Brandeis University began in 1948, according to its mission statement, “under the sponsorship of the American Jewish community” in order to “embody its highest ethical and cultural values.” In this age of the ascendancy of the academic Left, Brandeis is in danger of becoming the polar opposite of those noble aspirations: a useful idiot of the global jihad.
First there was the appointment of Khalil Shikaki as senior fellow at its Crown Center for Middle East Studies, and the flat refusal to consider the evidence linking Shikaki to Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Now comes an honorary doctorate to be awarded to playwright Tony Kushner on May 21. Kushner thinks that “it would have been better if Israel never happened,” and that its founding was a “mistake.” He has echoed the most outrageous fantasies of Palestinian propagandists, denouncing Israel for “ethnic cleansing” and declaring: “The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community and Israel itself has got this disgraceful record…Israel is a creation of the U.S., bought and paid for…There are lots of beautiful little orange groves and olive groves which the Palestinians had before the Jews were there, and some very attractive European-looking cities, too…”
Kushner has decried “the deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture and a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people” – without, of course, mentioning that that national identity was invented in the 1960’s in what turned about to be an extraordinarily successful ploy to adjust the paradigm of the Arab-Israeli conflict with the newly-minted Palestinians as the underdogs.
Meanwhile, Brandeis’s Goldfarb Library featured a propagandistic exhibition of children’s paintings called “Voices from Palestine,” including depictions of bloodied Palestinian children and a PLO flag in the shape of Israel, suggesting that all of Israel belongs by right to the Palestinians.
Adverse publicity compelled the Library to close the exhibit last week after four days of a scheduled two-week run. Yet the day after the Library closed the exhibit, ; one carried a sign reading, “Shut Down the Israeli Apartheid Terror State/From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free.” Another read: “END Repression of Palestinian [sic] Children” – a particularly brutal irony in light of the culture of murderous hatred into which Palestinian children at the youngest ages are plunged by their parents.
These are the “highest ethical and cultural values” of the American Jewish community? Brandeis has clearly lost its way: it has come full circle from the robust and fervent Zionism of Justice Louis Brandeis. It has imbibed so deeply the Left’s iron dogma of relativist multiculturalism that it has become just another academic conduit for the propaganda and disinformation that dominate the discussion about Israel in today’s universities.
The bitter irony is that Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz and the others responsible for hiring Shikaki and honoring Kushner, as well as the protestors at the University last Thursday, no doubt believe that all this demonstrates their commitment to justice. Those at Brandeis who are responsible for all this probably deplore the Israeli “apartheid” state, but they never address (except to explain away) the relentless terror attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian mujahedin or the overall climate of terror that made the infamous “apartheid wall” necessary. They do not examine the root causes of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and so believe that it can by various concessions on the part of Israel. They, like so many others in Europe and America, labor under the delusion that they can win peace with the jihadists through concessions and negotiated settlements.
They don’t have any idea of what the new rulers of “Palestine,” the Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas, make quite plain in the Charter of their movement: that the conflict between Muslim Arabs and Israel is not ultimately about “stolen land” or nationalistic yearnings. (If it had been, the Palestinian Arabs would have accepted the state offered them by the UN partition plan of 1948.) Instead, it is just one front of the global jihad effort to establish the hegemony of Islamic law not just over what is now the State of Israel, but over the entire world.