Hitler's professors, Arafat's professors

Judaism, Wntr-Spring, 2003 by Edward Alexander

Greenblatt was still treating the boycott mainly as a violation of academic freedom--plausibly enough, since Rose had declared that "Academic freedom I find a completely spurious argument ...." But the real issue was an antisemitic campaign to transform the pariah people into the pariah state, as became evident in the rhetorically violent reactions to Greenblatt's criticism. Baker herself quickly announced that she repented of nothing. She was "not against Israeli nationals per se; only Israeli institutions as part of the Israeli state which I absolutely deplore." She was acting on behalf of good Europeans everywhere, and refused to reveal where she herself was born--Egypt, as it happens. (7)

Greenblatt was also assaulted by another inhabitant of the academic fever swamps of Manchester, Baker's colleague Michael Sinnott, a professor of "paper science." Springing chivalrously to Baker's defense, he called Greenblatt's open letter to her "sanctimonious claptrap," decried Israel as "the mirror-image of Nazism," and asserted that what made Israel a unique menace to the world was "the breathtaking power of the American Jewish lobby." In a seven-year sojourn at the University of Illinois in Chicago, he had felt the power of the insatiable Jews on his own pulses: first, "the Israeli atrocities for which my tax dollars were paying were never reported in the American news media, which were either controlled by Jews, or browbeaten by them in the way you have just exemplified"; second, his "pay raises at UIC never really recovered" from his defiantly scheduling a graduate class on the Jewish Sabbath. (8) The UMIST administration, already busy distancing itself from Baker, now had a still greater embarrassment on its hands when the Telegraph (29 September) reported Sinnott's letter. It "launched an investigation" into the abstruse question of whether Sinnott might be an antisemite. Sinnott, ever mindful of his "pay raises," issued a weaselly statement of regret, not over his sin but over its detection. (9)

As the boycott campaign intensified, its guiding lights were plagued by problems of definition bearing a ghoulish resemblance to those that once beset the Nazis in deciding just which people were to be considered fitting victims of discrimination, oppression, and (eventually) murder. Perhaps this is why Baker struck up an acquaintance with David Irving, who in December reported on his website that she had kindly taken the trouble to alert him to an ad placed by Amazon.com in the Israeli press which might be considered supportive of that terrible country. (10)

The Hitler-loving historian could have supplied Baker with information about problems the Nazis faced in implementing their boycott: Should the targeted group be people with four Jewish grandparents or three or perhaps just two? Some Baker defenders had chastised Greenblatt for suggesting that it was their Israeli nationality that led to the sacking of the two Israelis. By no means! It was just the fact that they worked for Israeli universities. But what of Arabs who worked for Israeli universities? If the Hebrew University employee, whose mass murder of the people in the Scopus cafeteria was the perfect existential realization of the boycotters' ideas, had survived his exploit, would he have been banned from joining Baker's janitorial staff in Manchester?