Kesher Talk: 06/29/2003

Friday, July 04, 2003

"simple... elegant and totally American." Just FYI, the first kosher White House dinner was milchig. But not very Texan . . .

Have an enjoyable Independence Day and Shabbat!

I will be at the beach in Long Branch, NJ, playing in the surf and later watching fireworks. Not too Shabbasdik, but if Yom Kippur can trump Shabbas, then so can the 4th of July. Thus saith Yehudit.

UPDATE: Independence Day blowout at a random Saddam Palace, via Andrew Apostalou, who also notes the 4th of July party the Kurds threw for American forces.

Thursday, July 03, 2003

I took the SelectSmart 2004 Presidential Candidate Selection test and my results were:

1. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (100%)
2. Daschle, Senate Minority Leader Tom, SD - Democrat (94%)
3. Gephardt, Cong. Dick, MO - Democrat (93%)
4. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (92%)
5. Feingold, Senator Russ, WI - Democrat (92%)
6. Green Party Candidate (92%)
7. Clinton, Senator Hillary Rodham, NY - Democrat (89%)
8. Libertarian Candidate (88%)
9. Lieberman Senator Joe CT - Democrat (86%)
10. Leahy, Patrick Senator, Vermont - Democrat (86%)
11. Kucinich, Cong. Dennis, OH - Democrat (85%)
12. Feinstein, Senator Dianne, CA - Democrat (82%)
13. Biden, Senator Joe, DE - Democrat (80%)
14. Jackson, Cong. Jesse Jr., IL - Democrat (79%)
15. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (76%)
16. Dodd, Senator Chris, CT - Democrat (75%)
17. Bayh, Senator Evan, IN - Democrat (71%)
18. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (69%)
19. Graham, Senator Bob, FL - Democrat (68%)
20. Kaptur, Cong. Marcy, OH - Democrat (65%)
21. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol IL - Democrat (57%)
22. Bush, George W. - US President (51%)
23. Bradley, Former Senator Bill NJ - Democrat (51%)
24. McCain, Senator John, AZ- Republican (46%)

Now, I would sooner vote for George Bush or John McCain than the Green Party, Dennis Kucinich, Dick Gephardt, Jesse Jackson, or John Kerry. I think they skewed me this way because - while I am a hawk on Iraq - I support Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, drug legalization, and some sort of environmental protection policy (although I would like the regulating mechanism to be by way of markets rather than command-and-control), and my views on gun control and health care don't fit into the choices offered by the questionnaire.

For many of us, in 2004 the prosecution of the war on terror is going to temporarily outweigh other considerations. Which would make Lieberman my ideal candidate, I would think. (test via Shark)

Cambridge demonstration update. This Tuesday, 11 people protested at the Cambridge, MA office of the International Solidarity Movement, which meets in an office donated by the Cambridge Peace Commission, paid for by Massachusetts taxpayers. (Be sure to see the photos of the protest.) More comments at LGF.

Good work, Alex!

Lots of the comments note how old the Cambridge ISM people are. They look exactly like the fuddy-duddy leftists I used to know in Philadelphia. These are 2nd and 3rd generation activists who literally cannot conceive that their worldview isn't the only valid one. They and their forbears probably did the world a lot of good registering back voters in Alabama in the 60s, or fighting McCarthyism in the 50s, or supporting unions in the 30s. And there are still wrongs to be righted, and some of their tactics are still useful. But their ossified worldview leads them astray as to who the good guys and bad guys are, and they end up defending terrorists while calling themselves non-violent activists.

Even rabidly pro-Palestinian Israeli reporter Amira Hass thinks people like this are hypocrites.

Jews in odd places: Ireland: Slugger O'Toole, who follows Northern Irish politics, turns his attention to the role of Jews in the disputed province. (via Iain Murray)

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

Creepy antisemitic British academics, part II. Some updates on the Andrew Wilkie case, which I reported on last week:

So far, the best letter to Oxford about the case. States all the issues succinctly and thoroughly. Thank you, Andrew.

