Free Republic

Israel-bashing figures prominently in 'teach-ins' where San Franciscans seek a flavor of the Vietnam era Let's admit it - San Francisco is gorgeous, and deserves its name as the capital of resistance to what the US is trying to do in the Middle East. After all, while other places from coast to coast had rallies and marches before and during Operation Iraqi Freedom, only there were thousands "hauled off by the pigs" for blocking the financial district, and only there was there a rally and march almost every Saturday for weeks and weeks until Saturday, April 19. But were all...

“It’s very sad but I felt physically threatened in the heart of London”, Benny Morris told me in a telephone conversation. Several days ago, on his way to speak at the London School of Economics, the Israeli historian encountered the tragic reality of “Londonistan”, as the journalist Melanie Phillips labelled the British Islamization. On the way to his talk, Morris was almost lynched by a mob of leftists and jihadists. He was walking with his wife towards the LSE, when he was accosted by a group of keffiyah-ed Muslims who, recognising him, started hurling abuse, shouting and screaming in his...

In the opening scene of Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig, F. Scott Fitzgerald is seen to observe a curious little man as he chats with socialites at a sumptuous bash, speaking adoringly of President Coolidge and the Republican Party -- all in an upper class Boston accent. Then, an hour later, the renowned novelist is stunned to see the same man speaking to the kitchen help. Only now he claims to be a Democrat, and his accent has become coarse as if he were one of the crowd. This scene comes to mind when observing the incessant, ideological acrobatics of...

At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two. Here is a clear and typical example—in detail, which is where the devil resides—of Pappe’s handiwork. I take this example from The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. On February 2, 1948, a young Jewish scientist named Aharon Katzir came to see David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine. Two months earlier, the General Assembly of the United Nations had recommended...

(IsraelNN.com) Writing in the May 8th edition of Newsweek, Benny Morris - long known as a Revisionist, even anti-Israel, historian - says Arab-Muslim hatred of Israel continues to preclude peace. Though his article contains many anti-Israel jabs, the thrust is that there is nothing Israel can do to overcome Islamic national-religious hatred of Israel and the Jews in the Land of Israel. [Arab] rejection of any compromise, whether a partition of Palestine or the creation of a binational state, was deep-seated, consensual and consistent. "Myself and several other young Israeli historians were dubbed revisionists and commonly assumed to be doves,"...

Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris and Peace not Apartheid Brandeis University’s Radical Student Alliance has invited anti-Israel activist Norman Finkelstein to speak on campus, a university newspaper reports. The precise topic of the lecture was not described in the article; but when the DePaul University assistant professor last spoke—at Stanford University on Jan. 25, 2007—he added to his typical Israel-bashing diatribe a defense of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine Peace not Apartheid.It seems somewhat appropriate that, in the wake of widespread condemnation of Carter’s numerous misrepresentations, the former president has found a supporter in Finkelstein. Like Carter, Finkelstein has been criticized...

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that's completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn't read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale...

A few days after the publication of the interview with me ("Survival of the fittest," Haaretz Magazine, January 9), an angry Israeli-Arab student came to my office at Ben-Gurion University. He suggested that the Holocaust never happened (he cited what he called "an important and world-renowned Egyptian historian"), and claimed that the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed at the order of the CIA or the Mossad, and that Israeli soldiers and pilots in the territories are deliberately targeting and murdering innocent civilians. I mention this so that we all understand the kind of world we in the...

Benny Morris' transformation highlights chilling truths about the conflict http://www.jewishworldreview.com | If war is the "continuation of politics ... by other means," as German strategist Karl von Clausewitz famously wrote, then it must be said with equal certainty that the study of history in our day has become another form of warfare. No conflict better exemplifies this maxim than that between Arabs and Israelis. For the last 55 years and more, Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have waged war in the pages of their books. Pro-Israel writers look to the past to justify by legal, historic and moral grounds the rebirth...