On Hating the Jews by Natan Sharansky

[Batman]

On Hating the Jews by Natan Sharansky

VERY LONG BUT WORTH READING ARTICLE BY NATAN SHARANSKY.

HERE ARE JUST SOME EXCERPTS:

Three decades ago, as a young dissident in the Soviet Union, I compiled underground reports on anti-Semitism for foreign journalists and Western diplomats. At the time, I firmly believed that the cause of the "disease" was totalitarianism, and that democracy was the way to cure it. ..........

Today I know better............. It was in these ostensible bastions of enlightenment and tolerance that Jewish cemeteries were being desecrated, children assaulted, synagogues scorched.

To be sure, the anti-Semitism now pervasive in Western Europe is very different from the anti-Semitism I encountered a generation ago in the Soviet Union. ............

Another shattered illusion is even more pertinent to our search. Shocked by the visceral anti-Semitism he witnessed at the Dreyfus trial in supposedly enlightened France, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, became convinced that the primary cause of anti-Semitism was the anomalous condition of the Jews: a people without a polity of its own. ..........while Herzl and most Zionists after him believed that the emergence of a Jewish state would end anti-Semitism, an increasing number of people today, including some Jews, are convinced that anti-Semitism will end only with the disappearance of the Jewish state.

I first encountered this idea quite a long time ago, in the Soviet Union. In the period before, during, and after the Six-Day war of June 1967--a time when I and many others were experiencing a heady reawakening of our Jewish identity--the Soviet press was filled with scathing attacks on Israel and Zionism, and a wave of official anti-Semitism was unleashed to accompany them. To quite a few Soviet Jews who had been trying their best to melt into Soviet life, Israel suddenly became a jarring reminder of their true status in the "workers' paradise": trapped in a world where they were free neither to live openly as Jews nor to escape the stigma of their Jewishness. To these Jews, Israel came to seem part of the problem, not (as it was for me and others) part of the solution. Expressing what was no doubt a shared sentiment, a distant relative of mine quipped: "If only Israel didn't exist, everything would be all right."

In the decades since, and especially over the last three years, the notion that Israel is one of the primary causes of anti-Semitism, if not the primary cause, has gained much wider currency. The world, we are told by friend and foe alike, increasingly hates Jews because it increasingly hates Israel. Surely this is what the Belgian ambassador had in mind when he informed me during his visit that anti-Semitism in his country would cease once Belgians no longer had to watch pictures on television of Israeli Jews oppressing Palestinian Arabs.

OBVIOUSLY THE state of Israel cannot be the cause of a phenomenon that predates it by over 2,000 years. But might it be properly regarded as the cause of contemporary anti-Semitism? What is certain is that, everywhere one looks, the Jewish state does appear to be at the center of the anti-Semitic storm--and nowhere more so, of course, than in the Middle East.

The rise in viciously anti-Semitic content disseminated through state-run Arab media is quite staggering, and has been thoroughly documented. Arab propagandists, journalists, and scholars now regularly employ the methods and the vocabulary used to demonize European Jews for centuries--calling Jews Christ-killers, charging them with poisoning non-Jews, fabricating blood libels, and the like. In a region where the Christian faith has few adherents, a lurid and time-worn Christian anti-Semitism boasts an enormous following.

To take only one example: this past February, the Egyptian government, formally at peace with Israel, saw fit to broadcast on its state-run television a 41-part series based on the infamous Czarist forgery about a global Jewish conspiracy to dominate humanity, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To ensure the highest ratings, the show was first aired, in prime time, just as millions of families were breaking their traditional Ramadan fast; Arab satellite television then rebroadcast the series to tens of millions more throughout the Middle East.

In Europe, the connection between Israel and anti-Semitism is equally conspicuous. For one thing, the timing and nature of the attacks on European Jews, whether physical or verbal, have all revolved around Israel, and the anti-Semitic wave itself, which began soon after the Palestinians launched their terrorist campaign against the Jewish state in September 2000, reached a peak (so far) when Israel initiated Operation Defensive Shield at the end of March 2002, a month in which 125 Israelis had been killed by terrorists.

Though most of the physical attacks in Europe were perpetrated by Muslims, most of the verbal and cultural assaults came from European elites. Thus, the Italian newspaper La Stampa published a cartoon of an infant Jesus lying at the foot of an Israeli tank, pleading, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again." The frequent comparisons of Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler, of Israelis to Nazis, and of Palestinians to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were not the work of hooligans spray-painting graffiti on the wall of a synagogue but of university educators and sophisticated columnists. As the Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago declared of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians: "We can compare it with what happened at Auschwitz."

