 |
| Scene from the Islamist bombing of the Boston Marathon in April of 2013 |
I recently watched a TV political drama whose writers clearly have a decidedly liberal/left political ideology. The plot involved the bombing of the White House by a Neo-Nazi group.
Of course no one should deny that a Neo-Nazi group should be portrayed as evil. Neo-Nazism is among the most despicable ideologies imaginable. What is nonetheless troubling about this particular drama series is that it rarely portrays Islamist terrorism. The only time they even reference it is in the context of ‘mistaken identity’. Meaning an attack that might initially be assumed to be from an Islamist group only to be later discovered that is was from a right wing extremist group.
Rarely do dramas like this portray any form of Islamist terror unless it is as a biased first reaction to terrorists unknown. Until proven that it wasn’t and discovered to be a right wing hate group.
The message dramas like this convey is that Islamist threats are not anywhere near those of right wing extremists. They thereby minimize the very real threat of the Islamist terrorism that has been plaguing this country and the entire world.
Let me hasten to add that I firmly believe that most Muslim citizens of this country are indeed peace loving and even patriotic Americans that would not harm a fly. I agree that we should treat them with the same dignity and respect that we treat any other ethnicity. That is what I do. I live in a neighborhood that is filled with Muslim residents and we all get along just fine.
But at the same time we must recognize that not all Muslims are like that. There is not an insignificant number of extremist Muslims that have committed horrible acts of terror. Beginning with the events of 9/11 followed by many others since. Far more people have died or have been seriously injured by them than those injured by right wing extremists since that fateful day in September of 2001. And yet dramas like this keep insisting that the far greater danger is from the extremist right.
I believe that the majority of dramatic representation of terrorism on TV and in film has this kind of bias and therefore influences public opinion in a way that endangers us all.
But the entertainment industry is not alone in such bias. Especially as it affects Israel and the Jewish people. When it comes to anti Israel bias there is no shortage of that in an even more influential arena: Academia. They may actually have a greater impact on society that the the entertainment industry does because of the respect academia generates.
The latest of such negative influences has come in the form of a book by Jasbir Puar, a professor at Rutgers University. It was published by Duke University Press and entitled The Right to Maim.
Mosaic Magazine excerpts a review of that book by Professor David Berger. Here in part is what he says:
Israel has been accused of poisoning Palestinians [and] harvesting their organs; thousands of Jews are said to have refrained from coming to work at the World Trade Center on that fateful September 11, with Jews responsible in whole or in part for the attacks. . . . The historian Gavin Langmuir proposed a term to characterize the [medieval] blood libel, the host-desecration charge, and the well-poisoning accusation: these figments of the anti-Jewish imagination should, he said, be termed “chimerical anti-Semitism.” [Now] we encounter chimerical anti-Israelism...
[Thus] Puar asserts that Israel’s policy of shooting dangerous demonstrators or attackers in a manner that avoids killing them should be seen as a strategy of maiming the Palestinian population in order to create a debilitated people more easily subject to exploitation. Written in the highly sophisticated language of theoretical discourse current in certain historical and social-scientific circles, [the accusation] has led a significant number of academics to shower the author with extravagant praise...
It would be one thing if professor Puar was an outlier that was dismissed by her colleagues as unduly prejudiced and not to be relied upon. But as noted, the opposite is apparently true:
The Right to Maim was not only published by a respected university press. It bears an effusive blurb from the prominent academic Judith Butler, and when a talk that Puar delivered at Vassar College on this theme was attacked in a Wall Street Journal article, nearly 1,000 academics ranging from distinguished professors like Rashid Khalidi of Columbia to graduate students—most of whom have no expertise in relevant fields—wrote a letter to the president of the university containing a similarly effusive declaration of the quality of her work and her standing as a scholar.I agree with Professor Berger. We cannot ignore a blood libel like this when it comes from a respected Academic that has received so much praise. It only adds fuel to the current atmosphere in certain academic circles which have become irrationally and on occasion virulently anti Israel. Where student protests have crossed over into blatant antisemitism and have sometimes turned violent. Ignoring it is not an option. Doing so is at our own peril.