Caroline Glick

August 31, 2010, 5:25 AM

Washington's Israeli allies

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu heads to Washington for another stillborn round of talks with Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas hosted by US President Barack Obama, he will probably be preoccupied with one issue.

It won't be Obama's bigoted demand that Jews be prohibited from building synagogues, schools and homes in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.

Netanyahu won't be wondering how long Abbas can keep up with his "Palestinian president" act before his people chase him out of town. Abbas's term ended in January 2009.

Israel's elected leader will be thinking about Iran. He will be wondering how the US government will react if he sends the IAF to bomb Iran's nuclear installations. Will the US permit IAF jets to overfly US-controlled Iraqi airspace? Or will Obama follow the advice of his foreign policy mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski and order the US Air Force to shoot down those jets, abandon the US-Israel alliance and embrace a new role as protector of Iran's nuclear weapons program?

While Netanyahu wonders if the US can be trusted, other Israelis sleep soundly at night knowing that Uncle Sam has their back. The Israeli Left knows that no matter how forcefully its platforms are rejected by the public, the US government will embrace its members and fund its projects.

This week in the leadup to the talks, the openly subversive Geneva Initiative has launched a multimillion dollar public relations campaign targeting the public. Its goal is to persuade Israelis that Fatah is a legitimate partner for peace. The campaign is funded by USAID.

ACCORDING TO Yediot Aharonot, the Geneva Initiative has hired Ron Asulin, one of the country's top directors to stage and direct commercials featuring Fatah members telling Israelis they are credible partners in peace. The Geneva Initiative invited Yediot's Alon Goldstein to watch the recording sessions in Ramallah.

His report, published Sunday, is a fascinating glimpse at the Left's propaganda shop.

Goldstein describes how Asulin told Fatah's Saeb Erekat to begin his greeting with the word "shalom."

"It will be effective," Asulin promised.

Among his other achievements, Erekat played a starring role in the PA's 2002 blood libel in which he and his comrades accused Israel of committing a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield. He told CNN that Israel had killed "more than 500 people." He also claimed that more than 300 were being buried in mass graves.

In the event, Palestinian losses in the battle stood at 54; some 90 percent of them were combatants. Twenty-three IDF soldiers were killed. The only massacres were the suicide bombings that killed some 500 Israelis - 80 percent of whom were civilians - in the months that preceded Defensive Shield.

Not only has Erekat never retracted his statements. He has repeated them.

But never mind. He said "shalom" rather nicely.

Next on the list of US-funded spokesmen was Fatah strongman Jibril Rajoub, who was instrumental in forging the operational alliance between Fatah and Hamas that facilitated the terror war against Israel 10 years ago. Throughout the roaring '90s, Rajoub assiduously recruited Hamas members to his Preventive Security Force in Judea and Samaria.

As recently as May 10 he appeared on PA television and said, "Building a school and throwing a hand grenade, in my opinion, are resistance. I build the school in order to strengthen the reasons for my people's resolve, as one of several aspects of the resistance, and when there is a need to throw a grenade [or launch] a rocket, I'll do that as well out of my belief in the inevitable victory of my cause and its justness."

Last week the US paid for him to be filmed telling Israelis we should trust him. It was no mean task. According to Yediot, "Asulin had to work hard" to get Rajoub to say the word "partner."

Then there is Fatah's propaganda boss Yasser Abed Rabbo. As Yasser Arafat's culture and information minister, it was Abed Rabbo who ended press freedom in the PA shortly after it was established in 1994. Under his reign, journalists and editors were detained and beaten, newspapers were closed and printing presses were torched. In 2002, Abed Rabbo outdid Erekat in his mendacious condemnations of Israel. He accused Israel of "digging mass graves for 900 Palestinians in the [Jenin refugee] camp."

In 2001 he ordered the PA media to stop filming mass celebrations of the September 11 attacks on the US.

Despite his long career as a propagandist, Asulin still had his work cut out for him. He had to convince Abed Rabbo to stop waving his finger at the camera. "When you wave your finger, you are actually warning me. You are making threats."

IT IS WORTH pausing for a moment and considering the nature of the US-financed Geneva Initiative that is going to such lengths to present a wholly distorted picture of reality to the public. It is the brainchild of Israel's most successful subversive - former justice minister and former Meretz leader Yossi Beilin.

Beilin is the architect of every major Israeli strategic disaster in the past 17 years. He was the architect of the disastrous 1993 Oslo Accord that lionized Arafat as a peace partner and empowered him to embark on a campaign of terror and political warfare that continued on long after his death in 2004.

