The Harvard Crimson: Excerpt: “But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans? Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty? In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections. Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on European bank accounts, property, and compensation for labor expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s? As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-Europeans was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defense of slavery in the mid-19th.”
-
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Meta
Pouya,
what’s your take on this:
I worry that the bombastic and empty rhetoric of the (increasingly unpopular) Iranian regime on the Palestinian question is only turning away Iranian public opinion from the Palestinian cause. That was exactly what happened under the regime of Saddam Husayn, and it explains why there is very little interest in or sympathy for (by Kurds or Shi`ites or Sunnis) the persecuted Palestinians in Iraq.
Posted by As’ad at 9:33 AM – from angryarab.blogspot.com
Ill give you my take: Its very possible. To know exactly what Iranians think, of course, we would have to be serious about it and use a public opinion survey using scientific polling standards to know what Iranians think of the Palestinians.
The censorship is not limited to Harvard. Many universities and institutions are refusing to have open debate on a new book called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policyâ€. The book is not even in bookstores, but already anxieties have surfaced about the backlash it is stirring, with several institutions backing away from holding events with the authors: John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt.
See http://snuffysmithsblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/backlash-over-book-on-policy-for-israel.html
Not only that, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a speech cancelled recently, apparently bc he was, again, “anti-semitic”
As for the Palestinian cause in Iran, I think it really depends on who you talk to, if the Iranian seems the plight of the Palestinians as a human issue, then he/she will support them no matter who has tagged themselves onto the clause. Furthermore, there are some who sympathize w the Palestinians BECAUSE of the gov’t while others could care less bc they oppose anything the gov’t does.
I with the first one, I don’t care who says what or who wants to exploit the cause for their own legitimacy, I sympathize w the Palestinians as humans who have been woefully wronged by Zionism.
Heres what Ive noticed among some Iranian expatriates: If the Islamic Republic were to put out a press release saying, “2+2=4”, then 2+2 would not longer equal 4. It could equal 6, 89, or 3, but it no longer equals 4.