Columbia’s history professor Joseph Massad decides he’s an expert on international law above the entire world when it comes to de-legitimizing Israel.
By Lee Kaplan
Joining a long line of Palestinian and other Arab “academics” is a relentless quest to de-legitimize the Jewish state of Israel, Columbia’s Joseph Massad claims that the United Nation’s exercise of international law “against the Palestinian people” in 1948 creating Israel is rooted in a “ficticious”(sic) narrative of Israel having a "right" to exist.
Massad has taken pen or keyboard in hand to write a less-than-dignified propaganda rant against the Jewish state in the less-than-objective Arab news service, al Jazeera. In the article, dated May, 6th, 2011, Massad, who is not a law professor, nor has any expertise in international law, decides he knows more about international law than all the international lawyers in the world and throughout history including those who wrote UN resolutions pertaining to Israel’s existence and the establishment of states in the Middle East.
In the same Al Jazeera article Massad explains that “For the Palestinians and the international community, represented by the United Nations and the myriad resolutions its Security Council and General Assembly issued since 1948, what was to be negotiated were the colonization of land, the occupation of territory and population, and the laws that stipulate ethnic and religious discrimination in Israel, which, among other things, bar Palestinian refugees from returning to their land and confiscate their property. In their struggle against these Israeli practices, Palestinian leaders, whether in Israel, the Occupied Territories, or the diaspora, have always invoked these rights based on international law and UN resolutions, which Israel has consistently refused to implement or abide by since 1948. Thus for the Palestinians, armed by the UN and international law, the negotiations were precisely aimed to end colonization, occupation, and discrimination.”
Massad forgets or overlooks intentionally the United Nations in 1948 set up a Palestinian state on what is today called the West Bank the same time it created Israel (a state that was subsequently swallowed up by Jordan while Gaza was swallowed up by Egypt). Apparently, the United Nations setting up a Jewish state next door had no legal basis, but the Arab one did solely because Massad, the self-proclaimed international law expert says so. Massad also ignores that Jews were the majority population property owners who legally purchased all their land in the final area designated by the UN to be Israel. The remaining Negev desert had little going for it as private property back then. It is further a myth of the Palestinian movement that Jews just grabbed Arab property at the behest of the UN.
Massad further turns history and truth on their heads by ignoring that Israel was founded in international law by the United Nations over a 30 year period starting with the Balfour Declaration by the British. If Massad’s outrageous statements about law had any validity then most of the Arab states founded after the First World War would also have no legitimacy, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon that were sops for Arab tribes who fought against the Turks for the British and French. Massad further ignores that the Jewish majority in Israel legally purchased most of their land in pre 1948 Israel, and denies a Jewish presence in the land for 3,000 years even existing after the Roman conquest, thus negating his accusation that the founding population of Israel were little more than colonists dispossessing the “indigenous” population of Arabs. Massad also ignores that Jews were the majority population property owners who legally purchased all their land in the final area designated by the UN to be Israel, parts of which were stolen by Jordanian and Egyptian armies back in 1948. The remaining Negev desert had little going for it as private property back then. It is further a myth of the Palestinian movement that Jews just grabbed Arab property at the behest of the UN.
Of course, Massad, ignores the myriad pogroms of Jews by the Arabs in the region in 1921, in 1929 in Hebron, in 1936 and 1947 which led the United Nations and Britain to declare finally a separate state for Jewish self-determination in those areas where Jews were a majority.
Massad even ignores that a “Palestinian” back in 1948 was a term used to mean a Jew, and the term was not even adoptede by Arabs allegedly from the region until after 1964 as was explained by the PLO leadership in 1970. One can only attribute such outrageous claims of violations of international law to Massad’s being tenured which guarantees he will be able to continue to teach his falsehoods to Columbia students.
So is Massad, the historian making up new history to bolster is ignorant rantings about international law? Is he covered by academic freedom to make such outrageous statements? The intelligent answer would be no.
Here are some further re-creations of events taught by Massad as evidenced by the Al Jazeera article:
“On the other hand, one of the strongest and persistent arguments that the Zionist movement and Israel have deployed since 1948 in defense of the establishment of Israel and its subsequent policies is the invocation of the rights of Israel, which are not based on international law or UN resolutions. This is a crucial distinction to be made between the Palestinian and Israeli claims to possession of "rights." While the Palestinians invoke rights that are internationally recognized, Israel invokes rights that are solely recognized at the national level by the Israeli state itself. For Zionism, this was a novel mode of argumentation as, in deploying it, Israel invokes not only juridical principles but also moral ones.