Beilin is the architect of the disastrous 2000 Taba negotiations in which an embattled prime minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat the Temple Mount even as Arafat's men were butchering Israelis on the roads, in buses and cafes.

In 2002 Beilin worked with Colin Powell's State Department to draft the so-called road map for Middle East peace. That document was the most anti-Israel ever adopted by a US administration. The Sharon government managed in large part to scuttle the initiative by convincing president George W. Bush to agree that the document's draconian demands could only be implemented after the Palestinians suspended their terror war.

His ambitions checked by the unremitting Palestinian violence, Beilin found another outlet for undermining his government. In 2003 he partnered with the Swiss government and the EU in founding the Geneva Initiative. The initiative was an open bid to subvert the writ of the government to conduct foreign policy. Beilin and Abed Rabbo gathered their followers in Geneva, held staged "negotiations" and signed an "agreement" in which the Israelis agreed to every Palestinian demand and the Palestinians thanked them.

Ariel Sharon's chief of staff Dov Weissglas claimed in a 2005 interview that Sharon was so spooked by the affront that he was convinced to embark on the withdrawal from Gaza.

Together with the 2000 withdrawal from south Lebanon - which Beilin also spearheaded - the withdrawal from Gaza will go down in the annals of Israeli history as the greatest strategic blunder until that time.

Not surprisingly, the public takes a dim view of Beilin and his ilk. This is why in the last elections Meretz was destroyed as a representative political force. It won only three seats in the Knesset.

But Beilin and his supporters don't care.

They are not trying to win over the public in any real sense. In many ways they are the flip side of Fatah. Just as Fatah is the lawful representative of no one, so they are the lawful representative of next to no one. And just as Fatah rules through a mix of tyranny and corruption, so they seek to dictate Israel's path through a mixture of corruption and political subversion.

THE NEWEST Geneva Initiative campaign was far from the only display of the far Left's contempt for the Israeli people this week.

Over the weekend, more than 50 far Left activists who double as actors, writers and tenured professors signed open letters pledging not to perform at Ariel's new theater.

Since Ariel is beyond the 1949 armistice lines, as far as these self-described artists are concerned, its residents have no right to watch plays. On the other hand, as actor Doron Tabori, one of the signatories, argued in an appearance on the Knesset channel, the very idea that the state might consider ending its funding of his work in light of his discriminatory position is proof that his critics are all "fascists and racists."

Tabori is far from alone.

His rejection of the legitimacy of public criticism and his demonization of his critics is the hallmark of the Left.

Take Hebrew University Prof. Ze'ev Sternhall for instance. In 2001 he published an oped in Haaretz advising the Palestinians to limit their acts of murder to Israelis who live beyond the armistice lines. As he put it, "There is no doubt about the legitimacy of armed resistance in the territories themselves. If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements... and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line."

On Sunday, in response to the Im Tirtzu student movement's recent campaign against Ben-Gurion University's anti-Zionist Politics and Government Department, Sternhall wrote a new piece in Haaretz. Under the headline, "Only force will stop force," he threatened the government. If it continues to back Im Tirtzu, if its members maintain their call to fire state-funded professors who call for a boycott of Israel, then Israeli professors should work to foment an international boycott.

As he put it, "Any attempt to harm a lecturer's status for political reasons will met with a firm response from Israel's academic faculty. The expected reaction from the international community, including the possibility of a boycott, could be no less painful."

It is from the Sternhalls and Taboris of Israel that groups like the Geneva Initiative draw their support base.

On Sunday, Charles Krauthammer wrote about the American public's abandonment of the political and cultural Left. Rather than consider the possibility that the public may have a point, he claimed that the American Left has responded to their fellow Americans' repudiation by demonizing their countrymen as a bunch of bigots.

Krauthammer concluded that the Left will pay for its assault on American society at the ballot box in November. As he put it, "A comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them."

He is probably right about America. But their comrades in Israel will suffer no similar drubbing.

While Israel's elected leaders are left guessing if the US will stand behind the country at its moment of greatest need, the likes of Beilin and Sternhall know that they can rely on Washington come rain or come shine.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on August 31, 2010 at 5:25 AM

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August 28, 2010, 3:41 PM

Oliver Moan on the Ground Zero Mosque and the American Way

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As promised.

Enjoy and post far and wide!

