The power of the Jewish Lobby in America is such that saying something which is even “perceived” as being critical of Israel is the most “efficient way to have your reputation and career as a politician or academic destroyed,” leading U.K. journalist and columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian newspaper, Glen Greenwald, has said.
Greenwald’s article is the latest in a series of public pronouncements by mainstream journalists of an increasing awareness of the destructive power of the Jewish lobby, which Greenwald has described as “fanatic.”
Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Greenwald told of how Brooklyn College’s “academic freedom [is] increasingly threatened” over an event to be held there which gives the Palestinian side of the Middle East conflict.
“The controversy was triggered by the sponsorship of the school’s Political Science department of an event, scheduled for 7 February, featuring two advocates of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) aimed at stopping Israeli oppression of the Palestinians [one speaker is a Palestinian (Omar Barghouti) and the other a Jewish American (philosopher Judith Butler)].,” Greenwald wrote.
“When I wrote about this earlier in the week, opposition to the event was confined to the usual suspects devoted to so-called “pro-Israel” advocacy, including many with a long history of trying to destroy anyone critical of the Israeli government.
“The controversy was largely fueled by BC alumnus Alan Dershowitz, who denounced the event in a New York York Daily News Op-Ed as a ‘hate orgy’.
“Dershowitz previously led the successful campaign to pressure DePaul University into denying tenure to long-time Israel critic Norman Finkelstein (after his tenure had been approved by an academic committee), all but destroying Finkelstein’s career as an academic.
“Dershowitz has been joined in his current crusade by a cast of crazed and fanatical Israel-centric characters such as Brooklyn State Assembly member Dov Hikind. Ignoring the BDS movement’s explicit non-violence stance, Hikind publicly (and falsely) claimed that the event speakers ‘think Hamas and Hezbollah are nice organizations, and they probably feel the same way about al-Qaida’.
“Hikind called on the college’s President, Karen Gould, to resign, recklessly insinuating (needless to say) that she’s an anti-Semite. In 2011, Hikind led the campaign to force Brooklyn College to fire the young adjunct professor Kristofer Petersen-Overton for the crime of writing a pro-Palestinian paper (after firing him, the college rehired him days later).
One of the key members of Brooklyn College’s board of trustees, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, is notorious for having led the 2011 effort to block CUNY from granting an honorary degree to Tony Kushner in light of Kushner’s Israel criticisms (“My mother would call Tony Kushner a kapo*,” Wiesenfeld said of the Jewish playwright).
“When a New York Times reporter writing about the Kushner controversy asked Wiesenfeld whether one side of the Israel/Palestine debate should be suppressed, Wiesenfeld objected that ‘the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.’ When the Times reporter asked him: ‘equivalence between what and what?’, Wiesenfeld replied: ‘between the Palestinians and Israelis.’
“In sum, the ugly lynch mob now assembled against Brooklyn College and its academic event is all too familiar in the US when it comes to criticism of and activism against Israeli government policy. Indeed, in the US, there are few more efficient ways to have your reputation and career as a politician or academic destroyed than by saying something perceived as critical of Israel,” Greenwald wrote.
*Kapo: A member of the Jewish police appointed by the Nazis to keep order among Jewish internees during World War II.