‘In this realm, Israel has argued over the years that Jews have a right to establish a state in Palestine, that they have a right to establish a "Jewish" state in Palestine, that this state has a "right to exist," and that it has a "right to defend itself", which includes its subsidiary right to be the only country in the region to possess nuclear weapons, that it has the "right" to inherit all the biblical land that the Jewish God promised it, and a "right" to enact laws that are racially and religiously discriminatory in order to preserve the Jewish character of the state, otherwise articulated in the more recent formula of "a Jewish and democratic state". Israel has also insisted that its enemies, including the Palestinian people, whom it dispossesses, colonizes, occupies, and discriminates against, must recognize all these rights, foremost among them its "right to exist as a Jewish state", as a condition for and a precursor to peace.”
Professor Massad in two paragraphs doesn’t even credit Israel with trying to make peace with its Arab neighbors who have been screaming to drive the Jews into the sea since before Israel’s creation because it is not an Arab majority and Muslim dominated state. He states no objection to “Muslim” states all over the Middle East, most of which no longer have Jewish populations that were ethnically cleansed (murdered) by the Arab majorities within them.
Since Israel was created by the United Nations, is Massad simply lying or is he trying to rewrite history to the Palestinian narrative? Obviously, the latter. The Israeli Declaration of Independence from 1948 stipulates equal rights for all citizens of Israel despite their ethnicity and non-Jewish Israelis, a majority of which are Arabs and Muslims serve in Israel’s judiciary, police force and even the IDF is they wish. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Arab women can vote. Israel even has US-mimicked affirmative action laws in its universities and Arab members in the Knesset (who routinely under rules of freedom of speech call for the desruction of the Jewish state. If Massad were less a political hack for the anti-Israel crowd and a truthful academic, he wouldn’t make such false statements about discrimination and dispossession. Arabs who remained in a nascent Jewish state, founded legally by international law in 1948 after Arab armies failed to destroy it, have had their population multiply ten thousand percent since then and enjoy the highest living standards and more human rights than Arabs living anywhere else in the world.
Massad, the now self-proclaimed expert on international law, even faults the Almighty for what is written in the Bible and even in the Koran: the right of Jews to live in their own land, Israel, for their own self-determination. He says he is incensed that Israelis would deign to say they want “peace” because they don’t even have the right to exist. One can translate this into an endorsement of violence and terrorism and certainly cannot interpret it as any call to a peaceful settlement. To Joseph Massad international law must be obeyed when it supports Arab and Muslim goals, it is irrelevant when it supports the creation or rights of Jews to “exist” within secure borders. As such, Massad sees his function as a historian to promulgate the jihadist line rather than to educate the world to seek truth and advancement of society. His remonstrations about the inadequacies of international law are no better than his lectures and writings on history when it comes to objectivity and the facts.
This article was originally published at the American Center for Democracy website,
www.acdemocracy.org .
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
ARRIGONI KILLED FOR BEING GAY?
New information of Vittorio Arrigoni: Killed for being gay.
It is now emerging that Vittorio Arrigoni may have been gay as the motivation for why some factions of Hamas killed him. This makes the most sense. Arrigoni was reportedly gay like so many other ISM anarchists who strive for an anti-establishment way of life. One of his killers was a Hamas policeman. That cetain factions of Hamas would have kidnapped an Italian national who was gay to put pressure on the other Hamas factions in dealing with the Italian government sounds plausible. However, the urge of the Muslims to murder a gay would have been just too tempting. Gays are being murdered all the time in Gaza under the repressive Hamas regime, a regime the ISM loves to support in its quest to kill Jews, Christians and anyone else from the "establishment."
It is now emerging that Vittorio Arrigoni may have been gay as the motivation for why some factions of Hamas killed him. This makes the most sense. Arrigoni was reportedly gay like so many other ISM anarchists who strive for an anti-establishment way of life. One of his killers was a Hamas policeman. That cetain factions of Hamas would have kidnapped an Italian national who was gay to put pressure on the other Hamas factions in dealing with the Italian government sounds plausible. However, the urge of the Muslims to murder a gay would have been just too tempting. Gays are being murdered all the time in Gaza under the repressive Hamas regime, a regime the ISM loves to support in its quest to kill Jews, Christians and anyone else from the "establishment."
