Search Results for: ABUSE

The Israeli State ‘Justice’ System – A Tale of Two Innocents

Duma: The False Accusation

November 7, 2018 | Moshe Feiglin, Chairman of Zehut

The cynical abuse of Roman Zadarov, serving a life prison sentence for a murder that he apparently did not commit, is nothing compared to what is happening now with Amiram Oliel.

These are the main points of the story:

On the 15th of Av 5775 (July 2015) two homes in the Arab village of Duma were set on fire. A couple and their son were killed. Graffiti saying “Revenge” and “Long live the king Mashiach” were found scrawled on the buildings.

The President and Prime Minister immediately determined that this was an act of Jewish terror, the media was ecstatic and the GSS energetically embarked on a manhunt after “hilltop youth” to apprehend the guilty party. When no evidence was found, the media began to criticize the Defense Minister at the time, Bogi Ya’alon, saying that when it came to Jewish terror, Israel’s security services were dragging their feet. Bogi publicized an announcement, bragging that the security services knew who the murderers were, but had not yet arrested them in order not to reveal hidden sources.

Following that, a complaint was filed with the High Court to obligate him to arrest the criminals. Bogi had to provide an answer, the system was under pressure and began arresting young ‘hilltop youth’. These boys, arrested with no evidence against them, were interrogated under torture and were not allowed to see an attorney. Obviously, this torture had no legal justification – these boys were not ticking time bombs – but when give an excuse to justify torture of hilltop youth, the media and High Court – the ‘guardians’ of democracy- turn into the Dobermans of dictatorship. In this way, human rights in Israel deteriorated to an unprecedented low.

There was, of course, good reason to examine other motives and directions, such as the fact that four homes in Duma were burned in the months preceding this incident and another home was burned in the month following the incident. But for some reason, nobody investigated those acts of arson. The residents of Duma seem to have a hobby of burning their neighbors’ homes and it is possible that they had already learned how to write graffiti in Hebrew (as was the case, for example, in the Hassan Bek mosque and in other places).

But let us return to the story.

The parents of the tortured youth and many people from the Religious Zionist public began to rebel against the bits and pieces of information about the youth being tortured. There were public protests, angry articles in the sector publications – things began to sizzle. And then, with great “courage and responsibility”, the leader of the Religious Zionists, Naftali Bennett declared:

“Do you want the roof to fall in on us? Who do you believe? Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked? Or rightist attorney Itamar Ben Gvir?”

Bennett did not want to stand up to the evil winds blowing from the media and defend his constituents. Instead, he allowed the gang rape to proceed – and even joined in.

But Bennett is not the story.

The story is that nothing came of all the ‘ticking time bombs’ and severe torture. The only person indicted in the Duma incident was Amiram Ben Oliel, who is now in his third year of incarceration under conditions reserved for terrorists.

Under unspeakable torture, the GSS extracted a ridiculous confession from Ben Oliel – so ridiculous that the court refused to accept it. Nevertheless, those who know that it would be impossible to leave the GSS and the prosecution empty-handed, employed a legal trick in which the court accepted the same confession made by Ben Oliel 36 hours after his confession under torture. Just that this confession, which according to the court was made of his free will, was made – according to court records – only after the representative of the GSS entered the interrogation room. It is easy to understand that the GSS man’s threatening presence was what ‘convinced’ Ben Oliel to confess of his own ‘free will’.

But that is not the end of the story. The GSS got stuck with a confession that is illogical and does not fit in with any of the testimony in the Duma file. According to witnesses, there were at least two people at the scene of the crime. There was also a car, about which some of those arrested were interrogated. All of that disappeared from the indictment. According to the indictment, Amiram Ben Oliel is a superman, performing amazing feats all by himself. He sets two homes ablaze at the same time, writes two different graffiti slogans on the two homes and perhaps even dresses up as two different people. In the end, he runs away on foot, without leaving any evidence at all that connects him to the crime.

Just like Zadarov, it is impossible to free Ben Oliel because that would be an admission of the system’s evil. But it will also be very difficult to convict him, as Chaim Levinson wrote in the extreme Left Ha’aretz newspaper because nothing in the indictment connects to anything else.