The centrality of Israel to the revival of a more generalized anti-Semitism is also evident in the international arena. Almost a year after the current round of Palestinian violence began, and after hundreds of Israelis had already been killed in buses, discos, and pizzerias, a so-called "World Conference against Racism" was held under the auspices of the United Nations in Durban, South Africa. It turned into an anti-Semitic circus, with the Jewish state being accused of everything from racism and apartheid to crimes against humanity and genocide. In this theater of the absurd, the Jews themselves were turned into perpetrators of anti-Semitism, as Israel was denounced for its "Zionist practices against Semitism"--the Semitism, that is to say, of the Palestinian Arabs.

Naturally, then, in searching for the "root cause" of anti-Semitism, the Jewish state would appear to be the prime suspect. But Israel, it should be clear, is not guilty. The Jewish state is no more the cause of anti-Semitism today than the absence of a Jewish state was its cause a century ago.

To see why, we must first appreciate that the always specious line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has now become completely blurred: Israel has effectively become the world's Jew. From Middle Eastern mosques, the bloodcurdling cry is not "Death to the Israelis," but "Death to the Jews." In more civilized circles, a columnist for the London Observer proudly announces that he does not read published letters in support of Israel that are signed by Jews. (That the complaints commission for the British press found nothing amiss in this statement only goes to show how far things have changed since Orwell wrote of Britain in 1945 that "it is not at present possible, indeed, that anti-Semitism should become respectable.") When discussion at fashionable European dinner parties turns to the Middle East, the air, we have been reliably informed, turns blue with old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

No less revealing is what might be called the mechanics of the discussion. For centuries, a clear sign of the anti-Semitic impulse at work has been the use of the double standard: social behavior that in others passes without comment or with the mildest questioning becomes, when exhibited by Jews, a pretext for wholesale group denunciation. Such double standards are applied just as recklessly today to the Jewish state. It is democratic Israel, not any of the dozens of tyrannies represented in the United Nations General Assembly, that that body singles out for condemnation in over two dozen resolutions each year; it is against Israel--not Cuba, North Korea, China, or Iran--that the UN human-rights commission, chaired recently by a lily-pure Libya, directs nearly a third of its official ire; it is Israel whose alleged misbehavior provoked the only joint session ever held by the signatories to the Geneva Convention; it is Israel, alone among nations, that has lately been targeted by Western campaigns of divestment; it is Israel's Magen David Adorn, alone among ambulance services in the world, that is denied membership in the International Red Cross; it is Israeli scholars, alone among academics in the world, who are denied grants and prevented from publishing articles in prestigious journals. The list goes on and on.

The idea that Israel has become the world's Jew and that anti-Zionism is a substitute for anti-Semitism is certainly not new. Years ago, Norman Podhoretz observed that the Jewish state "has become the touchstone of attitudes toward the Jewish people, and anti-Zionism has become the most relevant form of anti-Semitism." And well before that, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was even more unequivocal:

You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely "anti-Zionist." And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth; when people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth.
But if Israel is indeed nothing more than the world's Jew, then to say that the world ... hates Jews because the world ...hates Israel .....that the world hates Jews because the world hates Jews. We still need to know: why?

THIS MAY be a good juncture to let the anti-Semites speak for themselves.

[Batman]

Here is the reasoning invoked by Haman, the infamous viceroy of Persia in the biblical book of Esther, to convince his king to order the annihilation of the Jews:

"There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from those of other peoples, and the king's laws they do not keep, so that it is of no benefit for the king to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed.

This is hardly the only ancient source pointing to the Jews' incorrigible separateness, or their rejection of the majority's customs and moral concepts, as the reason for hostility toward them. Centuries after Hellenistic values had spread throughout and beyond the Mediterranean, the Roman historian Tacitus had this to say:

"Among the Jews, all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral... The rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies. They will not feed or intermarry with gentiles... They have introduced circumcision to show that they are different from others... It is a crime among them to kill any newly born infant.

