Hitler's professors, Arafat's professors

Judaism, Wntr-Spring, 2003 by Edward Alexander

     In Hitler and his comrades we discern the spirit of clarity
     without residue, of honesty toward the outer world, and
     simultaneously of inner unity .... This, however, is exactly the
     spirit which we early recognized and advanced in the great
     scholars of the past, in Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Faraday. We
     admire and adore it likewise in Hitler ...
                                   --Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard,
                           German Nobel Prize winners in physics (1936)

     [Consider] the microscopic grasp that Arafat has of politics,
     not as grand strategy, in the pompous Kissingerian sense, but
     as daily, even hourly movement of people and attitudes, in the
     Gramscian or Foucauldian sense.
                                                   --Edward Said (1988)

     I know I will be misunderstood if I add that I have some sneaking
     admiration for Heidegger's attempt at political commitment, and
     find the attempt itself morally and aesthetically preferable to
     apolitical liberalism (provided its ideals remain unrealized).
                       --Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 257 (1991)

THE CAMPAIGN BY HITLER'S PROFESSORS AGAINST JEWS was fought nationally and internationally. The national campaign commenced in 1933 with the boycott and dismissal of Jewish faculty members by their non-Jewish colleagues. In Freiburg, for example, on April 1 the local Nazi paper, Der Allemanne, published lists of Jewish doctors and dentists who were to be boycotted, and a few days later a list of Jewish members of the university's medical faculty. On April 10 the rector of the university instructed his deans to dismiss all faculty members of Jewish religion or origin. The rector was one Martin Heidegger, who had just taken up his post. Since he had already, in 1929, said that Germany would have to choose between building up its own intellectual life or abandoning it "to growing Judaization in the wider and narrower sense," his action came as no surprise. When his girlfriend Hannah Arendt (as she is now known) asked her teacher in the summer of 1933 about "rumors" she had heard of his hostile attitude toward Jewish colleagues and students, he replied that he had given generously of his time to Jewish students, much as the effort disrupted his own work: "Who comes to me in an emergency? A Jew. Who insists on urgently discussing his doctoral degree? A Jew ... Who asks me for help in obtaining grants? Jews!!" (1) But even professors whose precious time was not so egregiously usurped by imperious Jewish students joined readily in the campaign to extend the anti-Jewish campaign from the economic realm (the April 1 boycott) to academic, scientific, cultural activity in its entirety. Not a single German professor publicly protested the boycotts and dismissals--or, for that matter, the drastic reduction in the number of Jewish students and the burning of books by Jewish authors.

The international campaign came later and consisted of the effort by German scholars to persuade their fellow-Europeans of the centrality of race, of their great insight into the way in which physiology determines culture. The Germans encouraged scholarly research to show the terrible damage that Jews had done to other European countries. Klaus Schickert, for example, argued in his doctoral dissertation that "Racial thinking is no German requirement, it has become a European requirement ...." (2)

Numerous members of the European family of nations responded to this wonderful idea with alacrity, and sent representatives to the Frankfort Conference of March 1941, organized by Alfred Rosenberg to deal with the "Universal European Solution of the Jewish Question." To stress the international character of the conference (and perhaps also the fact that Nazism itself was not merely a radical form of old-fashioned nationalism but an internationalist movement based upon race rather than citizenship), the flags of nine nations were displayed in a wreath surrounding two swastika banners. Vidkun Quisling was there to represent Norway, Robert van Genechten and Anton Mussert to represent the Netherlands, the two Professors Cuza to raise the Rumanian flag, Professor Veszo to display the flag of Italy, and so on ad nauseam. (3)

It is against this background of Hitler's war against the Jews that we need to view the current campaign to extend the economic war against Israel (in the divestment campaign of Noam Chomsky and his acolytes) to the professorial boycott of Israeli science and scholarship, Israeli scientists and scholars.

On April 6, 2002, 123 university academics and researchers (their number would later rise to 250) from across Europe signed an open letter, published in Britain's Guardian, calling for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel until the Israeli government abided by (unspecified) UN resolutions and returned yet again to negotiations with Arafat and Company to be conducted in accord with the principles laid down in the latest Saudi/Friedman peace plan. The petition was organized and published at the very time when Israelis were being butchered on a daily basis, mainly by brainwashed teenage suicide bombers, Arab versions of the Hitler Youth. It declared, in high Pecksniffian style, that since the Israeli government was "impervious to moral appeals from world leaders" Israel's cultural and research institutions should be denied further funding from the European Union and the European Science Foundation. It neglected to recommend that the European Union suspend its very generous financing of Arafat or that Chinese scholars be boycotted until China withdraws from Tibet, or that Moroccan scientists be blackballed because Morocco was occupying Western Sahara (and refusing to negotiate with the Polisario front). The petition was the brainchild of Steven Rose, Director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at Gresham College, London, and the great majority of its signatories were British; but it included academics from a host of European countries, a number sufficient to give it the appearance of a pan-European campaign against the Jews. It even had the obligatory display Israeli, one Eva Jablonka of Tel-Aviv University. (Nine other Israeli leftists added their names as soon as they found out about this opportunity for international renown.)