So, like Zadarov, Ben Oliel will continue to rot in prison – with two differences: One, Oliel underwent severe torture and now he is also being abused in unbearable conditions. He is in solitary confinement, his wife and four-year-old daughter meet him once a week for half an hour from behind a glass partition. He is allowed to hug his daughter for only a few minutes. The second difference is that Zadarov was already convicted. Amiram Ben Oliel’s trial will be starting this month. Public pressure may bring about a retrial for Zadarov and may not. By contrast, public pressure for Amiram may prevent a severe verdict, which would have no basis other than an illogical confession extracted under torture.

To be continued…

From Zehut, here.

Jewish Clericalism Meets Reality…

A Different Chareidi Perspective From Beit Shemesh

BY  · PUBLISHED  · UPDATED 

A Philo-Semite Is an Anti-Semite Who Loves Jews…

With Friends Like These…

By ADAM KIRSCH

BOOKS about anti-Semitism are depressingly numerous. New studies of the subject appear in a constant stream, focusing on anti-Semitism in this or that country, in literature or politics, in the past, the present, or the future. In 2010 alone, readers were presented with Robert Wistrich’s A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad and Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, which between them offer 2,100 pages of evidence of how much people used to and still do hate Jews.

If only as a change of pace, then, a book called Philosemitism in History should be cause for celebration. Never mind that it is a mere 350 pages, and not a continuous history but a collection of academic papers on fairly narrow subjects, from the Christian Hebraists of the seventeenth century to documentaries on West German television. At least it promises a chance to hear about Gentiles who admired and praised Jews, instead of hating and killing them. There must have been some, right?

Well, yes and no. As every contributor to Philosemitism in History acknowledges, Jews have never been entirely happy about the idea of philo-Semitism. The volume’s introduction, by editors Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp, begins with a Jewish joke: “Q: Which is preferable—the antisemite or the philosemite? A: The antisemite—at least he isn’t lying.” This may be too cynical. Closer to the bone is the saying that “a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.” That formulation helps to capture the sense that philo- and anti- share an unhealthy interest in Jews and an unreal notion of who and what Jews are. Both deal not with Jewishness but with “Semitism,” as if being a Jew were the same as embracing a political ideology such as communism or conservatism—rather than what it really is, a religious and historical identity that cuts across political and economic lines.

This Jewish mistrust of philo-Semitism finds ample support in the history of the word offered by Lars Fischer in his contribution to the book. Fischer’s essay focuses rather narrowly on debates within the socialist movement in Germany in the late nineteenth century. But since this was exactly the time and place that the words “anti-Semitism” and “philo-Semitism” were coined, Fischer’s discussion of the political valences of the terms is highly revealing. From the beginning, when the word was coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, “anti-Semitic” was a label proudly claimed by enemies of the Jews. In Austria and Germany, there were political parties, trade unions, and newspapers that called themselves “anti-Semitic,” even when their political programs went beyond hostility to Jews.

Philo-Semitism sounds like it would have been the rallying-cry of the opponents of anti-Semitism, a movement with its own political program. But Fischer explains that this was not the case. “Philo-Semitism” was invented as a term of abuse, applied by anti-Semites to those who opposed them. Though Fischer does not draw the parallel, he makes clear that “philo-Semite” was the equivalent of a word like “nigger-lover” in the United States, meant to suggest that anyone who took the part of a despised minority was odious and perverse. “Its obvious implication was that anybody who could be bothered to oppose anti-Semitism actively must be in cahoots with ‘the Jews,’ ” in thrall to the very Jewish money and power that anti-Semitism attacked.

What this meant was that, in Wilhelmine Germany, those who fought anti-Semitism—above all, Germany’s Social Democratic Party, whose leadership included many Jews—had to be careful to deny that they were philo-Semites. In 1891, the New York Jewish socialist Abraham Cahan, later to be famous as a novelist and the editor of the Forward, attended the International Socialist Congress at Brussels, in order to propose a motion condemning anti-Semitism. Victor Adler and Paul Singer, the leaders of Socialist parties in Germany and Austria—and both Jews—fought against Cahan’s motion, afraid that condemning anti-Semitism would only heighten the public perception of socialism as a Jewish movement. Finally, the motion passed, after it was amended to attack anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in equal measure.

No one, it seems, wanted to be a philo-Semite; and for a long time, on the evidence of Philosemitism in History, almost no one was. Certainly, it takes pathetically little good will toward Jews to qualify for a place in the book. Robert Chazan, looking for “Philosemitic Tendencies in Western Christendom,” finds one in Saint Bernard’s warning to the Second Crusade not to repeat the anti-Jewish violence of the First: “The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world, so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption.”