Excellent update at Jewsweek (via Buzz Machine), which interviews Duvshani and reiterates the point made by several blog thread habitues:

. . . the viral nature of the Internet proved all too troublesome. By Sunday, the e-mail had been forwarded to thousands of individuals and was posted on several Jewish and pro-Israel Weblogs. . . . Wilkie says he has gotten more than 3,000 e-mails in response to his comments. "The power of the Internet is awesome!" he told Jewsweek.

Yup. We don't just factcheck your ass, we hand it to you in a sling when necessary.

Andrew McMichael, the director of the Weaterhall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University and Wilkie's direct supervisor, said his division does not discriminate and houses more than 350 scientists from more than 30 countries, including Israel. "We foster a strongly interactive scientific environment and are proud of our international links," he told Jewsweek. "I am deeply distressed by this affair."

As another prescient LGF commenter pointed out last week, what planet is this guy on that he doesn't realize he is obligated to uphold the policies of the institution he works for? I know scientists can be a little wifty about life in the real world, but did Wilkie really have no idea what his own supervisor would think of his actions? Has he ever been employed before? Or did McMichael also make breezy off-the-cuff antisemitic statements and naive Wilkie confused them with Oxford policy and never thought he would be hung out to dry? The mind boggles.

Schmuley Boteach, who was Oxford campus rabbi for 11 years, was not surprised.

"This is par for the course. What cannot be debated is that Israel is loathed and hated in the highest echelons in British academia." Boteach went on to point out that the Arab community wields incredible influence at British universities, and at Oxford in particular. The Said Business School at Oxford University was funded by an initial grant of nearly $25 million by the billionaire Syrian arms brokers Wafic Rida Said.

Boteach describes repeatedly inviting Oxford bigwigs to lectures by Israeli officials, and getting turned down:

Lest you believe that it was only the right-wing [Israeli] Prime Ministers who were snubbed, the same happened with Shimon Peres. Not only did a paucity of academics agree to dinner with him. Worse, when we took Mr. Peres to speak at our Cambridge branch of the L'Chaim Society, a coalition of Arab and British students tried to have the police arrest him -- I kid you not -- on charges of war crimes. And a huge protest rally was organized against Mr. Peres with bullhorns blaring. Even with Yitzhak Rabin, whose lecture at Oxford had to be cancelled on the day that he was to deliver it as he rushed from England to Israel in response to a deadly bus bombing in October 1994, was opposed by leading Oxford academics. And this was well after the Oslo accords were signed and he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

So when you hear rants about "the right-wing warmonger Sharon," remember they said the same thing about Peres and Rabin.

An LGFer points out some Jewish benefactors of Oxford.

More: The rot goes deep, and more great comments and anecdotes at Roger Simon's blog.

Steve Rittenberg follows up with a survey from January '03 of the attempted global academic boycott of Israel, which has some amusing anecdotes about the knots people can tie themselves into when they try to fit science into ideology:

The most paradoxical example of the boycott's effect was Oren Yiftachel, a political geographer from Ben-Gurion University, described by Ha'aretz as "hold[ing] extreme leftist political views." Yiftachel had co-authored a paper with an Arab Israeli political scientist from Haifa University named As'ad Ghanem, dealing with the attitude of Israeli authorities to Arabs within Israel proper and the disputed territories. They submitted it to the English periodical Political Geography, whose editor, David Slater, returned it with a note saying it had been rejected because its authors were Israelis.

Here was a case to test the mettle of a boycotter - a mischling article, half-Jewish, half-Arab, wholly the product of people carrying Israeli passports and working for Israeli institutions, yet expressing opinions on Israel as the devil's own experiment station indistinguishable from Slater's. . . .