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
VIEW MY INTERVIEW ON ARUTZ SHEVA TV
You can view the interview outside the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem
that I had on Sunday here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9b32l9JmeA . There
were two other interviews on Israeli TV that should appear shortly. The main message
is the need for Israel to finally prosecute and punish at least the Israeli traitors
in the ISM who help to injure Israeli soldiers and border police. There is also a message for President Obama: Stop aiding the flotillas then blaming Israel for protecting itself.
One error on the A7 interview, my foundation is DAFKA.org not davka.org. I understand they are correcting this error. If you are Israeli and reading this,
be sure to write the PM's office as well as members of the Knesset to start prosecuting Huwaida Arraf the next time she brings another flotilla of radicals
to aid Hamas. She belongs in jail as does Paul LaRudee in the United States.
The wheels of justice grind slowly, but ultimately the ISM's leadership will find themselves in jail.
that I had on Sunday here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9b32l9JmeA . There
were two other interviews on Israeli TV that should appear shortly. The main message
is the need for Israel to finally prosecute and punish at least the Israeli traitors
in the ISM who help to injure Israeli soldiers and border police. There is also a message for President Obama: Stop aiding the flotillas then blaming Israel for protecting itself.
One error on the A7 interview, my foundation is DAFKA.org not davka.org. I understand they are correcting this error. If you are Israeli and reading this,
be sure to write the PM's office as well as members of the Knesset to start prosecuting Huwaida Arraf the next time she brings another flotilla of radicals
to aid Hamas. She belongs in jail as does Paul LaRudee in the United States.
The wheels of justice grind slowly, but ultimately the ISM's leadership will find themselves in jail.
Friday, October 19, 2007
HOW LAW IS BEING USED TO PROMOTE TERRORISM AND TOTALITARIANISM UNDER THE GUISE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
For Tel Aviv University law professor Neta Ziv, it’s all “academic” (even if it kills Jews and destroys Israel).
By Lee Kaplan
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”—William Shakespeare, King Henry VI
According to her Curriculum Vitae, Neta Ziv is the director of The Cegla Clinical Law Programs at the University of Tel Aviv Law School. She is the academic supervisor of the Human Rights Clinic and teaches courses on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession, Law and Social Change and Rights of People with Disabilities. Dr. Ziv received her LL.B. from the Hebrew University Law Faculty in 1983, and her LL.M. from The American University in Washington, DC in 1986. Dr. Ziv practiced as a public interest lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel between 1986-1996, and served as a leading attorney in some of Israel’s major human rights cases litigated before the Israeli Supreme Court. She continued her studies at Stanford Law School and received her J.S.D. in 2001. Dr. Ziv was among the founding members of the Israel Women’s Network Legal Center, the chair of Bizchut - The Israel Human Rights Center for People with Disabilities, and currently serves as a board member of "Itach - Women Lawyers for Social Justice". Dr. Ziv is a board member and Vice President of The New Israel Fund.
The last sentence of the above academic biography of Neta Ziv is very telling. The New Israel Fund is thought of by many American Jews as just another philanthropic organization to aid Israel. It is, in fact, an organization run by leftist Jews inspired by far-left American ideas. Few people, particularly American Jews, know how the New Israel Fund, working closely with another group, The Shefa Fund, has financed another leftist group that passed out flyers at Israeli train stations urging soldiers in the IDF to desert and promising them wages higher than their army wages while they sit in jail (Israel does not really pay salaries to its conscripts). As a board member of NIF, Professor Niv no doubt knew about this and condones it.
Professor Ziv is the embodiment of how the abstractions of academia can ultimately lead to the opposite of what the academy was meant to do: to enhance society through the application of scholastic study and scientific inquiry to arrive at truth. This is clearly present in her applications of American jurisprudence to Israel’s situation as a tiny democratic country surrounded by a sea of Arab nationalist and Islamic dictatorships calling for the state’s destruction. Ziv defines her activities as preserving human rights; others might define them as enabling the enemies of Israel to destroy the Jewish state. As an educator, she promotes developing what could be considered “cause lawyers” who use the courts to promote a radical agenda against the state in time of war.