In this context, philo-Semitism means persecuting Jews to the brink of killing them, but no further. (Paula Frederiksen wrestled with this ambiguous Christian legacy in her excellent book Augustine and the Jews.) Likewise, Chazan shows, the medieval princes who invited Jews to settle in their lands did so not out of any love for Jewish people, but in order to create a taxable commercial class—and they often ended up killing the goose that laid so many golden eggs.

As early as the eleventh century, then, we can see the ambivalence that continues to mark Christian philo-Semitism down to the present. Jews are valued, but only as long as they play the role assigned them in a Christian project or worldview. If Jews step out of that role, they are bitterly criticized. During the Renaissance, a desire to read the Bible in its original language drove many leading humanists to study Hebrew. These Christian Hebraists engaged with Jewish traditions more deeply than any Gentiles had done before, even studying the Mishnah and Gemara for clues about historic Jewish practices. As Eric Nelson showed in The Hebrew Republic, the Israelite commonwealth became a major inspiration to English political theorists in the seventeenth century.

Three essays in Philosemitism in History focus on the Christian Hebraist movement. Yet as Abraham Melamed writes in “The Revival of Christian Hebraism,” “the big question … is whether the emergence and influence of Christian Hebraism in early modern Europe led to a more tolerant attitude toward the Jews, and additionally to any kind of philosemitism.” Reading Hebrew and admiring the Israelites were all well and good, but did they lead scholars such as Johann Reuchlin and William Whiston to have any sympathy with the actual, living Jews of their time? “This is not necessarily the case,” Melamed answers. The English scholar John Selden was referred to, jokingly, as England’s “Chief Rabbi,” for his mastery of Jewish texts, but he seems not to have known any Jews, and he publicly endorsed the blood libel, citing Jews’ “devilish malice to Christ and Christians.”

A more complicated case of Christian philo-Semitism is the subject of Yaakov Ariel’s essay “It’s All in the Bible,” which explores the strong support of Israel by contemporary American Evangelicals. For centuries, but especially after 1967, evangelical Christians have been staunch Zionists, and their friendship has been welcomed by the Israeli government. Yet the premise of that friendship is a millenarian theology, based on a reading of the Book of Revelation, which holds that the establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land is a precondition to the Second Coming of Christ. On the road to the redemption, Christian Zionists believe, the majority of Jews will be wiped out in apocalyptic wars, and the remainder will convert to Christianity.

This philo-Semitism is, at its heart, deeply anti-Jewish, and the attempts of Israeli politicians to court evangelical support have been awkward, to say the least. In 1996, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, he supported a bill, urged by Orthodox members of the Knesset, to ban Christian missionary activity in Israel. When he realized that this would profoundly offend the Christian right in America, Netanyahu changed his mind and thwarted the bill. Here we have the Jewish leader of a Jewish state permitting Christians to try to convert Jews as the price for Christian political support. Tactically, this might have made some sense, since the Jews of Israel were anyway not about to be converted to Christianity and the end of days is a long way off; but as a matter of principle it was awful.

Does this count as “philo-Semitism”? And what about the painfully earnest documentaries aired on West German television in the 1970s, discussed by Wulf Kansteiner, in which “self-pity and appropriation of Jewish culture went hand in hand with awkward silences”? Or the Jewish kitsch on sale in many Eastern European cities, which Ruth Ellen Gruber writes about? Lodz, in Poland, was once a great Jewish metropolis, and then one of the most lethal Nazi ghettoes. Today it is home to a restaurant called Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof, where you can be served matzoh by a “waiter dressed up in Hasidic costume, including a black hat and ritual fringes.” Gruber is rather indulgent toward this kind of thing, seeing it as a byproduct or precursor of a genuine rebirth of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Seen in a colder light, this Jewish kitsch, like many of the phenomena on display in Philosemitism in History, might seem to call for a reversal of Wilde’s famous line: not “each man kills the thing he loves,” but each man loves the thing he killed.

But this is too bitter. There may be little to love about philo-Semitism, and little to be grateful for in its history; but that is because genuine esteem between Christians and Jews, like real affection of all kinds, cannot be grasped as an “-ism.” Ideologies deal in abstractions, and to turn a group of people into an abstraction, even a “positive” one, is already to do violence to them. That kind of violence is what historians tend to record, but most of the time, it is not the way real people think and live.

