By Steven Plaut

Harvard University is a school of rich tradition. And in a few days it

will be restoring a great Harvard tradition dating back to the 1930s:

the tradition of hosting Nazis and violent anti-Semites on campus

seeking the mass murder of Jews.

 

Harvard is to hold a pseudo-academic conference devoted to calls for

Israel’s extermination. This “academic conference” will be little more

than a genteel campus pogrom. Misnamed the “One State Solution

Conference,” it will definitely not have any discussion of any “One

State Solution” under which all of Western “Palestine” remains one

single Jewish state, while “Palestinians” unhappy about living there

as a political minority move to one of the 22 Arab states. When the

conference organizers and speakers talk about a “One State Solution,”

what they mean is a Rwanda solution, a final one, to the “Jewish

Problem” of the Middle East. They want Israel annihilated and replaced

by a “bi-national” state with an Islamist Arab majority in control.

And it does not take a great imagination to understand just how Jews

will fare under such a “solution.”

 

Naturally, Harvard is defending this campus atrocity with the usual

protestations about academic freedom and freedom of speech. The

administrators who justify such open and violent bigotry in the guise

of an academic conference are the very same people who never seem to

express any objections when campus hooligans disrupt and harass talks

by Israeli diplomats and rallies by Jewish students. Harvard

administrators would be the first ones in the Ivy League to shut down

as “hate speech” any “conference” devoted to proving that black people

have lower IQs than others, that called for evicting all illegal

Hispanics from the nation, or that promoted the view that

homosexuality is a mental disorder.

 

In any case, a brief review of pedigrees of the participants in this

“conference” illustrates just how clearly this is to be nothing more

than a Bash-the-Jews campus crusade.

 

The “star” of the Harvard pogrom will be Ilan Pappe, who is arguably

the most thoroughly discredited pseudo-academic on the planet. Pappe

is a notorious fabricator, someone who claims proudly that facts and

truth are of no importance. “Indeed the struggle is about ideology,

not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many

people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct

one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are

truthseekers,” the French newspaper Le Soir, has cited Pappe as

saying.

 

Pappe is an expatriate Israeli who devoted one of his “books” to his

sons with the wish that they may grow up in a world without Israel.

His own University of Exeter recently chastised him for his infamous

habit of playing fast and loose with facts. Pappe is best known as a

fulltime anti-Israel propagandist who has done more than any other

anti-Israel Israeli to promote the moral equivalence of “Nakba denial”

with Holocaust denial. He is a “new historian” in the sense of

pseudo-historian. His mission in life is to invent an imaginary

Palestinian historic “narrative.” Nearly all those beating the “Nakba”

drum today cite Pappe and his “books” about the supposed “ethnic

cleansing” of Arabs by Israel in its war of independence. (For those

who do not know, “Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe,” is how Arabs refer to

Israel’s birth.)

 

Pappe was a lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa,

but moved to resume the position of a pseudo-academic propagandist

position at the University of Exeter in the UK. Even other

anti-Zionists have repudiated Pappe as a liar and fabricator. He

openly calls for Israel to be exterminated and endorses Hamas

terrorism. He considers Noam Chomsky insufficiently anti-Israel.

 

Pappe, who ran for the parliament in Israel on the slate of the

Stalinist communist party and played a central role in fomenting

boycotts of Israel in the UK and elsewhere, was also the central

figure in the now infamous “Tantura Affair.” In this incident, Pappe

coached a graduate student of his into inventing a non-existent

“massacre” of Arabs by the Hagana Jewish militia (Alexandroni Brigade)

in Tantura, south of Haifa, a “massacre” that Pappe claims took place

in 1948. Not a shred of any evidence for any such “massacre” exists.

Arab and other journalists who were present at the time of the battle

that took place in Tantura reported no massacre. Arabs living in the

town at the time confirmed that a battle did occur, but that after the

battle the Jewish militiamen aided and assisted the townspeople, not

massacring anyone. The graduate student in question was sued for libel

by the veterans of the Hagana militia. He later admitted in court with

his lawyer present that the entire massacre was an invention.

