MAX POWER points out that not only is Robert Fisk an idiot, but he’s so clueless that he apparently doesn’t realize that the “hate mail” he quotes comes from Daniel Pearl’s father.

UPDATE: H.D. Miller blogged this point too.

READER PIETER K WRITES:

I’ve been following the mounting hate on the campus of SFSU with alarm. I graduated from SFSU in 1991.

What I read today via you is horrifying.

I’m saddened and repulsed that this campus which provided me and many others with a sterling academic experience should be a home to such vile extremism.

I’d like to concur with your reader Allen Thorpe and here’s the place to start perhaps:

This page explicitly defines “Hate Incidents” and makes clear and precise distinctions between Hate Incidents and 1st Amendment protected free speech. By anyone’s definition I think, what occurred on campus as described by Laurie Zoloth falls under the former. This page on SFSU’s site (and other pages on the SFSU Human Relations department ) clearly says that hate incidents will not be permitted:

1.Speech or actions directed at inciting or producing imminent violence will not be permitted.

2.Speech likely to incite or produce violence will not be permitted.

3.Fighting words-those by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace will not be permitted.

4.Communication, which creates, an immediate danger of uncontrollable violence is not permitted.

5.Threats of violence, assaults, phone harassment and any criminal conduct will not be permitted.

6.Conduct that targets a particular individual and is so disruptive that the behavior interferes with a student’s ability to exercise his/her right to fully participate in the life of the university.

Also, this: “Behaviors which are intolerant, insensitive or discriminatory are deemed unacceptable. As such, they shall be addressed openly, promptly and constructively by the University, its administrators, faculty, staff and students” from the Principles of Conduct for a Multi-Cultural University, contained here.

[At] the very least, this sounds like grounds for immediate expulsion of any student who assailed the Hillel group from the entire Cal State system, were it possible to accurately document who did what when. Arrests might do the trick (big wake-up call to the Department of Public Safety). Would full-blown criminal or at least civil prosecution be an option?

I know next to nothing about law. You of course would have valuable insight into this. Any chance of it working, given that it could be established that it’s an actual crime?

Also, as a semi-related correlative, there’s this page on their site which is either part of the problem or part of the solution…or is it both? Either way, a terribly muddled affair which helps illustrate how academic environments can be fertile ground for stupidity and hate under the guise of sensitivity.

Check the “First-Aid Skills and Resources” list and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Finally, at the bottom of the page are contact phone numbers and email for relevant SFSU authorities that should probably be hearing about this.

Yes, they need to hear from everyone, and especially from alumni.

And I do think that if SFSU fails to enforce its own rules, and if students’ civil rights are denied as a result, it’s vulnerable to a lawsuit.

UPDATE: Pieter K must be a bigshot alumnus, as well as a cool record producer and DJ. SFSU’s President Robert Corrigan has posted a letter promising prosecution of the offenders:

The demonstrators’ behavior is not passing unchallenged. The University’s code of student discipline and event policy allow for individual and group sanctions ranging from warning to suspension to expulsion for certain violations, and some of what took place on Tuesday may well fall within that area. Our videotaped record of the event is being reviewed now by SFSU Public Safety to note violations and identify violators so that the University’s disciplinary procedures can begin. In one instance, that of a protestor who seized and stamped on an Israeli flag, the case has already gone forward. I fully expect to see other cases presented. . . .

It is a very few individuals who are fomenting this discord. Yet, as we see, their impact can be profound — if we allow it to be. Despite the claims of some, this is not an anti-Semitic campus. But as history shows us, silence and passivity can at times of crisis be very little different from complicity.

He’s certainly striking the right notes. But a little pressure should help to keep him on the right track.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meryl Yourish has some thoughts, and some suggestions on how to keep the pressure up.

A READER SENDS THIS LINK to a story about Jimmy Carter questioning allegations about Cuban biological warfare research, and urging Cuban critics to think for themselves. Hmm. How about urging Cubans to think for themselves? But that’s not allowed, is it?

The reader writes: “This story should be enough to remind anyone not old enough to remember why Carter got run out on a rail.”

UPDATE: For something more intelligent (well, duh) try this piece by Matt Welch — who’d make a much better and cooler ex-President than Carter any day.