To understand where Professor Ziv is coming from, it is important to understand how American law has molded a new generation of “activists” within Israel who claim to be promoting “social justice” (Why is it every totalitarian revolutionary movement likes to claim it is seeking “social justice”?). In reality, such activities only serve to embolden and strengthen Israel’s enemies. Whereas in America, one can throw a stone and almost count on hitting a lawyer because of that nation’s status as a superpower and peaceful civil society (at least before 9/11), Israel’s situation is considerably different.
Constitutional Law has always in particular played an almost constant role in the American quotidian. It is only recently though that the constant effects of law in American society has turned academic inquiry into another form of propaganda and even subversion to be used against the very democratic society that created it. In America, one can use law to promote a political agenda against the state. That is the role of “cause lawyers.”
For example, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union that Ziv uses as a guide or ally to educate her law students in promoting her educational agenda are, in fact, not as interested in preserving human rights (although they claim to be) as in promoting a radical socialist political agenda that usually calls for Israel’s destruction. The ACLU was set up in the 1920’s as a pro-communist front group. Today, the ACLU has many lawyers who toe a party line against Israel. A case in point would be of a Coptic Christian who lost his job teaching courses about terrorism and Arabic language because Muslim extremists on his campus did not like what he taught. The man lost his job despite a contract and was not even paid. Whereas the local ACLU office (with a Jewish manager) agreed he had an excellent case, the Washington national headquarters nixed representing him when approval was sought from executives with Arab and radical leftist backgrounds. The Constitution did not apply to a Copt who taught about Arab Muslim terrorist groups.
A similar situation exists with the Center for Constitutional Rights in Washington, DC. Whereas one would expect an organization in the US Capitol with such a name to concern itself with the rights of Americans under the US Constitution, the CCR devoted a good deal of its time and efforts to trying to get Ariel Sharon tried for war crimes in the Hague or freeing the terrorist POWs in Guantanamo. What fewer people know is the CCR gets funding from the UAE where the finances for the 9/11 attacks came from. The UAE no doubt couldn’t care less about the US Constitution as much as rescuing the serial killers from the umma who were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan while engaging in Holy Jihad.
Professor Ziv works with a program set up to train Israeli law students in “human rights” and social engineering activist tactics as an outcome of practicing law. Israeli law students are given an opportunity to clerk with American judges to learn the ropes. And rubbing elbows with mindsets like those described above to preserve “social justice,” as perverted as it may be, is the norm. But “Social justice” is what Neta Ziv says it is.
Not a bad thing, you might say? All points of view should be recognized in a democratic society? Well, maybe in a country like America with friendly neighbors on its borders and not in a perpetual state of war for 60 years with Arab irredentists. But Israel’s situation is different. If Professor Ziv applied her ideals equally to require that the Palestinian Authority, under license from the Israeli government to create a new state, not be ruled by Sharia Law, or that women be granted equal rights there as in Israel, one might consider her merely an idealist with strict principals. Unfortunately, those principals only apply to aiding those who would use the legal system as just another weapon to destroy the Jewish state and set up another Arab-Muslim dictatorship, but who try to maintain the image of American jurisprudence while doing so. Call it the “O.J. Simpson defense” for Arab terrorism against the Jews; where the bomb belt fails, a well-placed lawyer might do just as nicely, and the Arabs just love it!
A case in point is Noura Erekat, the niece of Saab Erekat and a recent law school graduate in the US, who is now also an aide to congressman Dennis Kucinich. Her involvement in the NGO, Protection of Human Rights (LAW), has been to promote the anti-Semitism witnessed at the Durban Conference against Israel as well as getting Israel’s leadership indicted for war crimes in the Hague while Arab terrorism goes unmentioned. She claims she is for a two state solution on television and practices some of her law/activism within Israel and the Holy Land. Yet in private, she calls for using the law to destroy Israel. Not long ago she refused on Bill O’Reilly’s show to condemn an al Qaeda call to murder all the Jews in the world, or condemn Hizballah. Israelis also know well the Gaby Laskys and Felicia Langers who never met a killer of Jews they didn’t want to defend on behalf of Israel’s communist party, and, as such, Professor Ziv assures that newer generations of Israeli lawyers will think in a similar vein as Lasky and Langer.
Professor Ziv is known for her advocacy within the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) that is funded by the New Israel Fund. While ACRI’s self-description on their website describes the organization as “Israel's leading human and civil rights organization and the only organization dealing with the entire spectrum of rights and liberties issues…” that “…has led the fight to protect and promote rights in Israel and the territories under its control through litigation, legal advocacy, education, and public outreach efforts. ACRI promotes a concept of civil and human rights as an integral part of democratic community building and as a unifying force in Israeli public life.”
