Comments on: When Anti-Semites Implode

By: Jonathan Rosenblum

Jonathan Rosenblum — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:53:39 +0000

Quite apart from the merits of this particular thread, I’m grateful to Seth Gordon for his priceless description of his former friends (we all have a few). That his current conversation partners are to found reading Cross-Currents is a cause for rejoicing.

By: Zev

Zev — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:29:24 +0000

What is this triumphalist narishkeit? There are, unfortunately, many anti-Semites who have not “imploded,” and even if they will one day, they can - God forbid - cause us great difficulty in the meantime. The people you mentioned “imploded” b/c they’re playing with a few cards short of a full deck. The arguement that “we’re safe because our enemies are unhinged” is not exactly soothing.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 30 May 2006 18:34:30 +0000

NK takes checks from Arafat and sits with the genocidally-inclined in Iran. Their time will come… when?

By: Seth Gordon

Seth Gordon — Tue, 30 May 2006 15:30:54 +0000

I have been involved with groups that were, shall we say, far to the political left….

(How far, you ask? I was once at the founding plenary of some student activist organization where the Women’s–er, Wimmin’s Caucus demanded that all of this organization’s publications use the alternative spellings “womyn” and “wimmin”, and further demanded that the organization write this policy into their charter without voting on it. I suggested that we could resolve this conflict between proper parliamentary procedure and due deference to an oppressed class if all the men would simply walk out of the room while the proposal was being voted on. Unsurprisingly, this organization went nowhere. Those were the days, my friends…)

…sorry for the digression. Anyway, I never heard of Ward Churchill until David Horowitz et al. made such a big deal about him. Before then, I suspect that Churchill was not just “mostly unknown outside of academic circles”, but mostly unknown, period.

(This is not to deny the prevalence of antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism in many left-wing circles. I’m just irritated by how much publicity Churchill can get, especially from his political enemies, by acting like a loon.)

By: Ori Pomerantz

Ori Pomerantz — Tue, 30 May 2006 00:41:49 +0000

I hate to be on the same side as Ward Churchill, but in this case he is the unworthy beneficiary of a worthy policy. Universities suffer from an unfortunate tendency for intellectual inbreeding, where only the politically correct opinions are allowed. If you’ve been following academia lately, you know how bad it can get. According to most people in the humanities there are no absolute good and evil, colonialism and western civilization in general are absolutely evil, and while the government is evil too, the solution to any social problem lies in more government programs.

The tenure system exists to protect minority, unpopular opinions inside the university, at least when held by people who have already proven themselves. This allows some people with unpopular opinions, like a belief that western civilization might be better than the tyrannies that rule most of the earth, or that people are generally responsible for their own condition in life, to voice those opinions and try to influence the students.

If you could take away tenure for stupid opinions, as judged by a university panel, the overwhelming majority of “liberal” professors (I use the term in the US meaning, not the European meaning which is almost the reverse) might get rid of many of the professors with differing opinions. That would be bad. If it means that worms like Churchill are allowed to stay too, well, anybody he convinces couldn’t have been worth much to begin with.

Having said that, fabrication of facts would learn to a graduate student’s removal from the university. If that charge can be proved against Ward Churchill, there is no justification to anything other than firing him.

By: Yaakov Rosenblatt, Dallas

Yaakov Rosenblatt, Dallas — Mon, 29 May 2006 20:09:47 +0000

In a just society like the United States, the purveyors of evil get their just reward, in time. But within societies - and congressional districts - of lesser morality, they can rise to the top and remain there.

The clip of Noam Chomsky’s recent visit to Lebanon and his praise of Hisballah (www.memri.org) is a case in point. When will his time come?