Philostratus, a Greek writer who lived a century later, offered a similar analysis:

"For the Jews have long been in revolt not only against the Romans, but against humanity; and a race that has made its own life apart and irreconcilable, that cannot share with the rest of mankind in the pleasures of the table, nor join in their libations or prayers or sacrifices, are separated from ourselves by a greater gulf than divides us from Sura or Bactra of the more distant Indies.

Did the Jews actually reject the values that were dominant in the ancient world, or was this simply a fantasy of their enemies? While many of the allegations leveled at Jews were spurious--they did not ritually slaughter non-Jews, as the Greek writer Apion claimed--some were obviously based on true facts. The Jews did oppose intermarriage. They did refuse to sacrifice to foreign gods. And they did emphatically consider killing a newborn infant to be a crime....

THE (BY and large correct) perception of the Jews s rejecting the prevailing value system of the ancient world hardly justifies the anti-Semitism directed against them; but it does take anti-Semitism out of the realm of fantasy, turning it into a genuine dash of ideals and of values. With the arrival of Christianity on the world stage, that same dash, based once again on the charge of Jewish rejectionism, would intensify a thousandfold. The refusal of the people of the "old covenant" to accept the new came to be defined as a threat to the very legitimacy of Christianity, and one that required a mobilized response.

Branding the Jews "Christ killers" and "sons of devils," the Church launched a systematic campaign to denigrate Christianity's parent religion and its adherents. Accusations of desecrating the host, ritual murder, and poisoning wells would be added over the centuries, creating an ever larger powder keg of hatred. With the growing power of the Church and the global spread of Christianity, these potentially explosive sentiments were carried to the far corners of the world, bringing anti-Semitism to places where no Jewish foot had ever trod.

According to some Christian thinkers, persecution of the powerless Jews was justified as a kind of divine payback for the Jewish rejection of Jesus. This heavenly stamp of approval would be invoked many times through the centuries, especially by those who had tried and failed to convince the Jews to acknowledge the superior truth of Christianity. The most famous case may be that of Martin Luther: at first extremely friendly toward Jews--as a young man he had complained about their mistreatment by the Church--Luther turned into one of their bitterest enemies as soon as he realized that his efforts to woo them to his new form of Christianity would never bear fruit.

Nor was this pattern unique to the Christian religion. Muhammad, too, had hoped to attract the Jewish communities of Arabia, and to this end he initially incorporated elements of Judaism into his new faith (directing prayer toward Jerusalem, fasting on Yore Kippur, and the like). When, however, the Jews refused to accept his code of law, Muhammad wheeled upon them with a vengeance, cursing them in words strikingly reminiscent of the early Church fathers: "Humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with the wrath of Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah's revelation and slew the prophets wrongfully."

IN THESE cases, too, we might ask whether the perception of Jewish rejectionism was accurate. Of course the Jews did not drain the blood of children, poison wells, attempt to mutilate the body of Christ, or commit any of the other wild crimes of which the Church accused them. Moreover, since many teachings of Christianity and Islam stemmed directly from Jewish ones, Jews could hardly be said to have denied them. But if rejecting the Christian or Islamic world meant rejecting the Christian or Islamic creed, then Jews who clung to their own separate faith and way of life were, certainly, rejectionist.

This brings us to an apparent point of difference between pre-modern and modern anti-Semitism. For many Jews over the course of two millennia, there was, in theory at least, a way out of institutionalized discrimination and persecution: the Greco-Roman, Christian, and Muslim worlds were only too happy to embrace converts to their way of life. In the modern era, this choice often proved illusory. Both assimilated and non-assimilated Jews, both religious and secular Jews, were equally victimized by pogroms, persecutions, and genocide. In fact, the terrors directed at the assimilated Jews of Western Europe have led some to conclude that far from ending anti-Semitism, assimilation actually contributed to arousing it.

What accounts for this? In the pre-modern world, Jews and Gentiles were largely in agreement as to what defined Jewish rejectionism, and therefore what would constitute a reprieve from it: it was mostly a matter of beliefs and moral concepts, and of the social behavior that flowed from them. In the modern world, although the question of whether a Jew ate the food or worshiped the God of his neighbors remained relevant, it was less relevant than before. Instead, the modern Jew was seen as being born into a Jewish nation or race whose collective values were deeply embedded in the very fabric of his being. Assimilation, with or without conversion to the majority faith, might succeed in masking this bedrock taint; it could not expunge it.

