Once again, Britain’s brain trust takes a brave stand and kicks Israel under the bus. This time, they’re insisting that all Israeli academics must publicly renounce the policies of their government if they want to participate in international academic forums, etc.

This is political correctness gone mad—of the kind Larry Summers talked about when he was president of Harvard University:

Of course academic communities should be and always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed. And certainly there is much to be debated about the Middle East and much in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged.

But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent. [emphasis added]

For example:

• Hundreds of European academics have called for an end to support for Israeli researchers, though not for an end to support for researchers from any other nation.
• Israeli scholars this past spring were forced off the board of an international literature journal.
• At the same rallies where protesters, many of them university students, condemn the IMF and global capitalism and raise questions about globalization, it is becoming increasingly common to also lash out at Israel. Indeed, at the anti-IMF rallies last spring, chants were heard equating Hitler and Sharon.
• Events to raise funds for organizations of questionable political provenance that in some cases were later found to support terrorism have been held by student organizations on this and other campuses with at least modest success and very little criticism.
• And some here at Harvard and some at universities across the country have called for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested. I hasten to say the University has categorically rejected this suggestion.

We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position. We should also recall that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism. The only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong alternatives vigorously advocated.

I have always throughout my life been put off by those who heard the sound of breaking glass, in every insult or slight, and conjured up images of Hitler’s Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel. Such views have always seemed to me alarmist if not slightly hysterical. But I have to say that while they still seem to me unwarranted, they seem rather less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago.

I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy — a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But this depends on all of us.

Summers gave that speech in September 2002. Three years later, he left Harvard after a controversial tenure.** Things have only gone from bad to worse in the meantime.

However…(there’s always a “however”) imagine my surprise to read some of the comments attached to the Ha’aretz piece I link above: Yossi, from Israel, thinks the boycott is “annoying but a good idea,” while Mohammed, from Saudi Arabia, patiently explains to him that, no, it’s not okay—it’s anti-Semitic to single out Israelis.

Yossi: The Boycott may be annoying for some or even offensive but actually it is a very good idea.

It is very important at a time like this when the Palestinians are suffering so much from IDF violence and agression that the International Community start to isolate Israel in the same way they isolated Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.

——————————-

Mohammed: The Main reason the boycott lacks credability is that it singles out only one country. Here in Saudi Arabia for instance our freedoms are far more resrictive than our Palestinian brothers and sisters. What about Syria, Iran, North Korea etc. They treat our own Muslim population jarshly and have killed far more of our own than Israel has in all of its history. Yossi, when academics are targeted its usually about racism or in this case anti-Semitism because the academics are the very people who are makeing a difference with human rights and individual freedoms. Therefore when British Educators decide to take a stand against Israeli Educators the Palestinians are the losers and the Brits are seen in full view exposed for what they are doing which is racism-anti-Semitism. If this organization targeted boycotts of a variety of educators from repressive countries around than it would only be a bad Idea but because it only targets the Israelis its just pure bigotry.

I will be curious to see how many American academics rise to defend their Israeli colleagues.
—–

**Read this piece for a postmortem on Summers’s departure. It’s long and, most curiously, doesn’t even mention Summers’s remarks about anti-Semitism that I quoted above. But Summers was controversial about most everything—he was an equal-opportunity offender. Here’s the most interesting bit from the piece. It speaks volumes about politilcal correctness among other “elites,” too.

Several college presidents whose politics are not notably conservative agreed that Summers was punished for his views — and said that they worried about the message that sent to other presidents. “Summers as an individual may have been too strong-minded, too clear, and too disrespectful of the Harvard elite to survive,” said one president. “One thing is sure, and that is that the academic elite do not tolerate dissent that deviates from well known and narrowly defined boundaries, and the academic elite in particular does not tolerate dissent that carries with it the threat of implementation.” [emphasis added]

edited to add a link

The Egyptian authorities have been conducting a serious crackdown on bloggers (along with other dissidents who displease them). I haven’t read Alaa’s blog, but I read the Egyptian Sandmonkey’s regularly. Here’s what he has to say [emphasis mine]:

Currently there are about 48 detained,
6 of them are bloggers, and 3 of them are women. The best known is
Alaa, which makes him the posterboy of this campaign - but getting them
out is equally as important. Egypt
has fewer than 830 bloggers all in all, 60 of whom are political and
less than 30 are politically active. Now 6 of those are in jail - 20%
of all politically active Egyptian bloggers - and amongst them one of Egypt’s most highly profiled one….

Alaa
is a secular democracy activist, and a tireless advocate of freedom,
free speech and human rights. He organizes demonstrations and engages
in protests against all kinds of injustices in Egypt and is the winner of the international Best of the Blogs award from Reporters Without Borders last December….

Addresses for the Egyptian embassies in the US and Canada are available here, templates for e-mails to be sent to the embassies here, and the contact information for the person to e-mail in the US state department is here.
If you are a journalist or know one, help us spread the word by writing
about this or demanding your local newspaper write about this. If you
have a blog or a website and would like to raise awareness about this
issue, banners for the Free Alaa campaign can be found here and here. We could use any help we can get, so if you have any ideas or ways to help us, please do.

