Could Benjamin Netanyahu be more clear?
"Israel is not a state of all its citizens." "According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people - And only it.".
This reminded me of an incident at college in 2004 when I was an undergrad. I wrote a piece on it and at the time, USC had a very progressive individual who was editor of "The Trojan". My piece was published, but "The Trojan" has long ceased being printed though the very lightweight and superficial "Daily Trojan" continues.....
Netanhay's words prompted me to look back at my 2004 essay (reprinted here).
Academic Freedom – A Double-Edged Sword
So when we have a fascist on campus teaching
Middle East politics who invites other like-minded
fascists and bigots to the sanctity of our classroom, what are we to do?
Do we sacrifice our graduation deadline and drop
the course? Overlook our principles by continuing with the class while becoming
a little more silent every day, and in my case, feeling the affects of it on my
health and sanity?
The deception that lay lurking under professor Nabulsi’s
smile first hit me when he passionately and categorically announced that all
terrorists were Moslems.
What an assault
on a religion, I thought.
Hello... did
he take an amnesia pill that caused him to draw a blank on Timothy McVeigh
blowing up half of
Oklahoma City?
Maybe Aum Shinrikyo doesn’t factor in – they
are, after all, just Japanese terrorists. FARC, in
Columbia, are most definitely Christian.
IRA and ETA are Christians too.
Is this man being hateful or just
stupid?
I thought I would just correct
him this time, after all, he is a professor and I am the undergrad; and it may
be that
I had taken courses in terrorism
and
he had not.
Not being of a stingy disposition, I would
share my information with him and the class.
But then, he moved onto
Iran as his next subject of
attack.
With confidence, he made the
statement that
Iran
is the “leader of world Moslem fanatics.”
I thought someone ought to let him know that the Taliban were (are) far
worse, and were created thanks to the help of the
U.S. Of course, no one can beat the life style of
the Wahhabis in
Saudi Arabia.
At least in
Iran the women vote, they can hold
seats in the parliament, the Noble Peace Prize winner was a woman, and yes, the
Iranian envoy to the world economic forum at Davos was the Vice President, a
female.
She was no match for the
stunning Angelina Jolie, but she was there representing her state as a female
politician.
I wonder if Nabulsi knows
where Davos is!
I decided to talk to him one on one – in his office.
Didn’t help much.
He thought I only object to the information
he is giving out in class because I am afraid that people would realize how bad
Iran
really is and there would be mounting anti-Iranian feelings.
What an idiot this man is – he really doesn’t
know anything.
There’s already plenty of
anti-Iranian feeling going around.
In
fact, it is considered to be the most disliked country by Americans, at least,
according to a recent CNN poll.
But CNN
is another story.
Next on Nabulsi’s assault list were the Palestinian people.
For this purpose, he had a fascist diplomat
from
Israel.
The diplomat, with a poorly made tupe (hair-piece) and a badly stained suit,
proudly announced--as if he had come by a brilliant realization--that the
Palestinian population should not be allowed to go over 20%, for then it would
become 30%, then 40% and so on.
He said
that if it exceeded 20%, it would lead to civil war and then gave examples of
civil wars in the Middle East, being careful to emphasize that Muslims were
always involved:
Lebanon, the 8-year
Iran-Iraq war (funny, I always thought that was an interstate war!), Sudan
(that one, I thought, was in Africa), Yugoslavia (I guess Europe is now part of
the Middle East), Russia (they moved borders lately?).
So I asked this “Diplomat” how he proposed to
solve the Palestinian problem, by gassing them, sterilization, or what other
method, and, secondly, why he had left out
Rwanda in his list of ‘Middle-East’
civil wars?
His answer was: “You misunderstood me, the Israeli
population will also grow,” and “I left out
Rwanda
because I was talking about the wars in the Middle East,
Rwanda is in
Africa.”
Boy, he must have been told by Nabulsi that
we are really dumb in that class.
A couple of days after the “diplomat’s” visit, Nabulsi
walked in proudly and announced that “the diplomat did not have a solution for
the Palestinian problem.”
He gave a
whole bunch of statistics, compared the Palestinians to the French Canadians,
and gave us his “solution” which entailed sending those Israeli Arabs who would
fight for their fellow Palestinians out of
Israel
and into the
West Bank.
I later found out that his “solution” comes
from a book he has us read, and this little man takes credit—if you can take
credit for bigotry—for other people’s ideas.
Of course, he is careful to cover his bases by always saying
this is my opinion.
And as long as the
students are not denied the chance to voice their opinion, then the school has
done its part.
But there is more to it
than that.
Is the school not responsible
for selecting decent professors who are not only qualified, but have the moral
capacity to teach.
Where is common
decency and humanity?
At what point does
the expression of one’s ideas infringe upon the right of others?
We are here to learn values and become problem solvers.
I really don’t care if a Jew, a Moslem,
Hindu, black or white is being attacked, it just shouldn’t happen.
Instead, we should all put on our armor,
waxed with high morals, and fight bigotry and defend the least privileged link
in the human chain.
The strong don’t
need our support; it is the weak and down-trodden that need protection.
If we let go of this principle, we lose sight
of humanity.
What this man is teaching
in his lectures, as I tried to explain through the appropriate channels (which
fell on deaf ears) is social Darwinism.
Survival of the fittest may work for some, but it is a very lonely
concept. We can do better.
The silver lining is that this professor was a last minute
substitute.
Let’s hope this is his last
teaching assignment.
My message to him:
Nabulsi, snap out of it, get a life, but not here.
Apply for a job at Fox.
Your racist bile doesn’t belong in the
academia.