. . . Since Yiftachel is one of those academics who adheres to the motto "the other country, right or wrong," it is hard to believe he would balk at describing Israel as an apartheid state. He had in the past denounced Israeli governments as racist or dictatorial . . . now he had become the classic instance of somebody "hoist with his own petard," caught in his own trap. At one point he complained to Slater "that rejecting a person because of his [national] origin, from an academic point of view, is very problematic." Not only did it interfere with the progress of Yiftachel's career, it hurt the anti-Israel cause.

Funny how that works.

UPDATE: Wilkie, apparently, doesn't know when to stop digging.

My stance was based on [Duvshani's] service in the Israeli army and the violence that potentially entails. I would feel uncomfortable working closely with someone who had been through that, which you may not respect but I hope you can understand. The same would apply (to a greater extent, actually) for a palestinian terrorist (although I haven't heard of one applying for a PhD).

I'm not surprised when humanities professors produce this kind of crap, but this guy is supposed to be a scientist. What is he saying - anyone who has done service in his country's military is equivalent to a terrorist? Or does this just apply to IDF soldiers? (How about British soldiers?) What is Wilkie afraid of - that Duvshani will suddenly go wiggy and start smashing lab equipment and carving up lab assistants with a Bowie knife? Has Wilkie seen Apocalypse Now too many times? Does he have any statistics on the percentage of violent crimes in Israel committed by former IDF soldiers? I don't, but I know violent crime in Israel is pretty low (probably much lower than London), and virtually every adult citizen is a former soldier. You're supposedly a scientist, Professor Wilkie, use your logical faculties.

(Gasp! He may even be working alongside former soldiers now! Ticking time bombs, every one of them!)

McMichael has to fire this dope for the good of his lab. First, because you cannot afford to leave in a responsible position someone so immature and tonedeaf to his social environment that he is incapable of representing the stated policies of his organization, and second, because a man who cannot reason has no business running a science lab.

Allison also has some scathing comments. So does Daddy Warblogs.

Shark points out that Wilkie is coming to LA for a conference in January.

If I were in L.A. I would . . . thank Wilkie for his important research and remind him that keeping qualified scientists out of his laboratory for stupid reasons won't lead to any new discoveries.

Others have already noticed that boycotting Jewish scientists may be hazardous to your health.

UPDATE: Allison notes that the Wilkie story has made the AP wire, and Charles notes that Oxford has summoned Wilkie before a disciplinary board. Meryl thinks he'll get a slap on the wrist.

Carnival time. This week's Carnival of the Vanities is at Amish Tech Support. I entered my post on Bush's relationship with PM Finance Minister Salam Fayyad and the latest twists and turns in the "Road Map." (Lawrence, I don't mind referring to "Palestine" for the purposes of my topic.)

The forgotten victims. Head Heeb has links to stories in Ha'aretz about Israeli Arab victims of Palestinian suicide bombings.

". . . Certain things keep going through my mind. The question that cuts through my heart is: How is it possible to come and murder innocent people, just like that, without any thought about what will happen to their families? It's such a barbaric deed that the mind can't take it in. I am in a state of shock. And I was in shock before this, too, when Jewish friends of mine from Hadera were killed in terrorist attacks. I have lost two friends to terrorist attacks."

What is the thought that keeps going through your mind?

Hasan: "The thought that we, the Palestinians of 1948, share a terrible fate: war, distress and death. It's an old thought that now takes on new and far deeper meaning."

Share with who - with the Palestinians in the territories?

"No, by `we' I mean me and you - the Jewish Israelis. We have a common fate. They kill Jews and they kill us. I feel that I am an Israeli, I identify 100 percent with the state."

And don't you identify with your people, with the Palestinians?

"In certain things I do identify, of course. But I can't identify with people who organize terrorist attacks or with the perpetrators. Not before my brother was killed and not after. I understand a state that says: If someone kicks you, kick him back. They have broken all the rules. It was the duty of the Palestinian leadership to put a stop to it."

He then talks about how the only official counseling for victims of terrorism is for Jews.