One of the most heartening stories in this book History comes from fourteenth-century Marseilles, where a Jewish moneylender named Bondavid was tried for fraud. The trial record still exists, and it shows that Bondavid called a number of Christians as character witnesses. A priest, Guillelmus Gasqueti, testified that “actually [Bondavid is] more righteous than anybody he ever met in his life. … For, if one may say so, he never met or saw a Christian more righteous than he.” This kind of genuine, personal esteem between Christians and Jews was “unusual,” Robert Chazan writes, “but surely not unique.” And it is the proliferation of such face-to-face friendships in modern America that has made this country, not the most “philo-Semitic” in history, but the one where individual Jews and Christians have actually liked each other most.

This piece was originally published in Tablet.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic.

From The New Republic, here.

Non-Jewish Higher Education Is a SCAM!

Must Your Children Run the Collegiate Gauntlet?

By 

February 17, 2003

At Wake Forest University last fall, one of the few events designated as “mandatory” for freshman orientation was attendance at Blue Eyed, a filmed racism awareness workshop in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they can identify with “a person of color for a day.” In Swarthmore College’s dormitories, in the fall of 1998,first-year students were asked to line up by skin color, from lightest to darkest, and to step forward and talk about how they felt concerning their place in that line. Indeed, at almost all of our campuses, some form of moral and political re-education has been built into freshman orientation and residential programming. These exercises have become so commonplace that most students do not even think of the issues of privacy, rights, and dignity involved.

A central goal of these programs is to uproot “internalized oppression,” a crucial concept in the diversity education planning documents of most universities. Like the Leninists’ notion of “false consciousness,” from which it ultimately is derived, it identifies as a major barrier to progressive change the fact that the victims of oppression have internalized the very values and ways of thinking by which society oppresses them. What could workers possibly know, compared to intellectuals, about what workers truly should want? What could students possibly know, compared to those creating programs for offices of student life and residence, about what students truly should feel? Any desire for assimilation or for individualism reflects the imprint of white America’s strategy for racial hegemony.

You would be wise to read his report in its entirety if you plan to send a child to college. If you want to know what American higher education is all about these days, read it.

Lest you imagine that things have gotten better since he wrote his article, consider this recent report in World magazine.

Brown University is one of the most expensive schools in America. Parents spend up to $140,000 to fund one child in the quest for a diploma. The school is academically rigorous. It trains the students who were not quite competitive enough to get into Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, or Yale. The elite attends Brown and schools like it (e.g., Swarthmore).

Some freshmen-orientationdirectors say they are only trying to prevent future studentclashes over racism and “homophobia.” Otherssay outright that such presentations are designed to shake thesoil from new students’ small-town roots, dismantle traditionalvalues they might have brought from home, and – in presentationsby hard-left facilitators – help white freshmen own and overcometheir inborn racism. “I really want [freshmen] to understandthat they are no longer at home, they’re not in high school anymore,and a lot of the values and morals they may have had from thoseexperiences may change here over the next four years,” said diversityissues coordinator Marcus Newsom of Wartburg College in Waverly,Iowa.

You might think that these are isolated events. You would be wrong. An academic-supply industry is growing rapidly to meet the demand by colleges for these courses.

A smallarmy of diversity “experts” stands ready to help. BlueEyed facilitator Jane Elliot is one star in aconstellation of highly paid, ultra-leftist facilitatorswho travel from campusto campus to proclaim diversity dogma.

EdwinJ. Nichols, a Washington, D.C.-based diversity guru (whocounts as clientsthe U.S. Department of Labor and the EnvironmentalProtection Agency) charges schools about $5,000plus expenses for a workshop in which he teaches studentsto recognize andcombat “white privilege.”

Hugh Vasquez ofthe Todos Institute in Oakland, Calif., is the brain behindSkin Deep, another racial-awareness film popularwith college diversity programmers. Freshmen at Virginia’s Washingtonand Lee University this month watched the film, in which minorityworkshop participants lambaste “whiteness,” while white studentsrepent of generational racism.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Yet parents shell out anywhere from $20,000 to $140,000 to send a child into what is best described as the academic gauntlet.

RUNNING THE GAUNTLET

In a great movie, “The Black Robe,” there is an unforgettable scene of a gauntlet. Forcing an enemy to run the gauntlet was a widely practiced ritual among Indian tribes. A hapless captive was beaten by clubs as he ran in between a twin line of hostile braves. Different tribes had different rules. In the Shawnee tribe, those who survived the run were adopted into the tribe. Those who didn’t make it down the lines were burned at the stake. The gauntlet was a rite of passage.

