Confronting Jew-Hating Palestinian Protesters @ Harvard
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Noam Chomsky on the Role of the Educational System
Murray, Nancy. The new intifada : resisting Israel's apartheid / edited by Roane Carey ; foreword by Noam Chomsky, etc.
Established in June 2002, Boston to Palestine (B2P) describes itself as "a group of Boston-based activists who work in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their non-violent struggle to resist and end the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)." B2P seeks to achieve this objective "by sending delegates to work with International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and other peace and justice groups operating in Palestine." These delegates are equipped with still and video cameras "for the purposes of documenting life and events (including direct actions) in Palestine under occupation." B2P then creates "opportunities for them to relate their experiences to the public when they return."
Boston to Palestine has conducted dozens of what it terms "educational and outreach events" in Boston-area community and religious centers, high schools, and colleges, where returning delegates speak publicly about what they experienced and observed in the Middle East. The group has also organized demonstrations and vigils in and around Boston to protest "the ongoing atrocities conducted against Palestinians by the IDF, and to honor and commemorate ISM activists who have been killed or wounded by the IDF." B2P seeks to convey to the world "the horrors that are a feature of [the Palestinians'] daily lives at the hands of the IDF." Condemning the Israeli government's "lethal targeting and murdering of activists and journalists, and the detention and deportation of activists as a matter of policy," Boston to Palestine does not use the word "terrorist" -- either as a noun or an adjective -- to describe any Palestinian individual or deed.
In June 2006, B2P co-sponsored (with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Dorchester People for Peace, Friends of Sabeel, the Gaza Mental Health Foundation, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Women for Justice in Israel/Palestine, Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East, and United for Justice with Peace) a protest against Israel's "Siege of the Palestinian People." The organizers urged participants to bring signs with messages demanding an end to: "the siege and starvation of Palestinians"; "punishing Palestinians for their democratic vote" (in favor of a Hamas-led government) ; "the denial of food and medicine to Palestinians"; and "Israel's 39-year-old military occupation."
Boston to Palestine is a member organization of the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, led by Leslie Cagan.
Syllabus for Course: Nonviolent Activism in Israel & Palestine
Will the Real Noam Chomsky Take One Goosestep Forward
As Benjamin Kerstein says in this article:
To get things out of the way: Yes, I do consider Chomsky an anti-Semite. This inevitably raises the second question: How can Chomsky be considered an anti-Semite when he's a Jew himself? Firstly, being Jewish has, unfortunately, never precluded fealty to anti-Semitism. In fact, many of the most brutal polemical assaults against Jews and Judaism have been accomplished at the hands of their former co-religionists. The first time the Talmud was burned, in the 13th century, it was at the behest of a Jewish apostate to Christianity named Nicholas Donin, who denounced the Talmud as heretical. To choose a more modern example, the Bolshevik government in 1920s Russia organized its persecution of Orthodox Judaism mainly through the services of the Jewish Bund; an anti-religious socialist movement which had, ironically, played no small part in the February Revolution which toppled the Czar. And, of course, there is the classic image of Karl Marx, born a Jew and baptized only at the age of six, who could nonetheless write.
What is the Jew's foundation in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money...Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand...The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God...Only then could Jewry become universally dominant...The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry.
But then another question arises, why not simply term Chomsky a self-hating Jew? The truth is, I dislike the term. It implies a tragic pathos that absolves its object of an elementary moral responsibility. It also implies an inner-directedness which I consider false and misleading. Chomsky's attitudes towards the Jews are directed outwards, at the Jews as an object, and not towards any outwardly "Jewish" qualities within himself.
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