What that description does not say is how Neta Ziv seems to feel human and civil rights do not apply to Jewish Israelis, only to Arabs, and particularly those ones with a desire to dispossess the Jews in Israel of the same property rights they like to constantly claim they are denied. To Neta Ziv, Jewish Israelis are the majority “oppressing” the Arab minority (there’s that old “social justice” mantra again). While it’s true there are more Jews in Israel behind the green line and in the territories than Arabs, the entire Arab and Muslim world that calls for the end of Israel’s existence numbers 250 million to Israel’s 4 million Jews. A case in point is the legal precedent set in the case of an Israeli Arab named Qa’ adan who wanted to reside in a community set aside by the Jewish agency for the settlement of Jews in Israel that was handled by Professor Niv’s cronies in the ACRI. It was argued that Qa’adan, an Israeli Arab citizen, was denied equal rights because he wanted a home in an exclusive Jewish community that was set aside for Jewish settlement. ACRI and its intellectual acolytes in the judiciary ruled that Qa’adan had the right to live there too. Whereas some would call the establishment of a neighborhood for Jews in a region where Jews have been murdered for two millennia might be considered Jewish “affirmative action” (social justice types in America love “affirmative action”), Professor Ziv considers it a denial of human and equal rights. Money talks when it comes to leasing land in Israel, so why didn’t Qa’adan ask some of his Arab oil brothers to do some affirmative action for him and other Israeli Arabs by providing enough money to buy property? After all, they spend untold amounts of money to pay for weapons to kill Jews.
For Ziv, such a lawsuit no doubt creates the image at American universities that she visits that she is on a par with civil rights attorneys who broke down Jim Crow laws in America (it’s a great image to land speaking gigs, sell books and get invited to swanky faculty soirees). However, there is a difference. Private communities in Israel have the right to reject people they do not want, be they Jew or Arab. The Arab village of Um El Fahem inside Israel has no Jewish residents also and the city government openly supports Hamas. Jews do not live there because after dark they would be killed. Professor Ziv saw no need to sue the Municipality of Um El Fahem to provide security protection for Jews to live there on an equal basis. Nor did she sue to stop the practice of certain private communities in Israel having the right to reject anyone they feel they do not want as part of that community if they so desire. That right is still in tact for the Arabs of Um El Fahem who claim Israeli Arabs are discriminated against, yet also know that if Jews did move into their community they could hire an attorney to sue the state that Jews were “occupying” their land (if murdering a few did not snip the problem in the bud).
Then again, why should they when there are enough Jews like Neta Ziv to attack the state through the courts and thus deny Jewish communities the right to become Jewish havens for the persecuted of the Diaspora and maintain the Jewish character of the state?
At the same time, Professor Ziv sees no problems with affirmative action programs in Israel that give preference at all the universities to Arab-Israelis over Jewish Israelis, even veterans from the IDF. Professor Ziv and her legal eagles for social engineering also consider themselves serving human needs by suing on behalf of Arabs in the territories, yet say nothing about the official policy of the Palestinian Authority making it a death sentence for an Arab to sell land to a Jew, and they are perfectly willing to ignore honor killings while badgering the Israeli government at full tilt over Jewish communities there, some like Kfar Etzion that were rebuilt in 1967 , after being wiped out by the Arabs in 1948. Most of the Jewish community there was murdered in an open pit (even after the Armistice was done). One might equate that return with the American Indians getting back their land from the US government, but Neta Ziv prefers to concentrate on what sells on American campuses and radical leftist circles inside Israel where her consumer base is (even if that base is ignorant of facts on the ground, since it’s all “academic”. College professors learn “what sells,” the same as other businessmen, and Arab petrodollars are buying a lot of propaganda against Israel on US campuses these days).
Most galling is how the ACRI works in cooperation with its Palestinian Arab counterpart, Adalah, that claims it, too, works for human and equal rights. One problem, though: while ACRI works against Israel’s tiny state even in the territories to help irredentist Arabs in their goals, Adalah doesn’t give a fig about equal rights for Jews in the territories or inside Israel itself. To Adalah, only Arabs have human and civil rights and Jews are there to only be accused of violating the rights of those Arabs. One of Adalah’s main functions is to provide free legal aid in Israeli courts for some of the worst mass murderers of Israeli Jews, including serial killer Marwan Barghouti. Arab terrorists are never representative of an oppressive majority to the Neta Ziv types against the Jews, but always are deserving of the best legal protection no matter how many Jewish women or children they murder.