College is the final rite of passage for Americans who plan to enter the professions or business. It is imposed by college faculties on teenagers and young adults. Those who survive the ordeal – half of them don’t – are then invited to enter the world of diploma-certified income. Those who don’t graduate are relegated to the world of careers without high school diplomas– the outer darkness.

Parents regard themselves as trapped in this alien system. They want the best for their children, which in the post-WorldWar II has attending college and earning at least a bachelor’s degree. Parents have been led to believe that this is the safest pathway to a child’s success in life.

So, they send their children into alien territory, at great expense, only to see their children indoctrinated with ideas that the parents had warned against. Yet the parents regard themselves as helpless. “What else can we do? We never graduated from college.” Or this: “We can’t hang onto our children forever.”

Their ideological enemies long ago spotted this weakness, and for over a hundred years, they have taken advantage of it. They have persuaded parents to finance an alien program of indoctrination, either directly (tuition)or indirectly (taxes).

YEARS OF INDOCTRINATION

The American public school system serves the same purpose as the colleges do but at a lower level. The states require attendance at state-certified institutions of education. It takes special exemptions for parents to teach their children at home.

Amazingly, in terms of money, it takes as little as $200, plus toner and paper, to home-school your entire family, K-12, in every course except for math. It takes another $800 to buy the math textbooks. Even more amazing, the entire program is self-taught by the student. It takes less parental time than any other home-school curriculum. It’s the Robinson Curriculum, designed by research chemist Arthur Robinson for his six children. Two of them are pursuing Ph.D.’s in chemistry. The others are still in college or high school.

Parents are taxed to send their children into classrooms that are dominated by people who share a different religion from the parents.

By a series of Supreme Court decisions, all tax-funded education must be secular, yet fewer than 10% of Americans are atheists,i.e., people who believe that the world can be explained without reference to God.

In high school, in every academic field, the assumptions of modern Darwinism dominate the textbooks, yet only 10% of Americans admit to being Darwinists. Almost half say that God created mankind less than 10,000 years ago. Almost 40% say that God created everything, but used evolution – an anti-Darwinist outlook. This was discovered by a 1999 ABC News poll. You would not intuitively guess its results by watching PBS specials on nature or “Nova.”

College completes the academic ordeal. Here, Darwinism provides the conceptual framework for a host of rival ism’s. Defenders of competing ism’s strive to gain tenure on college faculties in order to have a chance to recruit young people at taxpayers’ expense. Even private religious colleges are dominated by one or another of these Darwinist ism’s, for the textbooks are written by professors in major universities. Only a handful of tiny Bible colleges, Bible institutes, and under-capitalized, high-tuition four-year colleges offer slightly less radical viewpoints.

EARLY WARNINGS

The most famous early warning was William F. Buckley’s book – I think his best book – God and Man At Yale (1951). He wrote it as a recent Yale graduate. It sent the liberal Yale faculty ballistic. In 1960, his undergraduate successor at Yale, M. Stanton Evans, wrote Revolt On The Campus, which dealt with the incipient conservative collegiate movement, which I had recently joined. The movement was tiny. Evans by then was the editor of the editorial page at the Indianapolis News, and for a quarter century has run the National Journalism Center, a top-flight organization that trains prospective journalists.

My favorite book attacking the collegiate system is the 1989 bombshell, Profscam, by Charles J. Sykes. I believe that every parent of a college-bound student should read this book before spending a penny on higher education. It will help get things more clearly in focus. The prospective student should also read it; if he or she should find that the book is too confusing or too advanced, there is no doubt in my mind that the student should defer enrollment until the book becomes crystal clear.

In Chapter 1, Sykes lays out the truth about the modern academic culture without sugar-coating. It is the same problem that crops up in every aging monopoly: the complacency of the protected group.

Professors have convinced society that this culture is essential for higherlearning, and have thus been able to protect their own status and independenceby cheating students, parents, taxpayers, and employers, and polluting theintellectual inheritance of society. Over the last 50 years, this academicculture has secured professors almost ironclad job security and the freedomto do whatever they like – and do it well or poorly – or do nothing at all. [Charles J. Sykes, Profscam: Professors and the Higher Education Game, 1988,p. 5.]