Posted on August 28, 2010 at 3:41 PM

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August 27, 2010, 7:45 AM

Filmmaker Oliver Moan on the Ground Zero Mosque

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In this week's Tribal Update from Latma, the Hebrew-language satire website I edit, we bring you the great American filmmaker Oliver Moan to discuss the Ground Zero Mosque and the new American Way.

We also bring you Defense Minister Ehud Barak's spin doctor, Freddy Spin to discuss how business is done behind the scenes in Israel's command center.

I'll post the Oliver Moan clip separately in a few hours.

Here is the whole show.

Feel free to post and distribute far and wide.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute to our efforts by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

Unfortunately, for now, we can only accept donations from donors in the US. We are finding a solution to the problem and check here for updates.

Posted on August 27, 2010 at 7:45 AM

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Accepting the unacceptable

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Last weekend the mullahs took a big step towards becoming a nuclear power as they powered the Bushehr nuclear reactor.

Israel's response? The Foreign Ministry published a statement proclaiming the move "totally unacceptable."

So why did we accept the totally unacceptable?

When one asks senior officials about the Bushehr reactor and about Iran's nuclear program more generally, their response invariably begins, "Well the Americans..."

Far from accepting that Israel has a problem that it must deal with, Israel's decision makers still argue that the US will discover - before it is too late - that it must act to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power in order to secure its own interests.

As for Bushehr specifically, Israeli officials explain that it isn't the main problem. The main danger stems from the uranium enrichment sites. And anyway, they explain, given the civilian character of the Bushehr reactor; the fact that it is under a full International Atomic Energy Agency inspections regime; and the fact that the Russians are supposed to take all the spent fuel rods to Russia and so prevent Iran from using them to produce weapons-grade plutonium, Israel lacked the international legitimacy to strike Bushehr to prevent it from being fuelled last weekend.

BEFORE GOING into the question of whether or not Israel's decision makers were correct in deciding to opt out of attacking the Bushehr reactor to prevent it from being fuelled, it is worth considering where "the Americans" stand on Iran as it declares itself a nuclear power and tests new advanced weapons systems on a daily basis.

The answer to this question was provided in large part in an article in the National Interest by former Clinton Administration National Security Council member Bruce Riedel. Titled, "If Israel Attacks," Riedel -- who reportedly has close ties to the administration - asserts that an Israeli military strike against Iran will be a disaster for the US. In his view, US is better served by allowing Iran to become a nuclear power than by supporting an Israeli attack against Iran.

He writes, "The United States needs to send a clear red light to Israel. There's no option but to actively discourage an Israeli attack."

Riedel explains that to induce Israel to accept the unacceptable specter of a nuclear armed mullocracy, the US should pay it off. Riedel recommends plying Israel's leaders with F-22 Stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, a mutual defense treaty and perhaps even NATO membership.

Riedel's reason for deeming an Israeli strike unacceptable is his conviction that such a strike will be met by an Iranian counter-strike against US forces and interests in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. While there is no reason to doubt he is correct, Riedel studiously ignores the other certainty: A nuclear-armed Iran would threaten those same troops and interests far more.

Riedel would have us believe that the Iranian regime will be a rational nuclear actor. That's the regime that has outlawed music, stones women, and deploys terror proxies throughout the region and the world. That's the same regime whose "supreme leader" just published a fatwa claiming he has the same religious stature as Muhammed

Riedel bases this view on the actions Iran took when it was weak.

Since Iran didn't place its American hostages on trial in 1980, it can be trusted with nuclear weapons in 2010. Since Iran didn't go to war against the US in 1988 during the Kuwaiti tanker crisis, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can be trusted with nuclear bombs in 2010. And so on and so forth.

Moreover, Riedel ignores what any casual newspaper reader now recognizes: Iran's nuclear weapons program has spurred a regional nuclear arms race. Riedel imagines a bipolar nuclear Middle East with Israel on the one side and Iran on the other. He fails to notice that already today Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan and Turkey have all initiated nuclear programs. And if Iran is allowed to go nuclear, these countries will beat a path to any number of nuclear bomb stores.

Some argue that a multipolar nuclear Middle East will adhere to the rules of mutual assured destruction. Assuming this is true, the fact remains that the violent Iranian response to an Israeli strike against its nuclear installations will look like a minor skirmish in comparison to the conventional wars that will break out in a Middle East in which everyone has the bomb.

And in truth, there is no reason to believe that a Middle East in which everyone has nuclear weapons is a Middle East which adheres to the rules of MAD. A recent Zogby/ University of Maryland poll of Arab public opinion taken for the Brookings Institute in US-allied Arab states Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the UAE shows that the Arab world is populated by jihadists.

