Ayoon Wa Azan (Some anti-Semitism is overstated)

There is an Israeli myth that claims Palestinian schoolbooks are full of anti-Semitism and call for murdering Jews and destroying Israel. Many professional charlatans in Congress and the media promote this claim, with a view to divert attention away from Israel’s daily crimes against the Palestinians. True, there are Arab books that go beyond Israel and its government, to attack Jews around the world in a racist manner that cannot be defended. However, this practice and this kind of books exist on both sides of the conflict. While Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi described the Jews in 2010 as descendants of apes and pigs and said that peace with them is impossible, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual godfather of Shas, a party that is in the ruling coalition in Israel, had beaten everyone by proclaiming that mercy with Arabs was prohibited, and said that Mahmoud Abbas and all those evil people must perish from the world, and that God should send a plague upon them and the Palestinians. There are much better people and I wrote twice near the end of 2011 and in mid-last year about Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her book “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education.” In the book, Peled-Elhanan wrote that she could not find among hundreds of Israeli textbooks one paragraph that depicted an Arab as a "normal person". Instead, the Israeli books claimed that killing Palestinians was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state, and justified the massacre of Deir Yassin by saying that it led to the exodus of the Palestinians who were replaced by Jews. Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a peace activist who has not changed course even after the death of her only daughter, Smadar, in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997, and her brother Miko is a peace activist like her. Such people exist and there are many like them. Professor Dr. Bruce Wexler, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, is the co-founder of an organization to promote Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. The organization was behind a report commissioned by the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, which found that Palestinian and Israeli textbooks both present the other as the enemy, but discredited claims that the Palestinian books teach hatred of the Jews. The report found that the objectionable material in all books was small in scope and limited. Let’s hear that again: A Jewish professor from Yale University proposed the report, and the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, which includes Christians, Muslims and Jews, supervised it. The report was drafted by 19 researchers of the highest caliber, all supervised by Daniel Bar-Tal, an Israeli professor at Tel Aviv University, and Sami Adwan, a Palestinian associate professor at Bethlehem University. But none other than the Israeli education ministry objected to all of those. The minister, Gideon Sa’ar, is a Likudnik, or in other words, an advocate of war, occupation, murder and destruction. I stay with the issue of peace advocates and opponents, but move on to Brooklyn College, and an article authored by Glenn Greenwald, an American lawyer and journalist who works for the London-based The Guardian. His name suggests he may be Jewish, and the article’s title was “Brooklyn College's academic freedom increasingly threatened over Israel event.” Greenwald said that Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, a graduate of Brooklyn College, and Brooklyn State Assembly member Dov Hikind, waged a campaign against the college and its president Karen Gould, who is also Jewish. Dershowitz demanded that an event for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) aimed at Israel, which was going to be held at the Political Science department, be cancelled, while Hikind called on Gould to resign. This is while bearing in mind that the speakers at the event in question were Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti and American philosopher Judith Butler, who is Jewish, too. Meanwhile, Todd Gitlin wrote in the Los Angeles Times in favor of the event, and noted that Dershowitz had spoken at the Political Science department back in 2008, alone without any other speaker to challenge him. As for the racist Hikind, he had once stated that the Palestinians worshipped death for their children, when Israel has murdered 1500 Palestinian minors since 29/9/2000. Perhaps I can add here that New York Mayor Michael Blomberger, also a Jew, endorsed the panel discussion as part of the freedom of opinion even as he opposes a boycott of Israel. In the end, the advocates of the freedom of opinion won the day, and the session was held. There were pro-Israel demonstrators outside, that is, vagabonds just like the state of institutionalized crime that they defend. As the reader can see, there are many American Jews who call for a boycott of Israel, or defend the rights of the Palestinians. Indeed, not all American Jews are like Dershowitz or Senator Joe Lieberman. We can reach a quick peace with a majority of them. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.