He lists a series of accurate indictments, but this one has not been widely acknowledged, on campus or off, as central to the whole problem: the two-tier faculty. The system works to the advantage of senior faculty members, whose courses are kept scandalously few in number and incredibly small, and whose intellectual interests are subsidized, but to no one else’s advantage. “In pursuing their own interests – research, academic politicking, cushier grants– they have left the nation’s students in the care of an ill-trained, ill-paid, and bitter academic underclass.” This existence of this academic underclass– teaching assistants, untenured professors, and part-time instructors – is not perceived by the vast majority of parents of first-year students; the students themselves may take years to figure it out. This underclass has become crucial for the economic survival of almost all of the institutions of higher learning, but it has a whole host of evil implications for college education.

By the time they read a book like Sykes’, parents have already made the decision to send their children to college, sometimes with a retail price tag of 140,000+after-tax dollars per bachelor’s degree (Ivy League universities). Once a major decision is made in life, nobody wants to have to reconsider it. Nobody wants to have his illusions unceremoniously shattered. Nevertheless, my recommendation is that those people putting up the money get these illusions shattered early rather than late, so that the potential victims can salvage something of value by making the system work for them – the real system, not a figment of their imaginations. It is time for parents and students to bone up on the reality that awaits them.

If Profscam is true – and it really is true – then parents and students need to reorganize their plans: soon. There are some parents and students who will resent this and will do their best to deny it psychologically. They will dismiss what I say with the standard phrases: “This can’t be true. He is exaggerating.” To skeptics, I say only: you have been warned. Repeatedly.

Sykes is not alone in his criticisms. Roger Kimball’s book, Tenured Radicals (1990), is equally critical, though from a narrower perspective. Kimball points out that the radical student protesters of the 1960’s have become the tenured professors of today. His book is filled with one horror story after another: of reduced academic standards, of tyranny in the name of the oppressed, of courses that are hostile to Western civilization. A parent had better read it before he signs the student’s first tuition check.

An equally pessimistic account is provided in Page Smith’s book, Killing The Spirit (1990). Smith, now deceased, was a first-rate professor of history, formerly of UCLA. He is the author of the marvelously written eight-volume work, People’s History of the United States, as well as the standard two-volume academic biography of John Adams. Killing The Spirit focuses on what goes on in the great research universities, as does Sykes’ Profscam. Smith’s conclusion is the same as Sykes’: the students are being cheated, the parents are being cheated, and the taxpayers are being cheated. Furthermore, the research produced by faculty members at these universities is substandard. But Smith, unlikeSykes, comes from inside the system.

So does Bruce Wilshire. He Wrote The Moral Collapse of the University (1990). He tells the same story: professors who hate to teach undergraduates, instruction without meaning, and a breakdown of educational standards. “If universities can not confront questions of meaning – and of goodness, vitality, purpose, beauty, reality, the universe directly lived – they suffer moral collapse. This has happened” (p. 205).

These books paved the way for Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991).D’Souza’s book caught the attention of the book-buying public and the media. It was as if there had been no previous books on the subject as if there had not been two generations of tenured liberalism dominating the college classrooms.

You might think that with so much criticism from intelligent sources, there have been changes. You would be correct. Things have indeed changed. They’re worse.

CONCLUSION

Professor Kors ended his report with these words:

Orwellmay have been profoundly wrong about the totalitarian effectsof high technology, but he understood full well how theauthoritarians of this centuryhad moved from the desire for outer control to thedesire for inner control. He understood that the new agesought to overcome what, in Julia’s terms,was the ultimate source of freedom for human beings: “They can’t get inside you.” Ourcolleges and universities hire trainers to “get inside” Americanstudents.

Thought reform is making its way inexorably to an office near you. If welet it occur at our universities and accept it passively in our own domains,then a people who defeated totalitarians abroad will surrender their dignity,privacy, and conscience to the totalitarians within.

What can you do about it? To change the system, not much. To keep your child out of the system, or on the distant fringes, where the damage will be minimal, you can do a great deal. Start looking for Internet-based courses that will let your child stay at home and out of the gauntlet.

I also encourage you to click through and read Phyllis Schlafly’s 19-point survival guide for college students.

From Lewrockell.com, here.

