Israel Apartheid Week

William Jacobson reports, "'Israel Apartheid Week' Sickness Returns."

I visited UCLA last year on February 23. See: "Israeli Apartheid Week, Students for Justice in Palestine, UCLA, February 23, 2011." These people are basically terrorists. And Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA has an event planned for next week, a "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Panel." Check that link. The panel,, alternatively titled "Confronting Apartheid," features members of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, including Professor Robin D. G. Kelley, who was recently interviewed at Mondoweiss: "‘A level of racist violence I have never seen’: UCLA professor Robin D. G. Kelley on Palestine and the BDS movement." Last week the university hosted a talk by anti-Israel propagandist Ilan Pappé, "The False Paradigm of Parity and Partition: Revisiting 1967." Professor Steven Plaut had this the other day on Pappé at FrontPage Magazine:

Pappe is a notorious fabricator, someone who claims proudly that facts and truth are of no importance. “Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers,” the French newspaper Le Soir, has cited Pappe as saying.

Pappe is an expatriate Israeli who devoted one of his “books” to his sons with the wish that they may grow up in a world without Israel. His own University of Exeter recently chastised him for his infamous habit of playing fast and loose with facts. Pappe is best known as a fulltime anti-Israel propagandist who has done more than any other anti-Israel Israeli to promote the moral equivalence of “Nakba denial” with Holocaust denial. (For those who are unaware, “Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe,” is the term Arabs use to refer to Israel’s birth.) He is a “new historian” in the sense of pseudo-historian. His mission in life is to invent an imaginary Palestinian historic “narrative.” Nearly all those beating the “Nakba” drum today cite Pappe and his books about the supposed “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs by Israel in its war of independence.

Pappe was a lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, but moved to resume a pseudo-academic propagandist position at the University of Exeter in the UK. Even other anti-Zionists have repudiated Pappe as a liar and fabricator. He openly calls for Israel to be exterminated and endorses Hamas terrorism. He considers Noam Chomsky insufficiently anti-Israel.

Pappe, who ran for the parliament in Israel on the slate of the Stalinist communist party and played a central role in fomenting boycotts of Israel in the UK and elsewhere, was also the central figure in the now infamous “Tantura Affair.” In this incident, Pappe coached a graduate student of his into inventing a non-existent “massacre” of Arabs by the Hagana Jewish militia (Alexandroni Brigade) in Tantura, south of Haifa, a “massacre” that Pappe claims took place in 1948. Not a shred of any evidence for any such “massacre” exists. Arab and other journalists who were present at the time of the battle that took place in Tantura reported no massacre. Arabs living in the town at the time confirmed that a battle did occur, but that after the battle the Jewish militiamen aided and assisted the townspeople, not massacring anyone. The graduate student in question was sued for libel by the veterans of the Hagana militia. He later admitted in court with his lawyer present that the entire massacre was an invention.

No matter – Pappe roams the world and continues to spread the lie about the imaginary Tantura “massacre,” a lie that has found its way into nearly every anti-Semitic web site and Neo-Nazi magazine on Earth, and even a handful of otherwise respectable mainstream journalists foolishly rely upon him. Pappe has lied about practically everything else, including about being “persecuted” by his own university in Israel. In fact, Pappe was never fired for his fraud and fabrication by the University of Haifa, although he should have been. (Some wags even suggested the university should be boycotted for not firing Pappe.) That did not stop Pappe from waving his stigmata as a “victim of Zionism” before the European anti-Semites promoting “divestment” from Israel. His recruitment by the University of Exeter proves how indifferent that school is to scholarly standards. His coming appearance as the star of the Harvard academic pogrom shows that things are not much better there.

Well, that's a pretty good flavor of what all this "Palestine Awareness" is about.

PREVIOUSLY: "Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to Host Conference On the Extermination of Israel."