And after all, why not? Neta Ziv sits in a safe office at the University of Tel Aviv many miles away in Sderot, hundreds of Kassem rockets fall on the heads of other people’s children. No doubt her academic way of seeing human rights as a one way street for the enemies of Jews in Israel makes her feel as judicially superior as the similarly safely nested jurists across the sea in the United States.
But what a pity for other Israelis who miss all the fun of being an intellectual and a lawyer like Neta Ziv, who can absorb and carry out such abstract legal thinking without paying the consequences with her own life.
In the future, more articles will be found here pointing out these individuals when they are on US campuses.
The above article can be found with hyperlinks to footnotes and additional information at www.dafka.org and www.israel-academia-monitor.com .
By Lee Kaplan
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”—William Shakespeare, King Henry VI
According to her Curriculum Vitae, Neta Ziv is the director of The Cegla Clinical Law Programs at the University of Tel Aviv Law School. She is the academic supervisor of the Human Rights Clinic and teaches courses on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession, Law and Social Change and Rights of People with Disabilities. Dr. Ziv received her LL.B. from the Hebrew University Law Faculty in 1983, and her LL.M. from The American University in Washington, DC in 1986. Dr. Ziv practiced as a public interest lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel between 1986-1996, and served as a leading attorney in some of Israel’s major human rights cases litigated before the Israeli Supreme Court. She continued her studies at Stanford Law School and received her J.S.D. in 2001. Dr. Ziv was among the founding members of the Israel Women’s Network Legal Center, the chair of Bizchut - The Israel Human Rights Center for People with Disabilities, and currently serves as a board member of "Itach - Women Lawyers for Social Justice". Dr. Ziv is a board member and Vice President of The New Israel Fund.
The last sentence of the above academic biography of Neta Ziv is very telling. The New Israel Fund is thought of by many American Jews as just another philanthropic organization to aid Israel. It is, in fact, an organization run by leftist Jews inspired by far-left American ideas. Few people, particularly American Jews, know how the New Israel Fund, working closely with another group, The Shefa Fund, has financed another leftist group that passed out flyers at Israeli train stations urging soldiers in the IDF to desert and promising them wages higher than their army wages while they sit in jail (Israel does not really pay salaries to its conscripts). As a board member of NIF, Professor Niv no doubt knew about this and condones it.
Professor Ziv is the embodiment of how the abstractions of academia can ultimately lead to the opposite of what the academy was meant to do: to enhance society through the application of scholastic study and scientific inquiry to arrive at truth. This is clearly present in her applications of American jurisprudence to Israel’s situation as a tiny democratic country surrounded by a sea of Arab nationalist and Islamic dictatorships calling for the state’s destruction. Ziv defines her activities as preserving human rights; others might define them as enabling the enemies of Israel to destroy the Jewish state. As an educator, she promotes developing what could be considered “cause lawyers” who use the courts to promote a radical agenda against the state in time of war.
To understand where Professor Ziv is coming from, it is important to understand how American law has molded a new generation of “activists” within Israel who claim to be promoting “social justice” (Why is it every totalitarian revolutionary movement likes to claim it is seeking “social justice”?). In reality, such activities only serve to embolden and strengthen Israel’s enemies. Whereas in America, one can throw a stone and almost count on hitting a lawyer because of that nation’s status as a superpower and peaceful civil society (at least before 9/11), Israel’s situation is considerably different.
Constitutional Law has always in particular played an almost constant role in the American quotidian. It is only recently though that the constant effects of law in American society has turned academic inquiry into another form of propaganda and even subversion to be used against the very democratic society that created it. In America, one can use law to promote a political agenda against the state. That is the role of “cause lawyers.”
For example, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union that Ziv uses as a guide or ally to educate her law students in promoting her educational agenda are, in fact, not as interested in preserving human rights (although they claim to be) as in promoting a radical socialist political agenda that usually calls for Israel’s destruction. The ACLU was set up in the 1920’s as a pro-communist front group. Today, the ACLU has many lawyers who toe a party line against Israel. A case in point would be of a Coptic Christian who lost his job teaching courses about terrorism and Arabic language because Muslim extremists on his campus did not like what he taught. The man lost his job despite a contract and was not even paid. Whereas the local ACLU office (with a Jewish manager) agreed he had an excellent case, the Washington national headquarters nixed representing him when approval was sought from executives with Arab and radical leftist backgrounds. The Constitution did not apply to a Copt who taught about Arab Muslim terrorist groups.
