When I first read this quotation, I was at once reminded of the sophisticated --and by now commonplace-- hatreds that have been directed against the State of Israel and those courageous Jews who dwell therein. These hatreds, once seized upon, can fester fast, and be disseminated as truth even faster. And believe it or not, those who should know better, those who boast of intellect and morality, are more often than not found to be at the forefront of this character assassination of Jews and their Judaism (which, by definition, includes a Jewish state). And no amount of placation, not even the weight of truth, can dissuade these anti-Zionists from their odious obsession.

One problem I have with these academics is their demonization of a basic tenet of Judaism, which is Zionism. They present a Zionism tangential from Judaism, which is not a Jewish Zionism at all but rather their invented version--an ersatz version they propagate to the world as being an evil and illegitimate political ideology. All other peoples of the world may win territory as a result of winning wars, but Israel, or so these academics propound, is to exist below and outside of these universal practices of law; all other religions may demand as sacrosanct their holy sites, regardless the manner by which these sites were acquired. But Israel and her Jews must accept the imposition of other peoples' religious expansionism, even when that same religious expansionism obtrudes upon Jewish holy sites.

These academics have no problem with a Muslim mosque being situated--by weight of religious partiality--upon Solomon's Temple Mount, as though Jews have no history whatsoever in the Middle East, but they have a problem with Jews building houses on land allotted them in a Torah that precedes all other conflicting religious bona fides by thousands of years.

Doug Larson wrote, "A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience." So it is with these academics presently obsessed with excoriating Israel and the Jewish people for a so-called "religious expansionism" (Zionism) they have otherwise zealously defended on the part of other religious, particularly Arab Muslims. When it serves the purpose of Arab Muslims, this academia can trace history back to the beginning of mankind, but when it comes to addressing Jewish historical issues, these same "intellectuals" cannot manage a rearward glance as far back as the Holocaust.

I've never understood "divestment from Israel" anything. How wise is it, especially for academics, to boycott the State of Israel when it is a prevalent fact that the Jewish people can boast of winning more Nobel prizes than any other race in the history of mankind? In my opinion, such boycotts of Jewish genius are indicative of why so many non-Jews are not winning Nobel prizes. We can rise no higher than the company we keep.

How do Western academics come up with the term "Palestinian" anyway? As Yoram Ettinger has written in a thought-provoking essay Who Are the Palestinian-Arabs? the observation, "Contrary to political correctness, Palestine was never an Arab entity with a unique national, geographic, cultural, identity." This is to say, the so-called Palestinians are nothing but a conglomerate of Arab Muslim peoples from those countries surrounding present day Israel. Conversely, Mr. Ettinger also recounts John Haynes Holmes writing back in 1929 that, "Scratch Palestine anywhere and you'll find Israel.... There is not a spot which is not stamped with the footprint of some ancient [Jewish] tribesman.... Not a road, a spring, a mountain, a village, which does not awaken the name of some great [Jewish] king, or echo with the voice of some great [Jewish] prophet.... [The Jew] has a higher, nobler motive in Palestine than the economic.... This mission is to restore Zion; and Zion is Palestine."

I cannot understand how Western academics, in good conscience, who boast of having attained such high levels of education, can so willfully obfuscate fulgent hallmarks of ancient Jewish history while simultaneously, and with great zeal, propagate an empty and contrived history of a people who never existed before Yasser Arafat invented them.

Penny Rosenwasser, of Jewish Voice for Peace, recently remarked, "A lot of Jews have a lot of fear because we were nearly wiped out 70 years ago. But we can't let that get in the way of fairness." Now there's a mouthful of contradictions. First of all, I've never met an Israeli Jew yet who is afraid of anything, least of all of his enemies. It is the enemies of Israel who are afraid, and this is the only method by which peace and harmony can be achieved in a preponderantly Arab-Muslim Middle East. Secondly, it is not the virtue of "fairness" to allow an enemy bent on your destruction to dictate where you shall live and where you shall die, which is the long and short of any Arab Muslim excogitation regarding the future of the Jewish people of Israel. That is not fairness. That is suicide.

So let's leave it to the Jews of Israel--and not to the PhDs of this world--to decide how they shall deal with their enemies. No other democratic government in the Western hemisphere is required to subjugate their very citizens to the hateful whims of an enemy, which is what the world's academia requires of the State of Israel. Israel and her Jews have long ago paid for admission into the pretentious realm of "fairness" Penny Rosenwasser and her noetic "fellows" have only imagined in what is become their fortified stupidity.

Michael Devolin