Free Alaa

I’ve sent e-mails. Please write to support this courageous young man, and freedom of speech.

In the blogosphere, there’s a new showdown on “the left,” this one precipitated by a blog post from Jonathan Chait in The Plank:

In the end, though, I can’t quite root for [Joe] Lieberman to lose his primary. What’s holding me back is that the ["netroots"] anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman’s sins. It’s a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early ’70s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary challengers against them.

Chait’s posting brought on a deluge of negative comments, remarked upon by the Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum, who didn’t want to get involved but then added his own complaints about the “netroots” activists:

Chait calls the Kos/Atrios wing “left-wing activists.” Marshall Wittman more colorfully calls them “McGovernites with modems.” But this is a serious misreading. In fact, if I have a problem with the Kossite wing of the blogosphere, it’s the fact that they aren’t especially left wing. Markos in particular specifically prides himself on caring mostly about winning elections, not fighting ideological battles….

So is the liberal blogosphere liberal? Of course it is. But to compare it to the left-wing radicals of the early 70s is to misunderstand it completely. Netroots favorite Howard Dean is no lefty radical, and at a policy level most of the high-traffic liberal blogs are only modestly to the left of the DLC — except on Iraq.

It’s a long, sad journey reading through the comments on both sites. There is a great deal of incoherence and ignorance, especially about the meaning of the word “ideology.”

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos isn’t a leftist, it’s claimed (as if leftism or rightism are the only manifestations of ideology). He is merely partisan. Well, okay. He is, of course, fanatically anti-Bush and fanatically anti-war. Other than that, he’s not ideological at all.

And when Atrios says

But, just to make clear why people like me don’t like Joe Lieberman - it’s because he’s a Fox News Democrat. Yes, his unwavering support for Bush’s disastrous foreign policy and his love for torture don’t win him any points either, but he’s not the only Democrat for whom that applies.

then that’s not ideological either, right? (especially the guilt-by-association name-calling-smear tactic favored by totalitarians of all political stripes).

Note #1 to the netroots folks: whether you’re leftists or liberals or progressives or centrists or conservatives, even if the only stance you agree on (and are willing to take) is that you are anti-Bush and anti-war, you will be perceived as ideological—because you are ideological. You tell us what you’re against. And what the rest of us are supposed to be against. What are you, for, though, other than a victory at the poll for Democrats? What happens when you win?

Note #2: If you don’t state your political position, your opposition will misstate it for you. (”He was for it before he was against it.”) And you may have to resort to losing tactics like this:

Here’s a smart observation from the comments section of Drum’s blog post cited above [emphasis mine]:

KOS and his netroots supporters are a fascinating phenomena. Markos does talk endlessly about winning and not ideology, but thus far he has never won and mostly has not even come close. And perhaps even more importantly, what is the sense of dedicating yourself to winning elections if you do not have some ideaology to promote.

Today’s New York Times front’s a story about the ideological disarray. And the paper chooses sides in the debate about whether the party should tack left:

With Democrats increasingly optimistic about this year’s midterm elections and the landscape for 2008, intellectuals in the center and on the left are debating how to sharpen the party’s identity and present a clear alternative to the conservatism that has dominated political thought for a generation. [emphasis added]

That’s bullshit. There hasn’t been any political thought on the Democratic side for a long time—that’s the real problem.

Michael Tomasky, of the American Prospect, thinks he knows why—it’s the media’s fault! it’s the pollsters’ fault!:

Mr. Tomasky argued in his article that “the party and the constellation of interests around it don’t even think in philosophical terms and haven’t for quite some time. There’s a reason for this. They’ve all been trained to believe—by the media, by their pollsters—that their philosophy is an electoral loser.”

Mr. Tomasky needs a lesson in logic: you don’t have a philosophy because the media tells you your philosophy is a loser? Um, no. A philosophy is something you believe in, subscribe to, and follow, regardless of what the media and the polls say. Kinda like what Bush has…whether you like it or not: he’s a true believer. That is the source of his appeal (when people aren’t mad at him).
Peter Beinart also needs to clear the cobwebs, though, because he sounds just like John Kerry. Who lost in 2004.

Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for The New Republic, argues for a new Democratic foreign policy in a new book, “The Good Fight,” saying liberals need to reclaim the tough-minded approach they brought to the cold war— recognizing the need for strong engagement in the fight against totalitarianism and for democracy, but doing so through international institutions. [emphasis added]

I see. America should keep its head down. Now, that’s a real winner.

Mr. Beinart, who backed the war in Iraq but now says, “I was wrong,” said there were “important cautionary lessons” for supporters of that war about the dangers of “apocalyptic thinking” and the conviction that quick action is essential. On the other hand, he said, “It was the wrong lessons of Vietnam that led the Democratic Party off the cliff into mass opposition to the gulf war” in 1991.

Call me crazy, but I think if the liberal hawks had the courage to stick to their guns and say that deposing Saddam was the right thing to do despite the fact that we are still there and that things continue to look awful, they could win an election in the United States.

Saying the war was a mistake is the only thing you can say if you want to be accepted socially in certain circles—i.e., the circles that journalists travel in. It is, however, an electoral loser.

You were for it before you were against it. What kind of principle is that?