"So the attention of an elected Arab body, such as the monitoring committee, is important to us. If we received psychological support, reinforcement, encouragement - that is worth more than any monetary compensation. They are there because of us, but when disaster strikes, they're not with us. Two Arab Knesset members visited during the mourning period: Ahmed Tibi [Hadash] and Jamal Zahalka [Balad]. We didn't hear a word from the other Arab MKs."

The reporter speaks to Shawki Khatib, the chairman of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee

Could he provide a list of the names of the Arab citizens of Israel who were killed in terrorist attacks? Khatib hemmed and hawed, and finally had to admit that he did not have such a list. His office has no documentation concerning attacks in which Arabs were killed or wounded.

Khatib goes on to shift the responsibility to the Israeli goverment and adds some boilerplate rhetoric about the "occupation." The Israeli government does not list Arab citizens separately from Jewish ones.

The Jaber family had a different experience:

. . . in my case the entire Palestinian leadership sent condolence cables and some government representatives from Egypt and Jordan came. A senior member of the Palestinian Authority visited Suad's parents."

Did you feel the PA was taking responsibility for Suad's death?

"Yes, definitely. I don't know what the situation is in the other families."

Does this also have a financial aspect?

"Of course not. Heaven forbid. No one talked about that or mentioned it, and even if it had come up, we would not have been ready to hear about it. There is a law in this country and there are authorities that deal with families who are victims of hostilities. We are like everyone else. By the way, all the Arab MKs, without exception, visited."

No representatives of the PA called on the other bereaved families. Maybe it's because you are a well-known family and publish a paper?

"Maybe. I don't know. All in all, we are a modest family."

"Making a career out of my midlife crisis by writing a book knocking down straw men" Dept. William Leon and I both commented on the Doug Rushkoff phenomenon last week.

Protocols has an ongoing discussion of his ideas - the smart-ass yeshiva bochers there are giving him a thorough and detailed and annotated and Jewishly knowledgeable and thoughtful and dispassionate and well-deserved fisking. (And there is more - just start at the top and scroll down; there are at least 10 posts by now.)

UPDATE: Protocols sez: "We've got a bar on the right that's a guide to the Rushkoff book-related posts." Cool.

UPDATE: The definitive fisking of Doug Rushkoff. Among many salient points is this: where on earth was this guy's editor? Doesn't his publisher care about how their reputation will suffer if they publish a book full of gross factual errors? Read the whole thing.

Why are there so few Jewish farmers? Economic historians Maristella Botticini (of Boston University and Universitá di Torino) and Zvi Eckstein (of Tel Aviv University and the University of Minnesota) may have found an answer.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

The Christopher Hitchens of the Israeli Left. Israeli historian Benny Morris lectured at Berkeley recently, and flabbergasted leftists there who apparently were not aware that he had been re-evaluating his views for the past three years. (What - they don't read the Guardian?)

Many in the audience of some 100 scholars and community members had read Morris’ work, and expressed disbelief, even anger, at the tone of his lecture. . . . The question and answer period following the talk erupted into controversy when audience members repeatedly confronted Morris about the contradiction they perceived. . . . Morris defended himself in what became a heated dialogue with audience members who repeatedly interrupted him . . . .

Morris said he had not expected such a response. “It’s left-wing, politically correct, Berkeley intolerance,” he said in an interview following the talk. “I’ve lectured at Dartmouth and Middlebury and I didn’t encounter such a uniformity of intolerance.”

Welcome to Berkeley, Professor Morris.

UPDATE: Reader Ben notes:

I took a seminar class last year with Morris. He pointed out quite rightly that if you read his books he has always said that the Palestinians started the War for Independence and have historically shown no inclination for accepting a partition deal, as opposed to the Zionist Movement, which always did. I think a lot of Lefties took the aspects of Morris' work that were most critical of Israel and blew them totally out of proportion to serve their own political ends.

Wouldn't be the first time that's happened . . . .