MICHAEL PINE comments on TAPPED’s post on Israeli “colonialism:”

There is a deeper problem to the throwaway line, one that gets at the heart of how the Left’s obsession with race gets in the way of a truly progressive foreign policy. For there to be peace for the Palestinians and all Arabs in the Middle East, the United States and the West has to seriously engage in nation-building. Critics will call such efforts neo-colonial, and invoke the tired refrain of “white man’s burden,” of Americans “imposing” their values onto “brown” people. But if America’s own experience tells us anything, the rule of law, freedom of expression and democracy is desired and enjoyed equally by people of all races. It’s time to drop the shackles of post-colonial guilt, built off our advances in racial and gender equality and take up the Free Human’s Burden – to export liberty to all.

Yeah, this whole “racism” thing is stupid. Since when did palestinians become a “race?”

ROBERT FISK IS WALLOWING IN SELF PITY. Lots of Americans died on 9/11, and Israelis are killed by terror bombers on a regular basis, but he’s getting nasty email. And people are saying mean things about him on websites!

The horror. The horror.

JONATHAN CHAIT says that Israel’s war on terrorism is working and that the reason the New York Times hasn’t noticed is that “they’re in the grip of a theory that helps them to ignore real-world evidence. In this case, the theory is that Palestinians resort to terrorism out of despair.”

MICKEY KAUS says that The American Prospect is like Enron . (But he adds a note to Bill Moyers: “Keep the blog!”) He also adds that it’s like Vietnam, and Ishtar, too! C’mon, Mickey — do you like it, or not?

BAY AREA HATEWATCH UPDATE: Here’s a report of a riot by palestinian supporters attacking pro-Israel demonstrators at San Francisco State University.

Way back in September I looked forward to the day when the benighted Bay Area would be as cosmopolitan and tolerant as Knoxville. It hasn’t happened yet.

UPDATE: No sooner did I post it than I found this post from Meryl Yourish with many links and additional information.

Yourish is right to say that no university would support this kind of behavior from white-supremacist students. Why should pro-palestinian students get off easy?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Alex Bensky writes:

I am, alas, unastonished by several results of this little attempt at a pogrom: the administration has said nothing; the faculty as a group has said nothing; the papers seem to have said little, if anything; the Jewish students will never hold another public activity and are thoroughly intimidated; and the savages who run through the streets shrieking, “Kill the Jews” have won this round.

And I have to confess I’m getting a little scared. But I’m just some paranoid Jew, so who cares?

Don’t get scared. Get mad. If I were on the SFSU faculty, they’d be hearing from me. Come to think of it, they are anyway. But the proper response is to turn out with a bigger march. And video cameras. And hey, if the Administration won’t provide security, provide your own. The iron rule of pogroms is that as long as the victims don’t defend themselves it’s not a threat to public order. Once they stick up for themselves, it suddenly gets noticed and the pogrom is stopped.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Rod Dreher writes in The Corner: “One thing that strikes me about the account, which was provided by the director of the school’s Jewish Studies Program, is that its author (who helped lead the peaceful pro-Israel demonstration) appears to be a garden-variety peace-and-justice multiculturalist who is genuinely shocked and saddened by the hateful display. When will the Pim Fortuyns of the American academic left stand up to this fascism?”

AND ONE MORE: Reader Allen Thorpe writes: “Maybe the school administrators need to be sued for failure to provide safety for ‘academic freedom and dialogue.’ Schools seem to be hypersensitive to lawsuits, and then there’s the bad publicity. Wouldn’t the ACLU take this case?”

MATT WELCH has some suggestions for how Jimmy Carter should “initiate a dialogue” with Castro on human rights.

AFGHANISTAN UPDATE: Yeah, there’s still a war going on there, sort of. This successful raid seems to be fairly typical of the mopping-up operations.

TAPPED IS OFF ITS ROCKER today. First, it’s demanding Stephen Ambrose’s removal from his Emeritus slot at the University of New Orleans. That seems a bit harsh, since Ambrose, who is dying of lung cancer, isn’t supposed to last more than a few months anyway. And Tapped also accuses Ambrose of self-plagiarism. That’s an impossible crime. Plagiarism has its roots in the Latin word for “kidnapping,” and self-plagiarism, like self-kidnapping, is an impossibility.

Then, in the very next post, Tapped responds to the Likud vote against a Palestinian state by saying: “No one in this country can ignore any longer that the Israeli hard right stands for colonialism, plain and simple.” Um, Israel’s position on the West Bank isn’t that of a colonialist (unless you join with the neo-confederates in regarding the “U.S. occupation” of the former confederacy as neo-colonialism). The West Bank, after all, could be returned to Jordan (of which it was a part prior to Jordan’s ill-fated decision to take up arms against Israel in the 1967 war), which would be colonialism only if one believes that the West Bank has an inherent right to independence of any state — a view which the neoconfederates might very well share, but which seems a bit odd for The American Prospect. After all, another post disagrees with Berkeley’s Snehal Shingavi, who states that “the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination is not up for debate.”