As Herb London from the Hudson Institute pointed out in an analysis of the poll, nearly 70 percent of those polled said the leader they most admire is either a jihadist or a supporter of jihad. The most popular leaders were Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Hizbullah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden.

So if popular revolutions bring down any of the teetering despotic regimes now occupying the seats of power in the Arab world, they will likely be replaced by jihadists. Moreover, since an Iranian nuclear bomb would empower the most radical, destabilizing forces in pan-Arab society, the likelihood that a despot would resort to a nuclear strike on a Western or Israeli target in order to stay in power would similarly rise.

All of this should not be beyond the grasp of an experienced strategic thinker like Riedel. And yet, obviously, it is. Moreover, as an alumnus of the Clinton administration, Riedel's positions in general are more realistic than those of the Obama administration. As Israeli officials acknowledge, the Obama administration is only now coming to terms with the fact that its engagement policy towards Iran has failed.

Moreover, throughout the US government, the White House is the most stubborn defender of the notion that the Iranian nuclear threat is not as serious a threat as the absence of a Palestinian state. That is, President Barack Obama himself is the most strident advocate of a US Middle East policy that ignores all the dangers the US faces in the region and turns American guns against the only country that doesn't threaten any US interest.

And now, facing this state of affairs, Israeli leaders today still argue that issuing a Foreign Ministry communiqué declaring the fuelling of the Bushehr nuclear reactor "unacceptable," and beginning worthless negotiations with Fatah leaders is a rational and sufficient Israeli policy.

WHAT LIES behind this governmental fecklessness?

There are two possible explanations for the government's behavior. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may be motivated by operational concerns or he may be motivated by political concerns.

On the operational level, the question guiding Israel's leaders is when is the optimal time to attack? The fact that government sources say that it would have been diplomatically suicidal to attack before Bushehr became operational last weekend makes it clear that non-military considerations are the determining factor for Israel's leadership. Yet what Riedel's article and the clear positions of the Obama administration demonstrate is that there is no chance that non-military conditions will ever be optimal for Israel. Moreover, as Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor shows, Israel can achieve its strategic objectives even without US support for its operations.

From a military perspective, it is clear that it would have been better to strike Iran's nuclear installations before the Russians fuelled Bushehr. Any attack scenario from now on will have to either accept the prospect of nuclear fallout or accept leaving Bushehr intact. Indeed from a military perspective, the longer Israel waits to attack Iran, the harder it will become to accomplish the mission.

So unless Israel's leaders are unaware of strategic realities, the only plausible explanation for Netanyahu's decision to sit by idly as Israel's military options were drastically diminished over the weekend is that he was moved by domestic political considerations.

And what might those political considerations be? Clearly he wasn't concerned with a lack of public support. Consistent, multiyear polling data show that the public overwhelmingly supports the use of force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Then there is the issue of Netanyahu's coalition. It cannot be that Netanyahu believes that he can build a broader coalition to support an attack on Iran than he already has by bringing Kadima into his government. Kadima leader Tzipi Livni is not a great supporter of an Israeli attack on Iran. Livni views being liked by Obama more important than preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear state.

The prospect of a Kadima splinter party led by former defense minister Shaul Mofaz joining the coalition is also raised periodically. Yet experience to date indicates there is little chance of that happening. Mofaz apparently dislikes Netanyahu more than he dislikes the notion of facing a nuclear-armed Iran, (and a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia and Egypt and etc., etc., etc.).

Only one possibility remains: Netanyahu must have opted to sit on his hands as Bushehr was powered up because of opposition he faces from within his government. There is only one person in Netanyahu's coalition who has both the strategic dementia and the political power to force Netanyahu to accept the unacceptable. That person is Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Barak's strategic ineptitude is legendary. It was most recently on display in the failed naval commando takeover of the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara. It was Barak's idea to arm naval commandos with paintball guns and so guarantee that they would be attacked and forced to use lethal force to defend themselves.

Barak's ability to dictate government policy was most recently demonstrated in his obscene abuse of power in the appointment of the IDF's next chief of staff. Regardless of whether the so-called "Galant" document which set out a plan to see Maj. General Yoav Galant appointed to replace outgoing IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi was forged or authentic, it is clear that its operative clauses were all being implemented by Barak's own office for the past several months. So too, despite the fact that the document is still the subject of police investigation, Barak successfully strong-armed Netanyahu into agreeing to his lightning appointment of Galant.