A similar situation exists with the Center for Constitutional Rights in Washington, DC. Whereas one would expect an organization in the US Capitol with such a name to concern itself with the rights of Americans under the US Constitution, the CCR devoted a good deal of its time and efforts to trying to get Ariel Sharon tried for war crimes in the Hague or freeing the terrorist POWs in Guantanamo. What fewer people know is the CCR gets funding from the UAE where the finances for the 9/11 attacks came from. The UAE no doubt couldn’t care less about the US Constitution as much as rescuing the serial killers from the umma who were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan while engaging in Holy Jihad.
Professor Ziv works with a program set up to train Israeli law students in “human rights” and social engineering activist tactics as an outcome of practicing law. Israeli law students are given an opportunity to clerk with American judges to learn the ropes. And rubbing elbows with mindsets like those described above to preserve “social justice,” as perverted as it may be, is the norm. But “Social justice” is what Neta Ziv says it is.
Not a bad thing, you might say? All points of view should be recognized in a democratic society? Well, maybe in a country like America with friendly neighbors on its borders and not in a perpetual state of war for 60 years with Arab irredentists. But Israel’s situation is different. If Professor Ziv applied her ideals equally to require that the Palestinian Authority, under license from the Israeli government to create a new state, not be ruled by Sharia Law, or that women be granted equal rights there as in Israel, one might consider her merely an idealist with strict principals. Unfortunately, those principals only apply to aiding those who would use the legal system as just another weapon to destroy the Jewish state and set up another Arab-Muslim dictatorship, but who try to maintain the image of American jurisprudence while doing so. Call it the “O.J. Simpson defense” for Arab terrorism against the Jews; where the bomb belt fails, a well-placed lawyer might do just as nicely, and the Arabs just love it!
A case in point is Noura Erekat, the niece of Saab Erekat and a recent law school graduate in the US, who is now also an aide to congressman Dennis Kucinich. Her involvement in the NGO, Protection of Human Rights (LAW), has been to promote the anti-Semitism witnessed at the Durban Conference against Israel as well as getting Israel’s leadership indicted for war crimes in the Hague while Arab terrorism goes unmentioned. She claims she is for a two state solution on television and practices some of her law/activism within Israel and the Holy Land. Yet in private, she calls for using the law to destroy Israel. Not long ago she refused on Bill O’Reilly’s show to condemn an al Qaeda call to murder all the Jews in the world, or condemn Hizballah. Israelis also know well the Gaby Laskys and Felicia Langers who never met a killer of Jews they didn’t want to defend on behalf of Israel’s communist party, and, as such, Professor Ziv assures that newer generations of Israeli lawyers will think in a similar vein as Lasky and Langer.
Professor Ziv is known for her advocacy within the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) that is funded by the New Israel Fund. While ACRI’s self-description on their website describes the organization as “Israel's leading human and civil rights organization and the only organization dealing with the entire spectrum of rights and liberties issues…” that “…has led the fight to protect and promote rights in Israel and the territories under its control through litigation, legal advocacy, education, and public outreach efforts. ACRI promotes a concept of civil and human rights as an integral part of democratic community building and as a unifying force in Israeli public life.”
What that description does not say is how Neta Ziv seems to feel human and civil rights do not apply to Jewish Israelis, only to Arabs, and particularly those ones with a desire to dispossess the Jews in Israel of the same property rights they like to constantly claim they are denied. To Neta Ziv, Jewish Israelis are the majority “oppressing” the Arab minority (there’s that old “social justice” mantra again). While it’s true there are more Jews in Israel behind the green line and in the territories than Arabs, the entire Arab and Muslim world that calls for the end of Israel’s existence numbers 250 million to Israel’s 4 million Jews. A case in point is the legal precedent set in the case of an Israeli Arab named Qa’ adan who wanted to reside in a community set aside by the Jewish agency for the settlement of Jews in Israel that was handled by Professor Niv’s cronies in the ACRI. It was argued that Qa’adan, an Israeli Arab citizen, was denied equal rights because he wanted a home in an exclusive Jewish community that was set aside for Jewish settlement. ACRI and its intellectual acolytes in the judiciary ruled that Qa’adan had the right to live there too. Whereas some would call the establishment of a neighborhood for Jews in a region where Jews have been murdered for two millennia might be considered Jewish “affirmative action” (social justice types in America love “affirmative action”), Professor Ziv considers it a denial of human and equal rights. Money talks when it comes to leasing land in Israel, so why didn’t Qa’adan ask some of his Arab oil brothers to do some affirmative action for him and other Israeli Arabs by providing enough money to buy property? After all, they spend untold amounts of money to pay for weapons to kill Jews.