To Tapped, apparently, it’s up for debate — but you’ll be called a “colonialist” if you take the wrong side. This isn’t consistent with Tapped’s usually reasonable approach. What gives?

UPDATE: A reader notes that Egypt is apparently pro-colonialism, since it doesn’t want Gaza back. But, really, who would? I don’t think that the Israelis want either the West Bank or Gaza. I think they just don’t want people trying to kill them, unmolested, along their borders. Is this so hard to understand without trotting out hoary shibboleths like “colonialism”?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Ken Summers writes:

Uh, just thought I’d ask, but if TAPPED wants Ambrose kicked out for self-plagiarism, what is their position on Michael Bellesiles? Oh, yeah – they don’t have one. But the post immediately below the two you cited gives some indication of where they stand (as if it weren’t already apparent). I checked, and still the only two articles mentioning Bellesiles are the original Bogus review (cheap pun intended) and one by Chris Mooney, which I
believe you have also mentioned before. Not sure if their search function includes the weblog.

Yeah, I don’t remember their calling for Bellesiles’ ouster either. Am I wrong?

THE DALLAS DEEP-LINKING CONTROVERSY is the subject of a point/counterpoint discussion over at TechCentralStation today.

STEVEN DEN BESTE reports an a successful war against terrorism from a few centuries ago. It may come to this again.

FLIT takes on Canadian correspondent Eric Margolis and finds him wanting.

BILL QUICK has some thoughts on the future of the blogosphere. He’s not that persuaded by Richard Bennett’s technological approach.

DERSHOWITZ-CHOMSKY CAGE MATCH!

I first debated Chomsky in 1973, several weeks after the Yom Kippur War. Chomsky’s proposal at that time was consistent with the PLO party line. He wanted to abolish the state of Israel, and to substitute a “secular, binational state,” based on the model of binational “brotherhood” that then prevailed in Lebanon. Chomsky repeatedly pointed to Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims “lived side by side,” sharing power in peace and harmony. This was just a few years before Lebanon imploded in fratricidal disaster.

I don’t like Dersh all that much, but he sure is right here.

In a subsequent debate at the Harvard Medical School, Chomsky initially denied having advocated a Lebanon-style binational state for Israel, only to have to back down upon being confronted with the evidence. He also tried to dispute the fact that he had authorized an essay he had written in defense of Robert Faurisson to be used as the forward to Faurisson’s book about Holocaust denial, but again had to back down. Chomsky took the position that he had no interest in “revisionist” literature before Faurisson had written the book. When confronted by Robert Nozick, a distinguished philosophy professor who recalled discussing revisionist literature with him well before the Faurisson book, Chomsky first berated Nozick for disclosing a private conversation and then he shoved him contemptuously in front of numerous witnesses.

This then is the man who is leading the campaign for divesture against Israel. He is joined in this ignoble effort by some who would take the money now invested in the Mideast’s only democracy and have it sent to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba, the Palestinian Authority, and others who support and finance terrorism. He is also joined by a motley assortment of knee-jerk anti-Zionists, rabid Anti-Americans, radical leftists (the Spartacist League), people with little knowledge of the history of the Arab-Israeli dispute, and even some of Chomsky’s former students who now teach in Israel.

There is no intellectually or morally defensible case for singling out Israel for divestiture, and I challenge Chomsky to debate me on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself — and the world — against terrorism that targets civilians. Universities invest in a wide array of companies that have operations in countries that systematically violate the human rights of millions of people. Nor are these countries defending themselves against those who would destroy them and target their civilians. Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple, and those who signed the petition should be ashamed of themselves and shamed by others.

Chomsky is an America-hating anti-Semite whose sole organizing intellectual principle seems to be siding with genocidal cretins.

UPDATE: Reader Watt Boone writes:

Regarding “Chomsky is an America-hating anti-Semite whose sole organizing intellectual principle seems to be siding with genocidal cretins.”

This all may be true. Yet he can’t be anti-semitic unless he hates himself, which certainly is a possibility. He’s Jewish (at least by birth) and is the son of a Hebrew scholar in NYC.

Yes, I know. But if I were Chomsky, I’d hate myself.

JEFF JARVIS has unveiled his big idea about weblogs. Check it out.