Even if Galant is the best candidate for the position, it is clear that Barak did the general no favors by appointing him in this manner. He certainly humiliated and discredited the General Staff.

Barak is the Obama administration's favorite Israeli politician. While Netanyahu is shunned, Barak is feted in Washington nearly every month. And this makes sense. As the man directly responsible for Israel's defense and with his stranglehold on the government, he alone has the wherewithal to enable the entire Middle East to go nuclear.

How's that for totally unacceptable?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on August 27, 2010 at 3:13 AM

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August 24, 2010, 11:15 AM

Israel fights the demagogues

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Israeli academia is in an uproar. And this is a good thing. Last week, the Zionist student movement Im Tirtzu opened a rather modest campaign against Ben-Gurion University's Politics and Government Department. And the howls of protest stretched from the Negev to the border with Lebanon.

Im Tirtzu is a grass-roots initiative of university students. Over the past few years it has managed to amass a modest budget funded by Jewish and non-Jewish Zionists here and in the US.

One of Im Tirtzu's central goals is to engender an atmosphere of academic freedom and intellectual pluralism on university campuses. Over the past generation or so, those campuses, and particularly the humanities and social sciences faculties, have become hotbeds of anti-Zionist activism and intellectual terror. Stories of professorial intimidation of and discrimination against Zionist students are widespread, as are instances of outright indoctrination in the classrooms.

As Ma'ariv's Ben Dror Yemini reported this week, at Hebrew University's law school, Prof. Yehuda Shenhav teaches a class called "Bureaucracy, Governance and Human Rights." In the course of their studies, the students are expected to participate in the work of anti-Zionist organizations including Machsom Watch and Yesh Din. At the end of the year, the participants - who will be paid NIS 1,450 for their activism - are expected to write an article describing their experiences which will be turned into a booklet edited by Shenhav and anti-Zionist activists Michael Sfard and Yael Barda and published by their anti-Zionist NGOs.

The situation at Ben-Gurion University's Politics and Government Department is particularly distressing. It is headed by Dr. Neve Gordon, an anti-Zionist activist who has written that Israel is a "proto-fascist state," has castigated it as an "apartheid state" and has signed petitions calling for international academic, scientific, economic and cultural boycotts of the country.

Responding to complaints from students, Im Tirtzu undertook an examination of the Politics and Government Department faculty. It discovered that among the department's 11 tenured instructors, nine are involved in extreme leftist political activity. Led by Gordon, six of the 11 signed a letter supporting soldiers who refuse to serve in the IDF.

Both of the department's research fellows are notorious among their students for their anti-Zionist views. Eight of the department's 19 adjunct lecturers publicly espouse radical leftist views. Three of the department's six doctoral candidates have signed letters in support of Gordon's calls for international boycotts.

AS EREZ Tadmor, Im Tirtzu's research director, noted in a television interview last week, these views represent the politics of but a smattering of the public. And yet, they are the predominant view of the department. In a place where the most radical, dogmatic views - views that reject the state's very right to exist - predominate, it is impossible to imagine that the average student feels comfortable exploring and researching other thought streams. Consequently, it is reasonable to fear that far from educating students, the department engages in wholesale indoctrination of students.

Indeed, as Makor Rishon's Yishai Friedman reported last Friday, the department pays them and gives them academic credit for participation in radical leftist NGOs. As Friedman exposed, students who volunteer at post-Zionist NGOs funded by the New Israel Fund receive academic credit for their efforts and the NIF provides them with generous NIS 7,400 scholarships for their activism.

Several of the department's faculty members serve or have served in leadership positions in these groups. For instance, Gordon served as the head of NIF-funded Physicians for Human Rights, which supported the false claim that the IDF massacred Palestinians in the battle at the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. The scholarship program is funded through the NIF's Shatil group's Everett Social Justice Fellowship initiative.

Last month, Im Tirtzu sent a letter to Ben-Gurion University president Rivka Karmi asking her to take action to correct the atmosphere of intellectual terror in the department.

It asked that she inform the group, within a month, of the actions she had taken in this regard.

It then gave her an ultimatum. If she refused to respond to its query, "we will be forced to utilize our freedom of speech and protest and use all legal means to inform the current and future student body, and especially those who support Ben-Gurion University in Israel and abroad, about the severity of the situation and the administration's prolonged refusal to contend with the situation which has allowed it to reach the current level of severity. We will also recommend that political science students not study at Ben-Gurion University.

