Academia plays host to lies and defamation a la Protocols:

Jewish attack not a surprise, says the author of a short op-ed on Excalibur, York University’s campus newspaper, and proceeds to provide a moral justification for the terrorist attack that left eights Jews dead.

Here is what he says:

It’s no wonder why Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav Kook School was attacked.

I’m not surprised that Ala’a Hisham Abu Dhaim targeted Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav Kook School in Jerusalem.Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav Kook School is described as a religious camp that links Judaism with Zionism. This makes it very different from any other anti-Zionist Orthodox school in Israel.

This institution established a program known as the “yeshivat hesder”. The word “hesder” means the settlement of a curriculum that combines Talmudic studies with military service. In other words, this school has direct connections with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and its graduating students are those whom are committing a holocaust in Gaza in the Palestinians eyes.

This school strengthens the idea on its students and graduates of the land of Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile, as well as the need to make this land a “religious land,” which means there should not be any right to return for the Palestinians that were expelled from their land. The school has around 500 students aged 18 to 30. Many of its past graduates went on to found other similar religious schools in the West Bank settlements which are described as racist among the Orthodox Jews.

In the eyes of the Palestinians, it was the IDF who started the holocaust in Gaza, and the Palestinians are simply targeting the source of that attack. After this incident, thousands went out protesting in Jerusalem cheering “death to the Arabs”. Note here that they’re wishing death to all the Arabs whether they are Palestinians or not. This makes many understand, or at least assume, that the teachings of many of those whom have protested are against the Arabs as a whole, not just against the Palestinians.Let’s not forget the famous quote from the former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in his speech to the Knesset on June 25, 1982: “[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.”

For such a short article, of some 320 words, it manages to compact quite a few lies and mistakes, big and small, the disproportionate number of which beg the question: what is the purpose of it?

Here are a few of its more glaring mistakes:

1. “The school has around 500 students aged 18 to 30.”

8 human beings were massacred in that terrorist arrack, of whom 7 were 18 and younger: Neria Cohen, aged 15, Segev Avihail, aged 15, Avraham mOses, aged 16, Yehonatan elder, aged 16, Ro’I Roth, aged 18, Yohai Lipshitz, aged 18, Yonadav hirshfeld, aged 18. Another boy, Naftali Sheetrit, one of the critically wounded students, aged 14. This information was easily found on the Internet.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125593

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercaz_HaRav_shooting#Victims

2. “This school strengthens the idea on its students and graduates of the land of Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile”

This idea that Zionism aims at expanding the land of Israel from “from the Euphrates to the Nile” can be found nowhere in Israel’s foundational laws, or documents, or even in Israel’s leaders’s statements. Where it can be found is in the Hamas Charter, alongside other lies quoted directly from the “Protocols of the elders of Zion”. It is a doubtful kind of endorsement of your paper, published in an academic institution, that into its pages creep some of the most notorious defamatoty fabrication in history.

3. “After this incident, thousands went out protesting in Jerusalem cheering “death to the Arabs”.

Here’s a report of what happened, found in an article in Ha’aretz which found the real event outrageous enough to merit the harshest criticism:

“Already last week, radical right-wing groups announced that they planned to gather on Sunday at a spot along the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem and march to the Jabal Mukkaber neighborhood. They were bent on destroying the home of the man responsible for the terrorist attack at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, and the place and time were printed on announcements pasted up all over the city…. We are not talking about a mere handful of individuals who managed to get through police barriers, but a frenzied crowd of dozens of violent people…”

Please note that the incident involved not “thousands” of people, spontaneously spilling into the streets baying for Arab blood, but a few dozens extremists who were organized and were looking to enact some vigilante justice on their own. Note the difference in the way an Israeli paper scathingly scolds the police for not doing enough to protect the Arab neighbourhood and Aggad’s attempt at justifying an act of terrorism.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/965315.html

4. And lastly, “Let’s not forget the famous quote from the former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in his speech to the Knesset on June 25, 1982: “[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.”

