man as it gets in public life. According to his bio in Wikipedia, Comey, a lawyer, majored in religion at the College of William and Mary, and wrote his thesis about the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell, emphasizing their common belief in public action.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: JAMES COMEY’S OVERDUE DEPARTURE

If a FBI director is doing his job, we probably should neither see nor hear of him much on television.

The FBI director by his very office holds enormous power. And like the IRS director, by definition he or she must show restraint given the vast resources at his discretion and thus the potential for abuse. In other words, we want a FBI director to exude coolness, stay dispassionate, and remain professional. I don’t think that has ever been a description that fit Director James Comey.

Comey’s nadir came in the summer of 2016 when, confused over the investigatory role of the FBI and the prosecutorial prerogatives of the Justice Department, he de facto turned the FBI into investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury in presenting damning evidence against Hillary Clinton, then nullifying it, then reopening the case, then re-reopening it and backing off — all in front of television cameras in the midst of a heated presidential campaign.

And then after doing all that, Comey confused the act with its intent, and as a veritable legislator reinvented statutes about communicating classified information by suggesting that even if one likely committed a felony, but did not intend to (not a proven assertion), then it wasn’t really a felony.

Comey’s behavior was never properly addressed. His recent performance in front of Congress likely sealed his fate. We do not expect our FBI director to whine, in teenager fashion, about being treated unfairly, as he alleged when Loretta Lynch dumped the Clinton e-mail scandal in his lap. (A good FBI director, of course, would simply have run the investigation, presented the findings to the Justice Department, and then have let them deal with it (if not Lynch, then someone else). Comey misrepresented the volume of Huma Abedin’s improper e-mails; and in general always fell back on loud assertions of FBI integrity rather than displaying it through his behavior and statements.

Nor did Comey have a reservoir of good will. Long ago, he acted bizarrely in the John Ashcroft hospitalization melodrama; he was responsible for the career of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald who miscarried justice in the case of Scooter Libby (not to mention Fitzgerald’s own subsequent Conrad Black prosecution). His legacy is that Hillary Clinton paid no price for illegally setting up an improper e-mail server, destroying evidence, and communicating classified material in an insecure fashion.

Comey seems to think that he could freely discuss the charges of Russian collusion, but not so transparently the far stronger evidence of unlawful unmasking of Americans caught up in (or in fact targeted by) government surveillance — apparently in understandable fear that the Democrats and media posed the greater danger to his career.

Criticizing Israel: An Obsession of Hatred Alex Grobman, PhD

There is no shortage of critics of Israel. Some are antisemites who conspire to destroy the Jewish state. Others have legitimate concerns about particular Israeli government policies. When does criticism or condemnation of Israel become antisemitic? At what point does the condemnation of Israel cross the boundary into antisemitism?

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)

Omar Barghouti, founding member of The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) that initiated BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and a graduate of Tel Aviv University, claims that “Israel and its lobby groups often invoke the smear of anti-Semitism, despite the unequivocal, consistent position of the movement against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This unfounded allegation is intended to intimidate into silence those who criticize Israel and to conflate such criticism with anti-Jewish racism.”1

After hearing Barghouthi speak at UCLA, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the long-time executive director of UCLA Hillel and a renowned left-wing activist, said “BDS is poison and Omar Barghouti [a co-founder of the BDS movement] is a classic anti-Semite.” He found “no articulated aspiration for peace, only a negative desire to destroy the very foundation of the State of Israel. This is just recycled Palestinian rhetoric about the pursuit of justice in the mouth of a sophisticated, smart, Israeli-educated and wily ideologue.” When he uses the term “Justice,” it is merely “a political code word for no compromise. And everyone knows that any peaceful outcome is contingent on mutual compromise.”

Seidler-Feller considered Barghouti’s denial of Jewish peoplehood particularly egregious. Usurping the right of Jews to define who they are “is an aggressive act of denying Jews the fundamental right of self-definition. It constitutes a delegitimization of my being and of my identity as a Jew.” 2

A Unique Challenge

Nathan Sharansky, once a dissident in the former Soviet Union, sees these new attacks against Israel as posing a special challenge. Traditional antisemitism threatened the Jewish people or the Jewish religion. Individual Jews were denied the right “to live as equal members in a society. The new anti-Jewishness denies the right of Jewish people to live as equal members in the family of nations…. All that has happened is that we’ve moved from discrimination against the Jews as individuals to the discrimination against the Jews as a people.” Antisemitism, directed at the Jewish state, hides behind a façade of legitimate criticism that is more difficult to expose. 3

Definition of Antisemitism

The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at Tel-Aviv University suggests several criteria to distinguish between reasonable condemnation of Israel and antisemitic assaults.