Comments are working! On both Netscape and IE, all the comment threads are set at zero, giving the impression that no one has been commenting for the last few weeks. I finally clicked on some of these and lo! I discovered many comments. I just logged a complaint with Blogger. My fifth or sixth since they ported us to their new version. (In general, I like the interface better, at least in Netscape - in IE it's worse. And it bugs me that they are different. But they are clearly still working out some bugs in the implementation.) Our server is also doing some weird shit.

But don't let that (0) fool you! There are comments! Read them! Go make more!

UPDATE: Alisa reminds me that comments are not run by Blogger. Ours are run by YACCS and some other bloggers using YACCS are also having the same problem.

Basic Jewish Training. There won't be peace until the Pals start engaging in this kind of soul searching.

Anti-semitism conference update. Great news! You can now listen to MP3s of presentations from the conference on anti-semitism held in May, at YIVO in New York.

Speakers included pundits who have been quoted and linked all over the blogosphere the last few months, like Daniel Goldhagen, Hillel Halkin, Paul Berman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Christopher Caldwell, David Harris, Martin Peretz, Simon Schama, Josef Joffe, Todd Gitlin, Ian Buruma, Anthony Julius, Jaroslaw Anders, David Pryce-Jones, Azar Nafisi, David Kertzer, Mark Lilla, Alain Finkielkraut, and others.

(These names are each linked to other articles they have written on anti-semitism or related subjects - go here for the conference recordings.)

Here are transcripts of four of the speeches. Leon Weiseltier's in particular is excellent.

A roundup of media coverage of the conference and my impressions from attending.

UPDATE: Antisemitism conferences are all the rage this summer. There was one in LA the same week as the YIVO conference, and a World Conference on Antisemitism was just held in Vienna. (Gee, the town my mom and her mom fled from in 1939. . . . ) Sorry I'm being facetious; it's not all listening to lots of presentations and jawing in the halls - these conferences do pool together and consolidate all the data on the last 3 years of antisemitic incitements and attacks all over the world, and it is sobering (and enraging) just to view the picture created by the data as a coherent whole instead of as a string of individual incidents. The presentors' theories about the reasons for the upsurge can sometimes be translated into useful approaches for combating it. The networking that goes on may also facilitate action.

The Vienna conference was convened by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, with 55 participating nations - The conference home page has .pdf files of presentations from Israel, Norway, Greece, Estonia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Ukraine, and several NGOs.

All right, I'm impressed. They all showed up and acted concerned. I find it interesting that the German Green Party is taking ownership of this issue.

Germany's commissioner for human rights policy, Claudia Roth . . . a Green Party member of the Bundestag, was quoted in the report as admonishing Vienna for failing to take this "good opportunity to look at its own history of antisemitism critically" and for not ensuring that the conference received "greater publicity."

Roth appeared to be exploiting longstanding political tensions between the two countries, which have been exacerbated in recent days because of rivalry between Germany's left-wing government and Austria's right-wing coalition. But Roth's criticism appeared to be also an extension of a deliberate policy of her Green Party of allying itself with the Jewish community. That attitude is most visibly embodied in the actions of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the Green Party leader who has emerged over the last two years as the leading defender of Israel in European politics.

Rudolph Giuliani, who headed the American delegation,

called on countries to pass hate crimes legislation that would increase penalties, establish educational programs dealing with anti-Semitism and discipline debate so that disagreements over actions in the Middle East do not result in “demonizing attacks on the Jewish people and Israel.”

This dissenting view of hate-crime laws has a point. France already has statutes against hate-crimes. In France, the problem is that the police and courts are not only not enforcing those statutes, but they are not enforcing crimes against people and property either. A synagogue is torched and they say, "oh just some teen vandalism, not worth investigating." Jewish kids get beaten up and called dirty Jew, "oh just kids fighting, no big deal."

And some people tried to use the French hate-crime law to prevent Oriana Fallaci's anti-Islamist book from being published there.