THE INSTAPUNDIT / ISRAELI ART STUDENT “SPY” CONNECTION: For months people have been asking me why I haven’t written about the persistent claim that Israeli art students were travelling around the United States selling paintings — and that those art students were really spies for Israeli intelligence. There’s a pretty good wrap up of the story here. I haven’t written about it because I haven’t seen anything very compelling — and because (here’s the scoop, hold on to your hats in the unlikely event that you’re wearing a hat) I’ve actually met them and own one of their paintings!

Yes, we were visited by some Israeli art students — at least that’s what they said they were — who went door to door in our neighborhood. It was something over a year ago. We were almost the only ones in the neighborhood who would even let them in, but they were obviously genuine Israelis based on their accents and general bearing, and they sure seemed like art students to me. We chatted about techno music (they liked it; I gave ’em a Mobius Dick CD), and they sold us a painting at an inflated price, but my wife liked it and them and it went well with the decor in our den.

So what does this prove? Well, nothing, really. Were they art students or spies? Well, they looked and acted like art students, a breed with which I have some familiarity. But of course, really good spies would have, too! There were no short-wave radios or Uzis protruding from their backpacks, they didn’t mutter suspicious comments in code, and they didn’t ask about sensitive military matters. (The girl left her gloves behind, which a spy probably wouldn’t do — unless they contained sophisticated undetectable listening devices. I didn’t detect any, but then I wouldn’t detect an undetectable listening device, now would I? (“More proof that they’re spies!” shouts Justin Raimondo).)

But of course, there’s nobody in my neighborhood with a sensitive government job (unless it’s so sensitive I don’t know about it!). And there aren’t any secret military bases around here that are worth spying on (unless they’re so secret I don’t know about them!). So the whole thing seems bogus to me. My sense was that it was, well, not a con exactly, but a way to extract too much money for ordinary art work from people disposed to be sympathetic to Israeli art students, a group that they seemed to feel was kind of small here in Knoxville. The girl was very cute, which might be proof that she’s a spy sent to entrap vulnerable American men with her feminine wiles, except that most college-age Israeli women I’ve met were equally cute, and I rather doubt that they were all spies. I can attest to the art-student part of the story, but the whole spy aspect has the feel of an urban legend. I could be wrong, but my impression was that these folks were after money, not secrets. And now you don’t really know any more than you did before, which is why I held off posting this story until now.

UPDATE: Reader Kenneth Nunney writes: “You naive man…don’t you see that the Israelis who came to see you were real art students, clearly sent here to act as interference for the real spies who were just pretending to be art students. And I thought you were smart.” But of course! The fact that the ones who came to see me were real art students proves that there were spies operating in the United States disguised as art students! I see it all now. . . .

THE NEW YORK SUN is gaining subscribers — and one reason seems to be the boycott of the New York Times by people who don’t like the anti-Israel tilt of its mideast reporting and editorializing. It seems to me that a certain in-the-works Los Angeles newspaper is likely to benefit from the same phenomenon. Roni Blau, call your office!

THERE’S A FREE EXCERPT from Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power over at OpinionJournal. I read the book a few weeks ago when it came out, and found it both enjoyable and informative. I think that the future is going to look more like the more distant past that Boot describes than the comparatively aberrational Cold War period.

SPEAKING OF KAUS, he emails that he’s afraid that people are going to start taking my tongue-in-cheek remarks about “megabucks” seriously:

I have a laptop, a cable modem, and NEXIS. I pay $100 a month — high, I suspect — to a good server (Modern Solutions) in Reno, Nevada. That’s about it. No employees. No interns. On cold winter days, I sometimes have to walk 10 miles in the snow just to blog. Try doing that in sandals!

So there. Seriously, Slate is treating him fairly, but they haven’t given him unlimited grazing rights in Bill Gates’ money-pastures yet. So don’t hit him up for money.

MICKEY KAUS says Andrew Cuomo is the victim of a “completely bogus identity-politics ambush.” It sounds as if Kaus is right, but it’s hard for me to feel too sorry for Cuomo. The Democrats have built a whole infrastructure based on identity-politics ambushes. Now it’s devouring its own. In fact, that’s mostly who it devours these days.

THE RICHARD BENNETT / HILLARY CARTER FEUD is getting ugly; here’s the latest installment with links back. Hey, it’s only blogging, guys.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen explains the difference between trolling and being a troll.

ANOTHER SAUDI CARVE-UP SCENARIO — you can decide what you think about this one. I think that, one way or another, the Saudi regime is in its end stage.