Posted on 10/16/2005 4:29:26 PM PDT by Alouette
Israeli academia is usually as leftist, if not more so, as American academia. So, the Israeli Academic Left was ecstatic when it was announced that an Israeli economist (who grew up in the USA), Professor Robert J. Aumann from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had been co-awarded the Nobel Prize this year in economics. (A previous Nobel winner in economics, Daniel Kahneman, grew up in Israel, but did his work mainly after moving to the US.) While Israelis have gotten Nobel Prizes before, most were given to politicians as rewards for Israeli political capitulations and appeasement of Arabs, and one was in literature.
The only previous academic Nobel Prize for people at Israeli universities was for two chemists from the Technion, who exploited the occasion of their award to promote politically correct Israeli liberalism, about how Israel was supposedly spending too much on defense and not enough on doing nice things. So, you can imagine the glee in the hearts of the local Moonbatocracy when they figured another Israeli leftist from academia would get his Kodak moment to promote political correctness.
But, alas, the academic Left was in for a surprise. Prof. Aumann is not only politically incorrect, he is strongly opposed to the entire Oslo "peace process", he believes Ariel Sharon's Gaza "disengagement" was the height of folly, and - Marx protect us! - he actually believes in God. He is personally religious, wears a yarmulka (skullcap), and has done serious academic work on applying mathematical and economic principles to some ethical debates from the Talmud. The far-leftist anti-Zionist Israeli daily Haaretz labeled him a "far-rightist". (He is in good company by the way; the have also labeled me one, minus the Nobel Prize, of course.)
Aumann is a veteran member of Professors for a Strong Israel, an anti-Oslo hawkish organization, and he opposed the Sharon disengagement. At the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University, they said he arrived daily with an orange ribbon, symbol of those opposing the Sharon Gaza capitulation, and kept doing so after the Disengagement Plan was implemented. He insists on calling the disengagement "the expulsion".
"Irrespective of game theory, I think it was immoral, inhuman, and stupid," he said. "We gained nothing, and there's a good chance we lost a great deal. What sort of message did they want to send with this expulsion? They wanted to send the message that we are sticking with the Green Line no matter what." (The Islamofascists are already in anguish.)
Academia in Israel is in shock. "Where did we go wrong?" they whined. "How could such a reactionary creature grow up in our midst? How could we have let this happen? Perhaps we need to fast on Yom Kippur to atone for our transgressions in allowing this to happen!"
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
Very interesting. Congratulations to Professor Aumann.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.