Hate-crime laws are like anti-porn laws: worth nothing if they aren't enforced, but can be used against anyone for anything if they are enforced. On the one hand, they are good for sending a signal about public policy ("what we as a nation will not tolerate"). On the other hand, the signal probably doesn't impress the people the policy is aimed at. However, there are always people in the middle, who may be susceptible to bigotry, but who may be deterred by a hate crime statute. I remain ambivalent about their effectiveness and impact on civil liberties, given that such statutes are not stopping hate crimes in France.

However, I do think this is a good idea:

Giuliani called for countries to compile hate crime statistics in a uniform way and analyze them regularly to gauge efforts to combat such crimes. . . . He noted that the United States has developed such a mechanism and if Europe followed suit, the same methods could be used for handling hate crimes against other minorities.

Action alert! Demonstration against ISM in Cambridge, MA Tuesday, July 1st.

On Tuesday, July 1, at 6:30 pm, there will be a demonstration at 51 Inman Street, Cambridge (behind Cambridge City Hall, between Harvard St and Mass. Ave). ISM is meeting in the Peace Commission offices at 7:00.

We will protest the support by Massachusetts taxpayers of a group that endorses and supports terrorism.

Follow the link for more info. (ISM is this year's version of a long tradition of pampered Western faux-revolutionary groups that romanticize violence by 3rd-world people, and has produced activists such as Rachel Corrie and Adam Shapiro)

RELATED: Corrie's parents - in their grief and understandable desire to think the best of their daughter's misguided mission - have been cozying up to Shapiro and Edward Said, and are planning to sue the Israeli government for exonerating the dozer driver.

Monday, June 30, 2003

Comparative penology. If you want another Fun Fact to beat up on the French with:
Their prisons are worse than ours. Ours have rape and drug-running. Theirs have rape and drug-running plus moldy food and lice. Eeuww.

Gay pride - and Israel's. Last year I posted something about the annual Israeli Gay Pride march to a list I'm on, and asked - somewhat rhetorically - if there was an equivalent in any Musim country. Several hysterical posts appeared soon apfter accusing me of being a racist and bigoted against Muslims. I replied that I had merely asked a question, and no one would be happier than I if the answer was yes. But no one ever did answer my question.

As last year,

. . . gay and lesbian Israelis will parade through Jerusalem's streets, from City Hall to Independence Park. The march was supposed to have taken place last week; it was postponed after one of its organizers, 47-year-old American immigrant Alan Beer, was murdered by a Hamas suicide bomber aboard Bus 14A.

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Creepy antisemitic British academics Dept. I've been wanting to blog on this since I read it - I'm glad KT is back on the air.

Tom Paulin, Mona Baker, and now . . .
Andrew Wilkie, Nuffield Professor of Pathology, Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford, UK. funded by the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine have just got a grant from the Wellcome Trust and are funded by the Medical Research Council, Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Wolfson Foundation, E.P. Abraham Research Fund and the Nuffield Medical Trustees, and Oxford University (and funded by, or of interest to, the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS).

(Others who share Professor Wilkie's views. Potential consequences of Prof. Wilkie's views.)

Watch the blogosphere get to work: Stephen Rittenberg saw it at International Academic Friends of Israel. Then Naomi Ragen picked up on it, then Charles Johnson.

Ragen wrote:

Dear Dr. Wilkie,

Ah the wonders of the internet. No longer can closet anti Semites ply their trade under the cover of darkness. Now the entire world knows who you are, as your disgusting bias in dealing with Amit Duvshani is now out there for all to see. The Jews have been living in the land of Israel for three thousand years. Indeed, as Disraeli pointed out, while your ancestors were still swinging from the trees, ours were priests in the Temple of Solomon.

You can accept or reject Mr. Duvshani on the basis of his academic qualifications. But to reject him on the basis of his qualifications as a human being because he served in the Israeli army and defended the Jews in their ancestral homeland shows me, an Israeli, a Jew, the author of six books, one play, and numerous articles that you Brits are still swinging from the trees in a Neanderthal morality that stinks of eras only lately ended.