 

No matter – Pappe roams the world and continues to spread the lie

about the imaginary Tantura “massacre,” a lie that has found its way

into nearly every anti-Semitic web site and Neo-Nazi magazine on

Earth, and even a handful of otherwise respectable mainstream

journalists foolishly rely upon him. Pappe has lied about practically

everything else, including about being “persecuted” by his own

university in Israel. In fact, Pappe was never fired for his fraud and

fabrication by the University of Haifa, although he should have been.

(Some wags even suggested the university should be boycotted for not

firing Pappe.) That did not stop Pappe from waving his stigmata as

“victim of Zionism” before the European anti-Semites promoting

“divestment” from Israel. His recruitment by the University of Exeter

proves how indifferent that school is to scholarly standards. His

coming appearance as the star of the Harvard academic pogrom shows

that things are not much better there.

 

While Pappe may be the most notorious fabricator at Harvard’s Destroy

Israel Conference, he is hardly the only one. A close runner-up will

be Stephen M. Walt, who – along with his sidekick John Mearsheimer –

is best known for proliferating medieval “theories” about a grand

Jewish cabal plotting to control the world. Walt and Mearsheimer spin

yarns about the imaginary power of the “Jewish lobby” that resound

very much like German propaganda from the 1930s. It would be an

exaggeration to say that there is no Israel lobby whatsoever in the

United States, but only a small exaggeration. The “Israel lobby” does

not come up to the pinky toes in terms of the power of the farm lobby

and the teachers union lobby. Walt’s partner Mearsheimer has been in

the news the past few weeks for endorsing and celebrating a

notoriously deranged British Israel-born Holocaust denier, Gilad

Atzmon. Walt also defends Mearsheimer’s choice of Nazi chums on his

own personal blog.

 

Walt and Mearsheimer are widely seen as open anti-Semites, churning

out conspiratorial tripe no better than what the “9/11 truther” nuts

produce. The Anti-Defamation League dismisses them as anti-Semitic

cranks, adding: “Mearsheimer and Walt start by blaming Israel for

everything in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once establishing

Israel’s consistent guilt, from the creation of the state to present

day, they then move to asserting that the ‘Israel lobby’ (which is

loosely and inconsistently defined) in the United States uses every

device and method of pressure politics to stifle criticism of Israel

and to ensure America’s pro-Israel policy, against America’s true

interests and to serve the interests of the Jewish state.”

 

 

 

 

The Harvard conference will also feature a number of obscure

pseudo-academics, whose inclusion is evidently entirely due to their

being Jewish anti-Semites. One of these speakers will be Marc H.

Ellis, on the faculty at Baylor University. Ellis is someone

considered by himself to be a Jewish theologian and thinker, and by

himself alone. No one else in the world seems to consider his

“philosophical” salad of Marxism and the quest for the annihilation of

Israel to be Jewish theology. Well, no one besides the racist Reverend

Jeremiah Wright, at least (Wright just adores Ellis). Ellis is

basically a clone of Norman Finkelstein, but – unlike Finkelstein –

was never dismissed by his own university for being a fraud (yet).

Come to think of it, since Finkelstein has lately been renouncing the

“Boycott and Divest from Israel” movement, Finkelstein these days

might better be considered to be the Ellis Lite. Ellis pretends to be

something of a “Holocaust theologian,” but the only lesson he has

managed to extract from the Holocaust is that it is necessary now to

conduct a second Holocaust to rid the world of Israel.

 

Ellis thinks that the legacy of the Holocaust ought to instill in Jews

the duty to denounce Israel unambiguously and to support the demands

and agenda of the Palestinian terrorists. He denounces all Jewish

denominations and all rabbinic institutions for their failures to

endorse Palestinian violence unreservedly. He is as hostile to the

Jews of America as he is to those of Israel: “We as Jews come after

the Holocaust, but we also come after the illusory promises of Israel

and America. And we cannot find our way alone, only with others who

realize that the promises they have been handed are also illusory.”