Roosevelt Revisionism

Pearl Harbor Historiography: A Lesson in Academic Housecleaning

By 

December 9, 2013

Pearl Harbor’s Establishment historiography remains as secure in its tenured cocoon as it was when I began college in 1959. American history textbooks are as free from the truth about Roosevelt’s deliberate provocation of Japan, and his advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor, as they were in 1943. Mr. Stinnett does not have a Ph.D., nor is he employed as a history instructor. He was therefore in a position to tell the truth. This was equally true of journalist George Morgenstern, whose 1947 book on Pearl Harbor was the first to put the story together in one detailed volume. The historical guild paid no attention to Morgenstern. We shall see if it pays attention to Stinnett. I strongly doubt that the reception will be either favorable or widespread.

A week ago, I sent a letter to a group of my subscribers. It provided background on the issues raised by Mr. Stinnett. I made this point, in the context of how intellectual guilds operate. They adopt a three-phase position on a controversial new idea.

The story isn’t true. The story is true, but so what? We always knew it was true.

I then illustrated this with the historiography of Pearl Harbor. Here is what I wrote.

* * * * * * * *

Consider the conservatives’ account of Roosevelt’s advance warning of the Japanese attack in late 1941. When George Morgenstern wrote Pearl Harbor: The Story of a Secret War, only right-wing Devin-Adair would publish it (1947). The book was ridiculed by academic historians as being a pack of unsubstantiated opinions written by a mere journalist — and a Chicago Tribune journalist at that. When the premier liberal historian, Charles A. Beard, said much the same thing the next year in President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (Yale University Press), he was dismissed by his colleagues as senile, and he permanently lost his reputation. When the premier American diplomatic historian, Charles C. Tansill, said it again in 1952 in his Back Door to War (Regnery), he, too, was shoved down the liberals’ memory hole.

Today, the revisionist account of Pearl Harbor is more widely accepted, and is gaining ground fast. Another journalist, Robert B. Stinnett, recently found the “smoking gun” — an 8-page 1940 memo by a lieutenant commander in the navy on how to get Japan to attack us, a memo that Roosevelt adopted, point by point. His book is titled, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (Free Press, 1999). Stinnett served under a young George Bush during World War II. His book is the capstone to his career.

The liberals are now moving to stage 2: “The story is true, but so what?” Stinnett’s book argues that Roosevelt basically did the right thing in luring the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. This attack overcame America’s anti-interventionists, who had 88% of the people behind them in 1940. Pearl Harbor got us into the War in Europe.

It didn’t, of course. Hitler’s suicidal declaration of war on the United States on the following Thursday is what got us into the European war.

It will be a long time before liberal historians get to stage 3: “We always knew it was true.” They will not admit how they smeared the reputations of first-rate historians who told the truth early, and then for the next fifty years used their power over graduate schools and professional academic journals to screen out the truth. The issue was power, and liberals respect it and use it.

* * * * * * * * * *

What happened to Beard sent a warning to any aspiring young grad student who might have been tempted to follow in Beard’s revisionist path. Beard was at the end of a long and distinguished career. He was the only scholar ever to be elected as president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. But his academic achievements gained him no mercy when he broke ranks on Pearl Harbor. James J. Martin, the premier revisionist historian after Harry Elmer Barnes died in 1968, in 1981 provided an account of what happened.

Beard not only infuriated the influential supporters of Roosevelt by his insistence that the continuous deception by the President in making his steady moves toward war while endlessly talking about his peacefulness (few were allowed to forget his pre-election promise in 1940 never to send Americans off to a war outside U.S. borders) was in essentials, as Leighton described it, “completely to undermine constitutional government and set the stage for a Caesar” (Beard’s famed peroration on pp. 582-584 of his Epilogue to President Roosevelt is required reading in this context.) He had opened up another sore while writing his book with a famed article in the Saturday Evening Post for October 4, 1947, “Who’s to Write the History of the War?,” in which he revealed that the Rockefeller Foundation, working with its alter ego, the Council on Foreign Relations, had provided $139,000 for the latter to spend in underwriting an official-line history of how the war had come about, in an effort to defeat at the start the same kind of “debunking” historical campaign which had immediately followed the end of World War I. Beard complained of inaccessibility of various documents, which he was sure would be fully available to anyone doing an Establishment version of the wartime past, convinced that these would be sat on as ‘classified’ for a generation or more. . . .

So it was understandable that the following February, two months before the publication of President Roosevelt, when the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Beard their gold medal for the best historical work published in the preceding decade, that his erstwhile liberal admirers would reach the end of their tolerance. The highlight of their protest was the resignation in rage from the Institute by one of its most influential members, Lewis Mumford, accompanied by abuse of Beard so extreme that it led to a memorable chiding to Mumford from Harry Elmer Barnes in a 11/2 column letter to the editors of the Chicago Tribune, published 11 February 1948. But the attack on Beard had barely begun.