For shame, Herr Professor. For shame Oxford.

Naomi Ragen

As the emails poured in, Wilkie sort of apologized and the University of Oxford promised to investigate.

Some choice comments. Iowahawk is in fine form, as usual. (And
here's another parody.)

This is pretty common attittude in the UK. I"ll never forget talking to a British chap who had gone to the same Univ as me in the US (U Penn). When I asked him how he had liked it, he replied, bluntly, that it was too overrun with Jews and Asians. Moreover, the Jews and Asians were all striver types eager to be doctors or bankers and were none interested in poetry or philosophy as he was.

it brings to mind the Irish fellow who referred to the Israelis as "Jew bastards" in casual conversation with me. I really never thought I'd live to see the day when such blatant bigotry is "cool" again among supposedly educated people.

ive been surprised by how often you can just pick up a phone and get someone, and how often the antisemetic ones will attempt to backtrack (i did that once with that scummy bookstore, i think near cambridge, that boycotted israeli books, i got a couple of staff members to finally say that they thought the policy couldnt be justified); i think its worth making the calls, sending email, you wont change their antisemetic little minds if theyre true antisemites, but you might get the ones who are just "fashion" anti semites to rethink their position, at the very least youll let the scums know that out there in the real world there are people who find their views disgusting

I'd be interested to know more about this professor, particularly his age. The very fact that he would have responded to this applicant, in such a racist way, via email indicates a certain ingnorance about the way information gets around these days. I imagine he is sitting back in his office muttering about these "damnable blogs," dismayed that so many people seem to care about his email. I'm sure in the old days that such a matter wouldn't have gotten around, but by now his email is probably up on dozens of blogs, and will probably make its way to "Best of the Web," and will probably make Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan, and then who knows. A couple years ago, only a select few would have heard about his bizarre racist rantings. Today, the whole world knows.

I don't doubt that hateful biases are enshrined at reputable academic institutions (witness Columbia University which hired both Paulin and De Genova). What I doubted was that an educated University professor would actually document his hateful bias in a real world situation -- i.e. rejecting a job application. That part seemed incredible to me.

As for the apologies. All pretty much standard stuff from the file of canned obligatory responses. Columbia did the same with De Genova. Nothing will happen to this guy. In fact, he is likely already a hero to a large part of the academic left and Oxford will be afraid to touch him for violating their hiring policies, assuming they cared to do so in the first instance.

Well, I'll be... He is reading his mail. I just got a message from him that says:
"All I can say to you is that my apology is genuine. -- Andrew Wilkie"
I replied that as a Jew whose father was the victim of antisemitic prejudice and quotas in higher education during the 1930's and whose mother's family was wiped out by the Nazis in Poland and Vienna, I would take him at his word.

I am a student at the University of Oxford and words fail me. . . . He broke about a dozen of the University's own rules and there should be no legal problem in removing him from his post. Whether The Powers That Be in the University fully realise just what it is this creep's gone and done and will throw the book at him is another matter.

Ive just met an Jordanian Lady, who is here to recieve Chemotherapy. We talked (she has no idea Im Jewish) and as she talked about her wonderful life saving treatment..she mentioned ALL of her Physicians that have keep her alive for these 3 years...ALL...are Jewish...What can I Tell Ya?

Prof. Wilkie has gotten many letters by now, and has recanted as much as he is going to, but will he face any consequences? Will policies against discrimination be enforced? If you want to keep up the pressure on his sponsoring institutions, here are some email addresses. I'm not going to quote these long letters here but they are good models.

UPDATE: Charles has the latest, and Oxblog is also on the case. The story has legs. (Don't worry, Glenn, we're carrying on fine without you.)

UPDATE: It's in the British press.

