Benny Morris: Now I know how most Israelis feel, having the modern historical record of their state, distorted and trashed by me and my other fellow “New Historians”. It’s a most unpleasant feeling.
What goes around, comes around. For those of you who don’t know by now, “islamophobia” (a ficticious meme of epic proportions) is the most important issue on the planet! For those of us fighting against the Islamization of the West, it’s actually the revealing of the factual truth about Islam, for the die hard Muslim, it’s the shock of having their ideology exposed for all to see like a drunken sailor out on a night of liberty.
It’s really rich to see the factually challenged historian now facing, (and much to the discredit of Mr.Morris himself) something that Israel has been facing for years. Being badly maligned and vilified with overly simplistic and disingenuous one liner claims, for Morris it’s “islamophobe, “racist”, for Israel it has been “apartheid” and “occupation”.
Morris, according to a Tundra Tabloids’ well placed source, also happens to be someone who has a tendency of changing his opinions according to the loudest voice in the room. Perhaps now, seeing that Islam itself, (not Israeli policies) has had a major contributing role in the 60+ years of war being waged against the Jewish state, that this is Morris’ “Mea Culpa”.
If so, the TT is then prepared to offer Benny Morris a few kudos if the following does indeed turn out to be true. According to report in the J’lem Post, the professor of Israeli history had a speaking engagement cancelled due to a Facebook campaign mounted against the professor from speaking at the university. What were the dreaded words of offense? In a Facebook entry the following was introduced as “evidence” of Morris’ islamophobia:
In a 2004 interview, Morris shared his belief that “there is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien”. He also described what he called “the phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there” as “creating a dangerous internal threat”.In the same interview, Morris called Palestinian society “very sick” stating that it should thus “be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers…Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another”.
It sounds like great common sense to the Tundra Tabloids, which has been repeating these themes for years. who knows, perhaps Morris frequents these pages as do other commentators on Middle East and Islamic issues? I can’t think of any rationally minded invidual looking and reading what Morris has stated, and knowing full well what Islam has done in the past, and is capable of doing in the future, and still regard Morris as a racist. He’s not.
“Islamophobia” is a mythical term that confuses the real issues of the day. It seeks to replace antisemitism as the watch word for bigotry and racism, while its own leaders reject the fact that Muslims have been and can be, antisemitic. The OIC secretary-general, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, said as much while visiting Helsinki in 08′.
You can read the Jerusalem Post article on the story, which by-the-way, curiously refrains mentioning just what where the offending statements were. KGS
LONDON – The Israel Society at Cambridge University has succumbed to pressure and canceled a talk by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev historian Benny Morris after protesters accused him of “Islamophobia” and “racism.”
Morris was scheduled to speak to students at the university on Thursday, but following a campaign led by anti-Israel activist Ben White the Israel Society canceled the talk. Instead Morris was invited to speak at an event hosted by the university’s Department of Political and International Studies.
White, who graduated from the university in 2005 and authored the book Israeli Apartheid: A Beginners Guide, set up a protest page on Facebook in which he claimed that “on different occasions, Morris has expressed Islamophobic and racist sentiments towards Arabs and Muslims.”
He added: “We find it offensive and appalling that an official student society would want to invite such an individual.”
Following the Facebook protest, a letter was sent to the student union by the university’s Islamic Society, other students and two staff members from the English Department asking it to take a stand and show it is serious “in opposing bigotry and Islamophobia.” The 15 signatories said Morris’s views were “abhorrent and offensive.
“The issue is hate speech, and the impact of a visit by this individual on the campus’ atmosphere for the student body’s minority groups… His visit is insulting, threatening to Arab and Muslim students in particular and also goes against the spirit of the student union’s stated anti-Islamophobia policy,” the letter read.
Last year, Cambridge’s Palestine Society hosted Abd al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. In 2008, Atwan said the terrorist attack on Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav yeshiva, in which eight students were killed and 15 were wounded, was “justified” as the school was responsible for “hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists.”
On February 18, Daud Abdullah, deputy-secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, will speak at Islam Week organized by the Cambridge University Islamic Society. Last year, the British government distanced itself from Abdullah after he signed the Istanbul Declaration, in which he called for attacks on the British navy, were it to enforce a ban on arms smuggling to Gaza. He has also called for continued military action against Israel.
Jake Witzenfeld, president of Cambridge University’s Israel Society, canceled the Morris talk, apologizing for any “unintended offense.”