While such views were not entirely absent in earlier periods, the burden of proof faced by the modern Jew to convince others that he could transcend his "Jewishness" was much greater than the one faced by his forebears. Despite the increasing secularism and openness of European society, which should have smoothed the prospects of assimilation, many modern Jews would find it more difficult to become real Frenchmen or true Germans than their ancestors would have found it to become Greeks or Romans, Christians or Muslims.

The novelty of modern anti-Semitism is thus not that the Jews were seen as the enemies of mankind. Indeed, Hitler's observation in Mein Kampf that "wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity" sounds no different from the one penned by Philostratus 1,700 years earlier. No, the novelty of modern anti-Semitism is only that it was far more difficult--and sometimes impossible--for the Jew to stop being an enemy of mankind.

ON CLOSER inspection, then, modern anti-Semitism begins to look quite continuous with pre-modern anti-Semitism, only worse. Modern Jews may not have believed they were rejecting the prevailing order around them, but that did not necessarily mean their enemies agreed with them. When it came to the Jews, indeed, European nationalism of the blood-and-soil variety only added another and even more murderous layer of hatred to the foundation built by age-old religious prejudice. Just as in the ancient world, the Jews in the modern world remained the other--inveterate rejectionists, no matter how separate, no matter how assimilated..........
The values ascendant in today's Middle East are shaped by two forces: Islamic fundamentalism and state authoritarianism. In the eyes of the former, any non-Muslim sovereign power in the region--for that matter, any secular Muslim power--is anathema. Particularly galling is Jewish sovereignty in an area delineated as dar al-Islam, the realm where Islam is destined to enjoy exclusive dominance. Such a violation cannot be compromised with; nothing will suffice but its extirpation.

In the eyes of the secular Arab regimes, the Jews of Israel are similarly an affront, but not so much on theological grounds as on account of the society they have built: flee, productive, democratic, a living rebuke to the corrupt, autocratic regimes surrounding it. In short, the Jewish state is the ultimate freedom fighter--an embodiment of the subversive liberties that threaten Islamic civilization and autocratic Arab rule alike. It is for this reason that, in the state-controlled Arab media as in the mosques, Jews have been turned into a symbol of all that is menacing in the democratic, materialist West as a whole, and are confidently reputed to be the insidious force manipulating the United States into a confrontation with Islam...
anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism..
Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, now serves in the government of Israel as minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs

[Kev]

Great words by Martin Luther King, however, perhaps someone can refresh my memory?

Wasn't he a vocal supporter of Jews in the infancy of his popularity, but once he discovered that the Jews could not be converted to his way of life, he became an arch enemy of them?

< my history is a bit vague in this area? >

[Donna]

Originally posted by Kev
Great words by Martin Luther King, however, perhaps someone can refresh my memory?

Wasn't he a vocal supporter of Jews in the infancy of his popularity, but once he discovered that the Jews could not be converted to his way of life, he became an arch enemy of them?

< my history is a bit vague in this area? >

Martin Luther and Dr. Martin Luther King...two different people.

[elke]

Originally posted by Kev
Great words by Martin Luther King, however, perhaps someone can refresh my memory?

Wasn't he a vocal supporter of Jews in the infancy of his popularity, but once he discovered that the Jews could not be converted to his way of life, he became an arch enemy of them?

< my history is a bit vague in this area? >

As Donna pointed out, you are confusing Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheran sect of Christianity during Reformation, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - the leader of U.S. civil rights movement during 1960s.

While Martin Luther (Lutheran leader) became virulently antisemitic, once he realized that Jews won't be converted to his brand of Christianity, MLK, Jr. doesn't seem to have been trying to convert the Jews at all. He had bigger fish to fry: he was fighting for justice and equality, and many Jews were within the ranks of his movement. MLK, Jr. was assassinated for his efforts in 1969, even though his modus operandi was completely and wholly non-violent. His was the saying quoted by Batman, along with other numerous and very wise quotes: the man was a very good, powerful speaker.

[Gilgamesh]

Originally posted by Kev
Great words by Martin Luther King, however, perhaps someone can refresh my memory?

Wasn't he a vocal supporter of Jews in the infancy of his popularity, but once he discovered that the Jews could not be converted to his way of life, he became an arch enemy of them?

< my history is a bit vague in this area? >

Martin Luther, founder of Protestant church, was a rabid anti semetic. His teachings are one of the pillars of German culture, including the anti semetic ones, too.

Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil right movement was not AFIK anti semetic. In contrast to other known black leaders, such as those of the Nation of Islam various leaders, who are pro Arab and pro Terror. (Wasn't the Washington sniper serial killer, one of those? ). The civil right movment strongest most orginized allies, were Jewish organizations and individuals. Not to mention, Jewish support of black integration, through politics, law, arts...

All Jews sympethied the Black human right struggle... We helped it happen, made American better and stronger then ever.

Anacdote: As a chiled in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong was fed, employed and warmly cared for by a Jewish family. He always carried a Star of David in his pocket ever since.

[Mediocrates]

http://www.policyreview.org/oct03/rosenthal.html

Anti-Semitism and Ethnicity in Europe

By John Rosenthal

...Conclusion...

The danger for European Jews

European “regionalism” and the “law of ethnic groups” represent a threat to Jews. They convert an individual’s “Jewishness” from a private matter of personal history (or, indeed, pre-history) into a matter of public interest. The fine-grained ethnic survey of Europe’s national populations recently co-authored by former fuen president (and current director of the South Tirolean Ethnic Group Institute) Christoph Pan makes this perfectly clear.11 As a result of this sort of exercise, “Jews” are set apart from the populations among which they live as being somehow significantly different and furthermore, to the extent that they are “allochthonous,” as “not belonging.”

All of this amounts, in effect, to a renaissance of the “blood and soil” ideology whose disastrous consequences for Jews and other “non-indigenous” persons in Europe in the past century are well enough known. Indeed, in Greek mythology, the “autochthons” are literally those who spring directly from the soil. Not surprisingly, some of the pioneers of a European “law of ethnic groups” in the 1930s were Nazi legal theorists. Several of them were successfully rehabilitated after the war and substantially contributed to the founding of the fuen and the intereg.12 To take but one example, Theodor Veiter, the longtime editor of the fuen organ Europa Ethnica, wrote in a 1938 study on “national autonomy” that “The destructive questioning of the highest human values . . . by Jewry shows that Jews are already excluded from the ethnic-national life of other nations by virtue of their mode of thought, which flows precisely from their race, and that they should therefore be excluded from the other nations.”

The dangers represented by a resurgent ethnicist or ethnic-national ideology for Jews in Europe are especially grave in light of the simultaneous resurgence, under the banner of “anti-globalization,” of a vaguely “leftist” ideology that stigmatizes cosmopolitanism — that traditional marker of the “uprooted,” “wandering” Jew in the anti-Semitic Weltanschauung — and blames the “anonymous power” of financial markets — that most important channel of supposed “Jewish influence” according to the same — for much of the world’s problems. This is not to say, of course, that every criticism of the functioning of financial markets or of free trade is automatically to be regarded as anti-Semitic. But it is to say that given the historical affinities between the critique of economic liberalism and traditional anti-Semitism, and given the highly under-theorized, largely “spontaneous” character of the anti-globalization movement, it is not surprising that classical anti-Semitic stereotypes will frequently fill the intellectual void and endow the ubiquitous but dimly perceived “capitalist” enemy with a well-known “ethnic” incarnation. It is not for nothing, after all, that August Bebel described anti-Semitism already in the nineteenth century as the “socialism of fools.”


(17 pages with footnotes)

[Communication]

I just posted this article in another thread, also long, but very good:

http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index...e/031111a.html

[Mediocrates]

By the time you get to page 12 or 13 of the Rosenthal article you will want to carbomb your local French or German Embassy. His use of the term 'exterminationism' I think captures it perfectly.

[Mediocrates]

The problem I have with the Tikkun article is that that is the same distinction they make themselves. They get right up to the edge of "Let's wipe Israel off the map" and follow it up with a mumbled "But we're not Jewhaters..."

If anyone learns anything from history it's that traitors and turncoats are always the first pressed against the wall and shot when the new regime comes to power. If you are a traitor to your own people then you are unreliable and bound to be a traitor to the new power. Better to kill them all. So the kind people of Tikkun shouldn't imagine themselves immune. It's like the old Yiddishe bromide "Don't forget you're Jewish, nobody else will."

[Communication]

This may not be the appropraite thread, but I wanted to post two news pieces that are both timely and demonstrate the rewards of being proactive:


1. US senators watch Palestinian television

"A video screened by the senators shows ordinary children on state-run Palestinian television expressing support of terrorism and their desire to become "martyrs."