"Additionally we will request that the university's donors place their contributions in an escrow account overseen by an attorney. The funds will be released to the university after it has substantively proven that the department's bias and distortion, expressed by the faculty and course syllabi, have been corrected."

Predictably, Karmi never acknowledged Im Tirtzu's letter. And so when the month ended last week, the group embarked on a worldwide public relations campaign against the department. The campaign, which was widely covered by the media (and evoked the predictable condemnation of Haaretz), has led to a storm of criticism by professors at Ben-Gurion and their comrades throughout the country. Predictably, they have castigated Im Tirtzu as a McCarthyist group, a fascist group, an extremist group and a far-right group that is seeking to silence dissent and destroy the principle of academic freedom.

So too, many professors who have spoken on the issue have argued that Im Tirtzu has no right to be heard. For instance, in a television appearance last week, Prof. Yossi Yonah from Ben-Gurion appeared on Erev Hadash with Tadmor. There he said, "I reject the authority, the legitimacy of a group like this to come and investigate my behavior as a member of the faculty."

These assertions are completely ridiculous. First of all, academic freedom is not threatened. What Im Tirtzu and other organizations like the Institute for Zionist Strategies have criticized is the fact that ideological uniformity in academic departments is not conducive to academic freedom.

NO ONE is criticizing professors' right to engage in academic study. Im Tirtzu and other groups object first to the fact that much of what is presented as academic work is nothing but polemical dogma, unsupported by empirical or theoretical research.

Second they object to the fact that the views of the radical Left, which represents almost no one here, receives the majority of teaching and research positions at Ben-Gurion University's Politics and Government Department.

Karmi has condemned Im Tirtzu and its campaign as McCarthyist and an attempt to silence opposing voices. While these assertions are par for the course for university heads who behave as though they have a divine right to unlimited taxpayer and donor funds, they are utterly false.

In acting as it has, Im Tirtzu has simply pointed out the obvious. No one is under any obligation to fund institutions that advance causes opposite to those they believe in. No one is required to study in a department that seeks to indoctrinate rather than educate. And both donors and students have a right to know what it is they are supporting.

Beyond that, the truth is that initiatives like Im Tirtzu's seek to expand rather than contract academic freedom. It is inarguable that academic freedom flourishes in environments where all dissenting views are given fair representation.

Perhaps more important than the ultimate consequences of Im Tirtzu's campaign is what both the initiative and the Left's response to it tell us about the direction Israeli society is taking.

The Left's hysterical response tells us that it - and particularly the academic Left - is incapable of withstanding even the slightest criticism. Yonah's insistence that the likes of Tadmor have no right to criticize academics exposes a deep and abiding contempt for the public harbored by our publicly funded professors. From a budgetary perspective, Im Tirtzu lacks even a small percentage of the funds available to anti-Zionist NGOs like Physicians for Human Rights, which enjoys seemingly bottomless financial support from the EU and the NIF.

And yet, despite their unrivaled access to funds, their nearly complete control over the country's universities, the often knee-jerk media support for their campaigns against Israel and their ability to spend sabbaticals abroad conferring with their Israel-bashing colleagues in places like Berkeley, for our radical academics, Im Tirtzu's initiative to expose their hostility to the state that supports them evokes group hysteria. In response they call for Bolshevik-style rejection of the public's right to notice their behavior, let alone criticize it.

Despite its modest budget, Im Tirtzu's message is getting across. And not for the first time. In the spring the group launched a wildly successful public awareness campaign about the NIF. The group released a report detailing the central role NIF-sponsored groups played in assisting the Goldstone Commission in preparing its libelous report accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Operation Cast Lead.

What Im Tirtzu's repeated success tells us is that something exciting is happening today. After a generation of meekly accepting the Left's domination of the public discourse - in the media, in academia, in the legal system and in popular culture - the public has finally had enough. Young people like Tadmor and Im Tirtzu's leader Ronen Shoval are finally standing up to their authority. And because they reflect the values and views of the overwhelming majority of the public, their message is getting through.

For the first time in a generation, the Left is on the defensive. Rather than dominating the airwaves with its allegations of Israeli and Zionist racism and criminality, it is forced to defend its right to block out all dissenting voices from the national debate.

There is much reason for concern about prospects for the future. With military threats to the country multiplying by the day and with the political campaign to delegitimize it escalating, Israel is under assault as never before. And yet, what the success of groups like Im Tirtzu shows is that, by and large, the public remains strong, vibrant, defiant and courageous. As our enemies grow stronger, the public is rising to meet and defeat them.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on August 24, 2010 at 11:15 AM

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