 

An even more obscure “academic” to be featured at the Harvard pogrom

is one Dalit Baum, a mouth-foaming hater of Israel who teaches “gender

studies” as an adjunct at my own school, the University of Haifa. She

holds a degree in math, and spends her days in quest of being the

planet’s leading lesbian for jihad. When she is not leading “dyke

marches” (her term), Baum lectures to college students against the

state of Israel and its right to defend itself. She pretends to be a

victim of societal oppression against homosexuals and women, although

the fact that she holds a job in a sociology department without having

any degree in sociology better illustrates the nature of her

persecution. Baum created an organization of anti-Semitic lesbians

calling itself Black Laundry, which meets in gay bars in Israel. Black

Laundry members, of course, never convene in the areas controlled by

the Hamas or Palestinian Authority to protest “oppression” of

homosexuals. We can only wonder why.

 

Timothy McCarthy, an adjunct lecturer at Harvard and a self-proclaimed

expert on “gender studies” and “human rights,” will be joining Baum.

He will be explaining why the best way to achieve gender equality and

human rights in the Middle East is to annihilate the only country in

which they exist.

 

Other speakers at the Nuremberg Rally off Harvard Square will include

anti-Semitic journalists, a gaggle of anti-Israel sociologists, law

professors who define human rights in such a way that Arabs have a

human right to murder Jews, but Jews have no human right to defend

themselves, and even one liberation-theology pseudo-rabbi. What they

all have in common is their desire to see Israel exterminated. In what

passes for academic pluralism and diversity these days, the Harvard

conference will not have even a single speaker who thinks that Israel

has the right to exist and the right to defend itself.

 

Harvard University has a bit of a history when it comes to coddling

Nazis. In the 1930s, it was one of the American universities reluctant

to hire Jewish and other refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. According to

“The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower,” by Stephen H. Norwood (Cambridge

University Press, 2009), Harvard University stood out above the rest

in its moral failure and in its collaboration with Nazism. Many of the

faculty members at Harvard were openly anti-Semitic, including

Harvard’s president James Bryant Conant. Later, after the war, Conant

served as US Ambassador to Germany and worked feverishly to get Nazi

war criminals paroled and hired. He lobbied for appointments of Nazis

to various public posts in Europe and at the United Nations.

 

Harvard’s law school dean, Roscoe Pound, was openly sympathetic to

Hitler, vacationed in Germany and attended anti-Semitic events there.

Harvard history professor William L. Langer strongly defended Hitler’s

reoccupation and remilitarization of the Rhineland, which was the

first step in launching World War II. More generally he served as a

sort of academic apologist for the Nazis. The Nazi Professor Friedrich

Schoenemann had taught at Harvard during and after World War I. During

the 1930s, when he was at the University of Berlin, he went on a

speaking tour of American campuses in 1933 to great acclaim, where his

talks were titled “Why I Believe in the Hitler Government.”

 

Harvard went out of its way to host and celebrate Nazi leaders during

the 1930s. The high Nazi official Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaungl was

invited as the Harvard commencement speaker in 1934. The wealthy

Hanfstaungel had been one of Hitler’s earliest and most important

backers. He was on record insisting “the Jews must be crushed,” and

describing Jews as “the vampire sucking German blood.” Hanfstaungel

was invited by a Harvard medical professor to serve as the honored

speaker in the Harvard commencement ceremony and class reunion of 1934

and used the occasion for anti-Semitic incitement. He openly advocated

the mass arrest or worse of German Jews. The student paper, the

Harvard Crimson, defended Hanfstaungel. Harvard called in the Boston

police to arrest Jews and others protesting the visit, and they were

charged with “illegally displaying signs.” When Hanfstaungel returned

to Germany from Harvard, he was personally welcomed by Hitler.

 

So the Destroy Israel “Conference,” AKA the Nuremberg Rally near the

Charles River, is simply upholding a proud Cambridge Ivy heritage.

 

The “One State Solution” as promoted by the Harvard pseudo-academic

pogromchiki should really be called the Final Solution.

 

 

Steven Plaut writes for FrontPage Magazine (http://frontpagemag.com) where this article first appeared.