Mr Duvshani told The Telegraph that he was shocked by the email. Speaking from his home in Tel Aviv, he said: "I was appalled that such a distinguished man could think something like that. I did not expect it from a British professor. I sent similar applications all round Europe and did not have another response like that. Science and politics should be separate. This is discrimination." Mr Duvshani said he would not be put off coming to Britain, because "I think there are better people than him there". He said, however, that he was unlikely to accept any position offered by Oxford University.

No shit. And Imshin uncovers the fact that Wilkie does collaborate with Israelis when it suits him. So he's a hypocrite too. (No permalink - use Allison's summary and links.)

UPDATE: Even more links and comments on this story.

Are you now or have you ever been . . . Kevin Drum makes a very good point, and one that it was in the back of my mind to make sometime, but he says it better than I would have anyway: What is up with the attempt to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy? This is for conservatives like leftists saying nice things about Stalin. Don't go there. You have to twist history into a pretzel to do it and the benefits are temporary and illusory. I am telling you this for your own good. Stalin was a bad dude, and McCarthy would have leveraged himself into a homegrown version of Stalin if he could have. He couldn't because Americans - officials elected by Americans - finally said "enough." (As one commenter points out, McCarthy's censure was a bi-partisan vote.)

The only thing that stands between liberty and tyranny is enough people saying "enough."

(Apparently Kevin's example of this attempted whitewash is coming from Ann Coulter, the Camille Paglia of the Beltway set, but I think we should take it seriously anyway. I've seen it bandied about in the blogosphere lately, trying to become a viable meme, and it should be thoroughly squashed before it spreads.)

Ammunition for electronic guerilla warfare. Here's a FAQ on where we stand now in Iraq.

Refreshing common sense on WMDs from David Adesnik at Oxblog.

"The US armed Saddam." No, we didn't.

Quotes from every Democratic presidential candidate who said Saddam had WMDs.

Anti-semites, eat shit and die already Dept. Some pics of graffitti around Melbourne, courtesy of "Tom Paine." So charming.

I remember taking him to BJ on Friday night when he visited last year; he said "My God, there are more Jews in this room than in all of New Zealand." Chin up, Bruce. Keep documenting that nasty stuff.

Partisan rage. This is kind of amusing, actually.

When conservatives look at the newspapers, they see liberal columnists who pick out every tiny piece of evidence or pseudo-evidence of Republican vileness, and then dwell on it and obsess over it until they have lost all perspective and succumbed to fevers of incoherent rage. They see Democratic primary voters who are so filled with hatred at George Bush and John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney that they are pulling their party far from the mainstream of American life. They see candidates who, instead of trying to quell the self-destructive fury, are playing to it. "I am furious at [Bush] and I am furious at the Republicans," says Dick Gephardt, trying to sound like John Kerry who is trying to sound like Howard Dean.

It's mystifying. Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering.

. . . Many Democrats feel that George Bush is just running loose, transforming the national landscape and ruining the nation, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.

Wherever Democrats look, they sense their powerlessness. Even when they look to the media, they feel that conservatives have the upper hand. . . . When they look to the culture at large, many Democrats feel that the climate is so hostile to them they can't even speak up.

Isn't this exactly how the Republicans were about Clinton? Remember Newt Gingrich and Ralph Reed? Remember how they just could not get it that Americans weren't interested in their silly crusade or their Moral Majority sermonizing? And how puffed up and spluttering they were about it? And how the more they fulminated the more they alienated people?

One would think the Dems would remember that, wouldn't one? Megan remembers, and formulates Jane's Law:"The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane."

It's always the beam in our own eye, isn't it?

Euroweenie Terrorist Appeaser Dept. According to Amish Tech Support,

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Nabil Sha'ath says he has a commitment from the EU to return to the territories Palestinians expelled from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem over a year ago.

Good old EU. Kin you say . . . . co-dependent enabler? I knew you could.

Kesher Talk

Friday, July 04, 2003

Thursday, July 03, 2003

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Monday, June 30, 2003

Sunday, June 29, 2003

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