Post-Summers Harvard

Scott Johnson at Power Line has an important post on post-Summers Harvard, focusing on President Drew Gilpin Faust’s recent comments and an article in Friday’s Crimson by Professor J. Lorand Matory (the faculty member who introduced the 2005 no-confidence motion against Summers).

Matory’s article is entitled "Israel and Censorship at Harvard," in which he asserts there is “a decades-old U.S. practice of threatening, defaming, or censoring scholars who dare to criticize Israel.”  He believes that Zionism -- the restoration of the modern state of Israel in the land on which it previously stood, formally endorsed by the United Nations in 1947 -- is a “convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-Europeans” and was “outmoded” by the “mid-20th century.”

Matory is entitled to his views, of course, but the penultimate paragraph in his article is worth scrutinizing.  Here is the paragraph:

Thus, my concerns about Zionism are motivated by neither pro-Arab nor anti-Jewish bias, but by the fear that those who dismiss all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism—or, equally often, as Jewish self-hatred—risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Israel's defenders convince the world that all legitimately Jewish people are Zionists and that Jewish people are uniform in their opinions about Israel and its policies, then the convinced will conclude that condemning Israel or its policies requires them to hate Jewish people.

Matory has created a straw man, since no one dismisses “all” anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, but the remarkable part of his statement is the rest of the paragraph:  he asserts his "concerns about Zionism" are motivated by his "fear" that if those who oppose his views convince everyone that all "legitimately Jewish" people are Zionists, he and people who share his views will unfortunately have to "hate Jewish people." 

Does that paragraph make grammatical, logical or moral sense?  Is it really possible that a tenured Harvard professor wrote it?

Comments

[PeaceThroughJustice]

"Does that paragraph make grammatical, logical or moral sense?"

I had no trouble understanding it. After all, it's a point that's been made by many others. Which aspect is giving you trouble?

(BTW, I think you're being overly optimistic when you say "no one dismisses “all” anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism." It's still the standard claim of most defenders of Zionism. What anti-Zionism do you personally accept? After looking around your site a little, I'd say you're pretty quick with the old "antisemitism" charge.)

[John]

Yes, it is a point that has been made by many, but it is still a wrongheaded point. No one argues that "all legitimately Jewish people are Zionists and that Jewish people are uniform in their opinions about Israel and its policies..." No one holds this position, it is a simplistic parody for anti-Zionists to trot out when they wish to avoid the hard points set out by Israel's defenders.

[Johan Amedeus Metesky]

“convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-Europeans”

So nice of Matory to tell us that Jews are "Europeans", particularly in light of the fact that Europeans have rarely considered Jews born in their countries to have equal status to themselves. The fact that a plurality of Israelis are Sephardim, Jews from Arab or Muslim lands, is to be ignored as are the genetic studies that show Jews (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi) as originating in the middle east.

By declaring Jewish Zionists as "European", rather than descended from natives to the middle east, Matory and his fellow travelers try to delegitimize Zionism and Jewish connections to the Land of Israel.

Matory is just a hop skip and jump from claiming Jews are frauds, descended from Khazars, and not 'real Jews'.

[Craig]

So he's worried about homogeneity of Jewish thought, but he has no problem whatsoever pushing the idea of black homogeneity? What will happen to American blacks if Matory succeeds in convincing everyone that they're all pro-affirmative action Democrats, and that people like Clarence Thomas are traitors to their race?