With the publication of President Roosevelt two months later, in April, the denunciation of Beard became a veritable industry, and the most eminent of the Roosevelt academic defenders were recruited to contribute to the character assassination. Probably the most outrageous was that of Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison, Roosevelt’s handpicked choice to write a history of American naval operations in World War II, and even elevated to the rank of Admiral in recognition of his labors. But the outline of the total campaign aimed at Beard is substantial, extensively documented in the later editions of Barnes’s booklet The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout (especially 6th thru. 9th).

Beard died in 1949. His book on Roosevelt was allowed — a mild word, given the circumstances — to go out of print almost immediately, and it was never reprinted. Maybe the Web will resurrect it. I hope so.

The final product of the Council on Foreign Relations’ investment of $139,000 in 1946 — a lot of money in 1946 — was the standard Establishment history of the coming of the war, written by William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation: The World Crisis of 1937-1940 and American Foreign Policy (1952). It was still the standard account two decades later. Its perspective remains dominant on campus today. Langer was a professor of history at Harvard. So was Gleason — medieval history — until he moved to Washington after Pearl Harbor, to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. He later became the official historian of the State Department. Establishment enough for you? (The other standard book was Herbert Feis’s Road to Pearl Harbor (1950). He had served as the State Department’s Advisor for International Economic Affairs.) Yes, the victors always write the history books, but when the historians are actually policy-setting participants in the war, the words “court history” take on new meaning.

I read Admiral Kimmel’s Story (Regnery, 1955) in 1958. That same year, I read anti-Roosevelt journalist John T. Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth (Devin-Adair, 1948). At age 16, I became a World War II revisionist.

In 1963, I had a conversation with Thomas Thalken, who later became the librarian of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. We were then both employed by a short-lived think tank, the Center for American Studies. He was its librarian. I was a summer intern, fresh out of college. He had earned a master’s degree in history under Tansill a decade earlier. He told me that Tansill had advised him not to earn a Ph.D. in history. Tansill had said that anyone who taught the truth about America’s entry into World War II would see his career end before it even began. Thalken took his advice.

This is why there are no tenured World War II revisionists who write in this still-taboo and well-policed field. The guild screened them out, beginning in the early 1950’s. Beard and Tansill by 1960 were remembered only for their non-WWII revisionist writings. Barnes was forgotten. Martin — in my view, the most accomplished American revisionist historian — never became known on campus. Anthony Kubek spent his career on the academic fringes. What the guild did to Barnes, Beard, Tansill at the end of their careers, and to Martin at the beginning of his, posted a warning sign: Dead End.

I went on to earn a Ph.D. in American history, but I never did teach in my field. Neither did Bruce Bartlett, who wrote The Pearl Harbor Cover-Up (Arlington House, 1978). (Our paths crossed briefly in 1976: we were both on Congressman Ron Paul’s Washington staff.) Bartlett did not earn a Ph.D. Instead, as a supply-sider on Jack Kemp’s Congressional staff, he wrote his way into economic policy-making.

This is typical of the handful of WWII revisionists in the post-Tansill era. Most of them never made it onto a campus, and of the few who did, they did not teach WWII revisionism. The WWII revisionist books of 1947-55 were out of print by 1960. They remain out of print.

In 1966, an aged Barnes wrote a brief introduction to an article that appeared in a small-circulation journal published by libertarian pioneer Robert Lefevre, Rampart Journal. At the end of his introduction, Barnes wrote: “We should be able to look forward to something more honest and dependable in the quarter of a century between now and the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.” Nice dream; no fulfillment. World War II revisionism remains a fringe movement of non-certified, non-subsidized historians.

Conclusion

In 1958, the only book critical of Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic policies and his foreign policies was Flynn’s book. In 1958, it was out of print. In the Year of Our Lord, 2000, it remains the only book critical of Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies.

We haven’t come a long way, baby.

Things are beginning to change for the better. The Web has begun to chip away at every academic guild’s monopoly. What is taught in college classrooms no longer has the same authority that it possessed in 1960. But until the subsidizing of higher education by the state ends, and until the state-licensed accreditation oligopoly ends or is overcome by new, “price-competitive technologies,” it will remain an uphill battle for Pearl Harbor revisionists in academia.

December 12, 2000

From Lewrockwell.com, here.