To the Editor (your paper has done an exemplary job),
So I didn’t go to Ohio University and I am also not a professor emeritus there, but after reading Steven Safran’s noxious letter I feel compelled to respond lest it not be given the thoughtful response it merits.
Firstly, Mr. Safran gives a cursory, one sided, and generally thoughtless run down of the conflict. He neglects to mention that Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since 2007. He also neglects to mention that the firing of rockets did not happen in a vacuum, but was precipitated by mass arrests on the West Bank following the murder of the three Israeli yeshiva students. I don’t know if you have ever seen Law & Order, Mr. Safran (the state department used to use them as a more interesting way to introduce people to our legal system and you cite an affinity for “basic” courses), but mass arrests are generally not how police work gets done in a country that cares about human rights. If you don’t care about human rights and you happen to torture people who are being held without charge or trial; then mass arrests are a pretty effective tactic. Unlike Mr. Safran who likes to employ an impossibly lazy rhetorical device, I will not tell you that “you need to be educated” if you disagree with me as a way of trying to win an argument without having to actually make one. Also, unlike Mr. Safran I will provide citations for my claims that I do not consider general knowledge. You can look up my claims about Palestinians being held without charge, trial, and being tortured here.
As far as the attacks on Rabbi Leshaw go, I tend to take the private sector approach to things. As the more seasoned adult and religious leader at Hillel on campus, she has no need to take responsibility for the racist things some of Hillel’s members have said about Arabs and Muslims. She does have to take responsibility for one of those racist comments being turned into a Facebook ad by Hillel and the decision to put resources into that ad buy. For this she should resign.
To understand some of what Mr. Safran is talking about in his paragraph about the Holocaust I recommend “The Holocaust in American Life,” by the late Peter Novick of the University of Chicago. In my opinion the book does a great job examining the changes in the way Americans remember the Holocaust since WWII. It certainly has some flaws, but I have yet to find the perfect piece of scholarship. It will certainly help you to understand how we ended up at the current place where Israel and the Holocaust can’t seem to be mentioned in different sentences.
Now, Mr. Safran, we get to your 4th paragraph, which is where you really go off the rails. Firstly you make an extremely broad claim that blood libel “has been adapted into the educational system of numerous Middle Eastern countries,” but it might be helpful if you told us which ones. You then go on to claim that “It continues to be taught to children in many madrasas (religious schools), including those run by Hamas in Gaza.” Again with no citations. I used several different Google searches and went at least five pages deep on each and I could not find a reputable source to back up your claim. How many religious schools? I may only do math for a living, but I would also want to see that number normalized over the total number of schools in Gaza or the area you are claiming. Trying to smear an entire ethnicity or religion with a flimsy un-sourced claim of racism is actually… racism.
“Perhaps unknowingly, Ms. Marzec borrowed one of history’s great symbols of anti-Semitism, BLOOD, to make a political statement. Is she anti-Semitic? I for one can’t answer that question, but certainly her message is. Theatrics are no substitute for reflective thinking and substantive discussion.” One thing at a time here. Blood it turns out is pretty universal as a symbol. You would be hard pressed to find a society anywhere that doesn’t have some symbolism associated with blood. If you were protesting a war, Mr. Safran, and you decided to use blood as a symbol; I am going to go out on a limb and say that almost everybody across cultures would get what you were going for. You would not have to explain it. You find yourself explaining blood libel to people because it is really obscure. This is the kind of lazy critical theory attack that makes my head hurt. Which do you think Ms. Marzec meant, Mr. Safran: the much more common symbol that people understand intrinsically, or the one you had to go to great lengths to explain? I, for one, (commas are important) can’t answer that question, but certainly we are going to examine your theatrics next.
Asking the kind of horrific question that Mr. Safran asks and then answering it as an unknown is a classic rhetorical device of the worst kind of politics. If you haven’t seen an attack ad that has featured it you should count yourself lucky.
Does Obama want to take away your guns, make your children read the Koran, and turn brussels sprouts into the official U.S. lunch? The evidence is still out, but Brussels sounds French and we all know that America isn’t French.
Is Mr. Safran a navel-gazing, genteel racist, who clearly doesn’t understand irony? I, for one, can’t say, but using the “I have black/Palestinian friends” defense that you employ in your last paragraph is pretty genteel racist.
Because Mr. Safran doesn’t do math for a living, he probably doesn’t think about how data are collected. Part of the increase in anti-Semitic incidents is that how they are counted has changed to include much of what we see on the Internet and I have yet to find a breakout listed from the
groups doing the counting. The Community Security Trust in the U.K. admits this new counting method has influenced their counts. While I do agree that numbers of offline incidents rose in reaction to Gaza and all racism is horrible, I am less sanguine about our ability to make online trolls disappear from our lives. It should also be noted that the rise in anti-Semitic incidents was matched in Israel by huge masses of pro war marchers chanting “Gaza is a Graveyard” and “Death to Arabs.” This was noted in many sources, but “Haaretz” and “Foreign Policy” did terrific work on the horrible chauvinistic turn that took place in Israel itself during the war.
I would like to finish on a much more hopeful note than Mr. Safran. This conflict is not going to last past my lifetime (Mr. Safran’s age > my age, so we could both be right). If you had asked me four years ago if I would see the remarkable change in world and particularly U.S. public opinion on Palestine, I would have put on the kind of fake laugh that you put on to hide your sadness, but things have changed fast. Most importantly people have stepped forward to refute the lazy and ad-hominem charge of anti-Semitism that is leveled to intimidate people who happen to have temerity to believe that human rights for all includes Palestinians.
As Nobel Peace Laureate, anti-Apartheid campaigner, and human rights activist Bishop Desmond Tutu said in his letter in support of the student government at the University of California, Berkeley after they voted to divest in 2010, “To those who wrongly allege unfairness or harm done to them by this call for divestment, I suggest, with humility, that the harm suffered from being confronted with opinions that challenge one's own pales in comparison to the harm done by living a life under occupation and daily denial of basic rights and dignity. It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians, a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation.”
Rob Bowron is an economist from New York City.
