It has been almost 30 years since I immigrated in the US as a refugee from
the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is no more, but I am experiencing a déjà vu of
my Soviet past. One of the standard responses of the Soviet authorities to any request
of the citizens, including that for allowing emigration, was that it was "inadvisable."
That meant simply "no" in the Soviet bureaucratese—with no further discussion
possible. Attempts to appeal were hopeless. It was particularly so when the decisions
had anything to do with Israel or Jews. A standard way to prevent a Jew from enrollment
in a college, in order to maintain its Jewish quota, was to grade poorly the composition
entry exam, with the comment that the topic was not sufficiently explicated. One
could not appeal such a decision—there was no way to prove the opposite. You can
imagine my feelings when I received, after my repeated inquiries and long wait,
the same kind of response from the leadership of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
at Carnegie Mellon University.
To wit, that response was about the non-renewal of the 5-lecture
volunteer course that Stuart Pavilack, the executive director of the Zionist Organization
of America-Pittsburgh, and I had presented, entitled "Israel's War and Peace:
Past, Present, Future." As we described it in the Osher catalog, the objective
was to discuss the causes and consequences of hostilities that have accompanied
Israel’s existence. Opposing hateful ideology is always important, especially these
days, when threats to the Jewish state and individual Jews are at a peak not seen
since before WW2. I stated this goal in the interview about the course for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle (1/4/2019, p. 2). Osher Institutes offer their fee-paying members, largely retirees (aged reportedly over 70 on average in Osher at CMU), numerous courses (140 at CMU) given pro bono "
Plenty of the course material had been collected, and I had presented
parts of it in Men’s Club of the Tree of Life congregation in years past (by invitation—I was not a member). Nevertheless,
it took quite a long time to write it up and create slides for 7.5 hours of talking,
updating them until the last moment. The talks were interspersed with lively discussions,
largely initiated by the listeners with a certain, let’s call it “anti-Zionist,”
ideological bent. That bent was also obvious in the negative opinions about the
course.
It is those opinions, from a small minority among the listeners,
that were used as the purported reason to dismiss the course from
the curriculum. All the detailed arguments in my attempts of email communication
with the chair of the curriculum committee and the president of the Osher board
have been quite rudely dismissed as well, without as much as a word about their substance,
and eventually left with no reply. While stating that the decision to not renew
the course was based on attendees’ evaluations, no criteria have been given in response
to my requests. Any possibility of appeal has been denied in the manner one does
not expect from an academic institution, albeit neither the curriculum
committee chair nor the Osher board president is an academic.
Meanwhile, I was not surprised to find in the Summer 2019 CMU
Osher curriculum
a rerun of another course, by one Tina Whitehead. Its description states that it
is presented "from the perspective of the Palestinian people." That could
suffice to characterize the course’s content: according to the latest poll,
that perspective is 93% antisemitic. I do know, however, that hers is also the perspective
of the organization she represents, Sabeel. That is a “liberation theology” group, with the center in Jerusalem. It is antisemitic
as well, under the currently common guise of being peacefully anti-Israel/anti-Zionist.
A telling quote,
from an Easter message of Sabeel's founder and leader, Rev. Ateek:
Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians
around him. It only takes people of insight to see the hundreds of thousands of
crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being
crucified. Palestine has become one huge Golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion
system is operating daily.
This is a resurrection indeed—of the familiar image of the satanic
deicidal Jew now murdering children, the foundation of Jewish persecution now
cloaked in plausible deniability: well, it’s about Israel not Jews. Ateek’s
book, “A Palestinian Theology of Liberation: The Bible, Justice, and the
Palestine,” contains traditional antisemitic calumnies, such as Jews’ not
considering non-Jews human. In his view, “the creation of the state of Israel
has been a settler colonial enterprise by Zionism that sought to dispossess the
Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—of their land and replace them with Jews.” The
Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh cut its partnering with Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary after the seminary hosted Ateek.
Sabeel sees Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, which was
renamed "Palestine" to erase its Jewish connection and meaning, as evil
and affront to Christian theology. Sabeel’s goal is for the millions of descendants
of the Arabs who fled from Israel in 1948-9, as well the Arab population of the
territories that were illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt until the Six-Day War,
to flood Israel and eradicate it as the Jewish state. It does not matter to Sabeel,
a Christian group, that Israel is the only Middle East country where Christians
flourish instead of disappearing. While paying obligatory lip service to non-violence,
Sabeel's doublethink website
quotes the call for violence by a terrorist poet and threatens
violence to the "Israeli people" (obviously, Jews, although 20% of Israelis
are Arab) who dare visit Jerusalem. Demanding
self-determination for Arabs, who have been self-determined in 21 states, all intolerant
Muslim monarchies and dictatorships, it denies the right to self-determination for
the Jewish people in a single democratic state with equal rights for all.
Sabeel approves
Hamas terror as “the message of the rockets [that] addresses the core issues and
the root causes of the problem.” Indeed it does, as those issues and causes are
one: implacable Jew-hate. Unsurprisingly, Sabeel calls for support
for an American antisemite, a Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, as it did for the
communist antisemite Angela Davis and the academic antisemite Marc Lamont Hill.
It also supports the "Great
March of Return," Hamas’s ploy
to use human shields to penetrate from Gaza into Israel and proceed
with mass murder of Israelis in their homes.
The course we presented was the only one in CMU Osher's annual
curriculum that, based on the rich factual material, could counter the antisemitic/anti-Israel
propaganda by the Sabeel emissary and inform the audience of the complex history,
current status, and potential outcomes in one of the most important points of contention
in the world. The brief "explanation" of its cancellation, from the curriculum
committee chair Circe Curley, contained falsehoods, such as that my "extensive
discussion of anti-Semitism in one of [my] classes differed from the original course
outline and the published course description." It certainly did not. Moreover,
the very idea that a discussion of antisemitism in a course about Israel could
be somehow outside of its scope is preposterous and illustrates the mindset of the
committee. Most importantly, the committee ignored the clear ideological bias of the negative evaluation statements, despite my repeated pointing that out and the committee
chair’s recognition that they "normally do not experience that [negativism]
in course evaluations."
Given CMU Osher’s continued support for anti-Israel antisemitic
lecturing, the cancellation of my course—after its first presentation and based
on no objective or, indeed, known criteria—should have been expected. It also cannot
be viewed as other than support for the views that historically have led to pogroms
and terror around the world. It is those views, propagated by the likes of Sabeel
ideologues, that have led to the resurgence of lethal antisemitism lately. In effect, CMU Osher has become an antisemitic propaganda
platform, a tool of hate.
In this light, it is hardly a mere coincidence that the CMU Osher
board president, James Reitz, is an active member of the First Unitarian Church
of Pittsburgh, which is partnered with Sabeel and supports the antisemitic Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The ideological predecessors of Sabeel,
including the Soviet KGB that contributed so much to "the perspective of the Palestinian people," would be happy to know that their views are now mainstreamed unopposed
from American university podiums.
________
The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle's take on the story is published at https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/cmu-osher-course-on-israel-canceled-palestinian-perspective-course-renewed/ (in the print edition: May 17, 2019, vol. 62, No. 20, p. 4 )