"How can you think about building a better future, no matter what your political views, if you indoctrinate your children to a culture of death?"


www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&PageID=565



2. Israel drafts its first ever UN resolution

AP: Israel Circulates Resolution at U.N.

By DAFNA LINZER
The Associated Press
Monday, November 3, 2003; 10:40 PM


UNITED NATIONS - Israel, which has seen hundreds of U.N. resolutions passed against its policies over the years, circulated its first resolution ever Monday, saying the outcome will show whether the organization is taking a balanced approach to the Mideast.



The Israeli resolution, a copy of which was given to The Associated Press, calls for the protection of Israeli children victimized by Palestinian terrorism. It closely mirrors a similar draft submitted by Egypt last week highlighting the plight of Palestinian children affected by more than three years of bloody conflict in the region.

Israeli diplomats said they'd be happy if the General Assembly decided to drop the two drafts or adopt them both.

"The test will be if they pass the Palestinian one but not ours," said deputy Israeli Ambassador Arye Meckel.

For years, Israel has refused to take seriously the hundreds of resolutions Arab states sponsor, all of which condemn Israel's actions against the Palestinians while making little, if any, mention of Palestinian attacks against Jews.

But Meckel said the pattern of dismissal only led to mounting anti-Israel resolutions. Twenty such resolutions passed in the General Assembly in 2002. The United States vetoed several that were brought to the Security Council, arguing that they were unbalanced and didn't condemn Palestinian groups taking credit for suicide bombings against Israelis.

"It's time to stop being passive," Meckel said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Meckel will send a letter later this week to 155 ambassadors at the United Nations asking for their support for Israel's first resolution. Israeli diplomats will also lobby world capitals.

Both the Israeli and the Palestinian resolutions are expected to come up for a vote in the U.N.'s human rights committee within the next two weeks, he said. If either one passes, it will go to the full General Assembly for a final vote in December.


© 2003 The Associated Press

[Mediocrates]

http://forward.com/issues/2003/03.10.24/oped1.html


Tour of U.S. Schools Reveals Why Zionism Is Flunking on Campus
By NATAN SHARANSKY
When I got to Rutgers University in New Jersey last month, I almost forgot I was on a college campus. The atmosphere was far from the cool, button-down academic reserve typical of such institutions. It was more reminiscent of a battlefield.

My arrival was greeted by a noisy demonstration of Palestinian and Jewish students holding signs reading "Racist Israel" and "War Criminals," together with black-coated Neturei Karta members calling for the destruction of the blasphemous Zionist entity. Faculty members, predictably led by a former Israeli professor, had sent out e-mails protesting the granting of a platform to a representative of the "Nazi, war-criminal" state. Of course, there was the famous pie incident in which a member of a campus Jewish anti-occupation group made his way past my security guards and plastered me in the face with a cream pie while shouting "End the Occupation."

Opposed to them were hundreds of no less rowdy Jewish students, full of motivation to defend Israel and give the protesters back as good as they got. After the pie incident, when I returned to the hall and mounted the stage, the atmosphere was so electric, so full of adrenalin, that the Palestinians and their supporters who had come to disrupt the event had no choice but to abandon their plans for provocation.

Things were not much calmer at Boston University: An anonymous bomb threat brought swarms of police to the lecture hall and almost forced a cancellation of my appearance. But here, too, some good resulted when the bomb threat caused the lecture to be moved to a larger hall, which was quickly filled with some 600 listeners who were unwilling to accept the violent silencing of pro-Israel views.

These moments — the pie throwing, the bomb threat, the demonstration — as raucous, threatening and contentious as they were, are among the more pleasant memories from my 13-campus tour of the United States. Perhaps it is because at these moments I felt that there was some point to my trip, perhaps because the violent hostility had stirred the students and motivated them to want to fight and win — which I, of course, was delighted to see.

There were other moments during my tour, difficult moments when I felt fear, sadness and worry. During a frank and friendly conversation with a group of Jewish students at Harvard University, one student admitted to me that she was afraid — afraid to express support for Israel, afraid to take part in pro-Israel organizations, afraid to be identified. The mood on campus had turned so anti-Israel that she was afraid that her open identification could cost her, damaging her grades and her academic future. That her professors, who control her final grades, were likely to view such activism unkindly, and that the risk was too great.

...read the rest at the link provided.