Radicals Run Wild
By: Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, August 01, 2008
What was left of the academic reputation of the Hebrew University
was demolished altogether July 30, 08. The reason was the arrest of the leftist
professor of sociology who had been one of the thesis advisors of that
notorious thesis claiming that Jews are racists because Jewish soldiers do not
rape Arab women.
In recent days, headlines have reported the stories of the Hebrew University president
joining a call of endorsement for the activities of a far-leftist
anti-Zionist group that claims Israel is an apartheid land, Arab students at
the Hebrew University being
arrested for membership in al-Qaeda, and a Hebrew University professor of
pharmacy insisting
on hiring a convicted terrorist to work in his chemistry lab. But these
were relatively minor disgraces compared
with that now infamous "rape thesis."
To remind you, a Hebrew
University graduate
student claimed in her thesis that the absence of any history of rapes of
Arab women by Israeli soldiers
proves that Jews are racists and oppressors, people who do not even regard Arab
women as worthy of being sexually
abused. The student at the Mount Scopus campus and her "research"
were then awarded a university honor for these impressive
"discoveries" by the "Shaine Center," a Hebrew University
sociology "research" center dominated
by far leftists. Nitzan had argued that abstaining from
rape is just as inhumane and oppressive as "symptomatically
raping" and in fact replaces it, because it just serves to reinforce the
intolerance felt toward Arabs by Jewish soldiers. These racist soldiers think
of Arabs as so inferior and horrid that they do not even feel a compulsion to rape them. While giving some shallow lip service to how the
"question" of rape refusal is "very complex,"
Nitzan's own "answer" is quite simple and straightforward - it
reflects Jewish racism against Arabs.
Israel,
she claimed, is so racist and anti-Arab that abstaining from rape is part and parcel of its determination to
enforce rigid "lines of division." She asserted that individual
soldiers who refuse to rape represent an intentional policy of oppression
roughly similar to when governments order mass rape, because in both cases the
"policy" serves to subordinate and dehumanize the oppressed victim
population. The thesis drew its "scientific" conclusions from interviews with 25 reserve soldiers, ages 23-32,
who served as combat troops in the
"occupied territories" during the intifada. None of the comments by any of these soldiers supports or
provides any confirmation, even the most indirect, to any of the lunatic
"conclusions" reached by Nitzan.
Facing a storm of public outrage, the president of Hebrew University,
Prof. Menachem Magidor, and the Rector, Prof. Haim D. Rabinowitch, jointly
issued an announcement defending the student and dismissing those who
expressed outrage over the contents of the thesis.
The "Non-Rape as Racism" thesis was co-supervised by one Eyal Ben-Ari, a Hebrew University
professor of sociology, who claims to know something
about the sociology of the military. Ben-Ari is a far-leftist with a track
record of turning out anti-Israel propaganda, such as claims that Israel is an ultra-militarist
society, and much of his propaganda is misrepresented as
scholarly research. The other co-supervisor of the rape thesis was
Ben-Ari's co-author in a book about Israeli "militarism." Israeli
feminist groups never had a word to say about that "thesis" nor about
Ben-Ari's role in inventing the "No rape as Racism" hypothesis.
From his role in the rape thesis, it
was already known that Ben-Ari had goofy ideas about sexual (mis-)behavior. But
now it turns out that the ultra-feminist Israel-bashing professor of sociology
practices what he preaches.
The very same Professor Eyal Ben-Ari was arrested
yesterday for suspected rape and sexual abuse of his students, and
arraigned before the Jerusalem
magistrate's court. It seems that Ben-Ari made it a habit to condition giving
nice grades to and getting research grants for his female students on their
sleeping with him. He was clearly not being racist though, because he is the
same guy who discovered the academic finding that raping proves you are not
racist. The police claim Ben-Ari had been behaving thus for the past fifteen
years! This was not the first Hebrew
University professor arrested
for sexual misbehavior.
The Jerusalem
weekly "Yediot Yerushalayim" broke the story and claimed Ben-Ari
routinely attacked his female students sexually and violently. It cited two
students who claimed they had been violently raped by Ben-Ari. He is also
accused of using university funds to take his female students on trips for
sexual trysts. He purchased for one of them a vibrator and then submitted the
bill for reimbursement to the Hebrew University's Shaine Center
(the very same Center that granted an award to the "Non-Rape is
Racism" thesis!).
While awaiting trial Ben-Ari is subject to a restraining order preventing him
from entering the Hebrew University
campus, as well as an order not to leave the country. The same ultra-feminists
in Israel
who insisted that an (unmarried) cabinet minister be indicted because he gave a
French kiss to a woman in his office
have yet to say a word about the behavior of this member of the Tenured Left.
Haaretz July 31, 2008 reports that female students in the Department of
Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University, which claims to specialize
in feminism and social justice, allege that Ben-Ari is not the only tenured
lecher in the department who abuses them sexually, and that these faculty
members walk about boasting of their "conquests" of the PhD students.
Strangely, the university authorities never looked into their behavior.
Ben-Ari had also served as a consultant to the Israeli army over the role of women in the military.
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