For Ziv, such a lawsuit no doubt creates the image at American universities that she visits that she is on a par with civil rights attorneys who broke down Jim Crow laws in America (it’s a great image to land speaking gigs, sell books and get invited to swanky faculty soirees). However, there is a difference. Private communities in Israel have the right to reject people they do not want, be they Jew or Arab. The Arab village of Um El Fahem inside Israel has no Jewish residents also and the city government openly supports Hamas. Jews do not live there because after dark they would be killed. Professor Ziv saw no need to sue the Municipality of Um El Fahem to provide security protection for Jews to live there on an equal basis. Nor did she sue to stop the practice of certain private communities in Israel having the right to reject anyone they feel they do not want as part of that community if they so desire. That right is still in tact for the Arabs of Um El Fahem who claim Israeli Arabs are discriminated against, yet also know that if Jews did move into their community they could hire an attorney to sue the state that Jews were “occupying” their land (if murdering a few did not snip the problem in the bud).
Then again, why should they when there are enough Jews like Neta Ziv to attack the state through the courts and thus deny Jewish communities the right to become Jewish havens for the persecuted of the Diaspora and maintain the Jewish character of the state?
At the same time, Professor Ziv sees no problems with affirmative action programs in Israel that give preference at all the universities to Arab-Israelis over Jewish Israelis, even veterans from the IDF. Professor Ziv and her legal eagles for social engineering also consider themselves serving human needs by suing on behalf of Arabs in the territories, yet say nothing about the official policy of the Palestinian Authority making it a death sentence for an Arab to sell land to a Jew, and they are perfectly willing to ignore honor killings while badgering the Israeli government at full tilt over Jewish communities there, some like Kfar Etzion that were rebuilt in 1967 , after being wiped out by the Arabs in 1948. Most of the Jewish community there was murdered in an open pit (even after the Armistice was done). One might equate that return with the American Indians getting back their land from the US government, but Neta Ziv prefers to concentrate on what sells on American campuses and radical leftist circles inside Israel where her consumer base is (even if that base is ignorant of facts on the ground, since it’s all “academic”. College professors learn “what sells,” the same as other businessmen, and Arab petrodollars are buying a lot of propaganda against Israel on US campuses these days).
Most galling is how the ACRI works in cooperation with its Palestinian Arab counterpart, Adalah, that claims it, too, works for human and equal rights. One problem, though: while ACRI works against Israel’s tiny state even in the territories to help irredentist Arabs in their goals, Adalah doesn’t give a fig about equal rights for Jews in the territories or inside Israel itself. To Adalah, only Arabs have human and civil rights and Jews are there to only be accused of violating the rights of those Arabs. One of Adalah’s main functions is to provide free legal aid in Israeli courts for some of the worst mass murderers of Israeli Jews, including serial killer Marwan Barghouti. Arab terrorists are never representative of an oppressive majority to the Neta Ziv types against the Jews, but always are deserving of the best legal protection no matter how many Jewish women or children they murder.
And after all, why not? Neta Ziv sits in a safe office at the University of Tel Aviv many miles away in Sderot, hundreds of Kassem rockets fall on the heads of other people’s children. No doubt her academic way of seeing human rights as a one way street for the enemies of Jews in Israel makes her feel as judicially superior as the similarly safely nested jurists across the sea in the United States.
But what a pity for other Israelis who miss all the fun of being an intellectual and a lawyer like Neta Ziv, who can absorb and carry out such abstract legal thinking without paying the consequences with her own life.
In the future, more articles will be found here pointing out these individuals when they are on US campuses.
The above article can be found with hyperlinks to footnotes and additional information at www.dafka.org and www.israel-academia-monitor.com .
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)