Here is what Menachen Begin really said: “The children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home, just like the children in Washington, in Moscow, and in Peking, in Paris and in Rome, in Oslo, in Stockholm and in Copenhagen. The fate of... Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.”

http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2008/03/york-university-paper-justifies-jerusale/index.shtml

It seems to me that the description of a person so evil and perverse that he seeks out to kill Jewish children qua Jewish children, that there is simply no comprehending him, as “two-footed animal” does gross injustice to the animal. Animals do not kill randomly. Animals do not murder innocents for revenge.

It is quite puzzling, in fact, that the author of the piece assumes the Palestinians are the ones, as a collectivity, designated as "two legged animal"s. Surely he does not mean to imply, that all Palestinians, to a person, raise their hand to slay Jewish kids, does he? I would hazard a guess that most Palestinians are horrified when Jewish kids are deliberately targeted and gunned down by a Palestinian or any murderer, in their name. In fact, even if images of celebrating Palestinians beam across the world's TV screens, they represent only themselves, and not the millions of other Palestinians who are not celebrating, and are not seen to be celebrating. Why, then, does Aggad assume that he can essentialize all Palestinians as murderers and apply to all of them Begin's angry description of the terrorist as "two legged animals"?

André Glucksmann, the French philosopher, defines terrorism as “a deliberate attack by armed men on unarmed civilians. Terrorism is aggression against civilians as civilians, inevitably taken by surprise and defenseless. Whether the hostage-takers and killers of innocents are in uniform or not, or what kind of weapons they use—whether bombs or blades—does not change anything; neither does the fact that they may appeal to sublime ideals. The only thing that counts is the intention to wipe out random victims. The systematic resort to the car bomb, to suicide attacks, randomly killing as many passersby as possible, defines a specific style of engagement."

It would behove Excalibur’s editor in chief to educate him or her self a little in these matters before allowing the pages of the publication to be used as an open apology for murderers by providing a warrant for another genocide of Jewish people.

***

Compare the above piece of slanderous editorializing, complicit in preparing the warrant for a genocide, with the moral clarity of Beryl Wajsman, editor in chief of the Subburban, who asks:

Where is the outrage?

The nation under attack never targeted civilians and non-combatants. Never destroyed religious sites. Never sought to obliterate all semblance of their aggressors’ culture and history. The enemies of that nation were intent on just that and had for two generations practiced the crudest forms of nullification and interposition including turning tombstones into toilet seats.

The nation under attack that August day in Montreal was Israel. The gathered thousands at the rally lionized and stood under flags of the murderous Hezbollah, deemed an outlaw terrorist organization by the government of Canada. Israel, the frontline state in the family of free nations, was that day accused of “barbarism” and atrocities that it never committed.

We wrote then, and believe today, that what motivated those leaders who spoke to that rally was political profiteering at its most cynical. The calculus was simple. Appeal to the lowest common denominator of hate and radicalism. Labour leaders sought more card carrying members. Politicians sought votes. Left-wing academics sought validation of their most reprehensible slanders. What strikes us today is what happened to the outrage?

Tibet is once again under the repressive heel of China. Death and destruction abound in the streets of Lhasa and two other major cities. Why are the voices of Quebec civil society now stilled?

_______

Another example of moral clarity:

Tactics like suicide bombings and rocket attacks on
civilian targets are wrong because they are counterproductive. For every Israeli
citizen that is killed they will kill many more Palestinians. This does not do
any damage to the Israeli military machine but it is of extraordinary help to
the Israeli ruling class and state. By pushing the masses towards the Zionist
state, these tactics strengthen the very thing they intended to destroy.

In plain language this means that the only two valid reasons for not slaughtering Jewish are the fact that it does no good and tends to lead to Palestinians getting killed. No other reasons are mentioned. So, it would be fine to slaughter Israeli civilians if it did any good and had no consequences for Palestinians. And they say the Israelis are paranoid…