Make no mistake, this is not left versus right or any other kind of ideological dispute. This is about a corporate attitude versus the academic freedom that makes the academy work. Juan Cole, for instance,
has opposed attempts to shut up Israeli academics, but the Israel-first lobby over here isn't going to return the favor. And this is furthermore not a right versus left issue because the anti-Jewish sentiments that the American Likudniks see everywhere really
come from their own side of the ideological spectrum, not ours. No wonder they're so bitter, they have to cohabitate with conservatives who admire Hitler.
No, instead this is about think tank hacks who draw paychecks for supporting dead and failed policies. They could never make it in a peer-reviewed environment, and neither could their failed ideas, so they attack academia. Their sugar daddies, in turn, are willing to keep paying them to keep saying the same thing over and over, because it's no different from any other kind of advertising. So, when the employee of a think tank 'publishes' a paper, you already know what it's going to say. All you have to do is read the name of the think tank. They are paid to exert pressure on policy, yet another form of the anti-democratic influence of money on our political system. The right is just pissed off that they haven't been able to buy our content like they have everything else in America. Our quasi-medieval organization is incompatible with their accustomed modes of hostile takeover. It's like a Windows virus trying to infect a DOS system. U C4nn07 H4X0r My 80x0R! 4 r34l M4n 0NlY n33D2 4 K0Mm4Nd l1n3! H4 h4 H4 h444444444!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
So, they have to take us out personally.
In the peer-review process, people who know as much or more than you do about your subject determine whether or not you will be published. Your work might touch on twenty different specialties on the way to making one basic point, and the referees could be in those subsidiary specialties. So, you have to watch your ass. It's this kind of quality-control that makes it so hard to turn the academy into just another corporate whorehouse. In this contentious context, 'arguments' that Cole was passed over for foul language or a contentious attitude (or for the obscurity of his research) are simply laughable. Mowbray and the rest of them have apparently never attended a faculty meeting. If, in the course of your research, what you find isn't what you wanted to find, you have a choice. You can either grow up and deal with the real world, or you can go join a think tank. People who disagree with these mercenaries are called "tenured radicals" because, since these lightweights could never make it in the real intellectual world, they have nothing intelligent to say.
"Radical" what? The people attacking Cole have been left behind by history. Their entire justificative program was built around a policy that has failed, so who's the radical now? The Likud is out of power, and the real government of the real Israel immediatly began making moves that would have been anathema before, things that would probably get yet another Labor PM killed. (In fact, they seem to have borrowed the Texas Democratic Party's platform) The sad dream of the last generation, that Israel's security required expanding outside Israel's borders is apparently over. They thought they'd learned the lessons from the 1973 War, only to pretend they couldn't learn the lessons of the last thirty-three years.
The [1973] war had a profound impact on the Israeli psyche, and brought to an end the period of political "stability" that had endured since the founding of the state in 1948. A surprise attack by Egypt and Syria, something that up to that point had been thought to be an impossible feat, was fought off only by heavy and near-panic fighting. Whereas previous wars -- the war for independence in 1948, the Suez crisis in 1956, the Six Days War in 1967 -- had been fought largely on Israel's terms, the 1973 war nearly succeeded in overwhelming the state's defenses. The result was evisceration of public confidence in the government and, by extension, the Labor Party.
Out of the ensuing combination of disaffection, instability and fear was born the Likud Party.
Ultimately, Likud's power has stemmed from a belief not only that Arabs are not to be trusted, but also that Israel's national security hinged on its ability to control a buffer zone of Arab territory. From this belief came policies such as the encouragement of Jewish settlements throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Israel is not my problem. Unlike these fringe radicals on the right who put another country first, I can go entire days without thinking about Israel at all. I'm interested in my own contry's priorities, and those are enough of a mess. The US no longer needs Israel to force a Soviet Union that doesn't exist anymore to exhaust itself in the region. The Cold War utility of Israel has been defunct for over a decade, but the think tank hacks who justified it for a generation (largely by calling everyone "anti-semites") didn't want to have to get real jobs. So why is it that the US, and by extension American academics, have to go on supporting a policy that even Israel is abandoning? Because that's the way we discipline intellectuals in the USSA. Much of the American right is still bogged down in the habits of self-deception they cultivated during the Cold War. They have created the "War on Terror" to keep themselves in power.
The behavior of Yale's administrators doesn't surprise me. Threaten the money and they'll cave, I could have told you that. But what they need to consider is what precedent they've set. What? Will the Likud be vetting Yale's curriculum? That was not a door than an American should open. The donors also don't surprise me. There will always be people with more money than sense. But if the quality of education at your alma mater is less important to you than how you feel about a country you don't live in, spend some of that money on personal help. Or a one-way ticket to Israel. One way or the other, you'll see the light. The reality is never the same as the myth, no matter how cherished, and colleges exist to make sure students learn the reality, not your myth.
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