Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Publication: Jewish World Review
Date: November 8, 2002
URL: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1102/alien_visit.asp
If a visitor from a far away galaxy
were to land at an American or Canadian university and peruse some of the
petitions that were circulating around the campus, he would probably come
away with the conclusion that the Earth is a peaceful and fair planet with
only one villainous nation determined to destroy the peace and to violate
human rights.
That nation would not be Iraq, Libya,
Serbia, Russia or Iran. It would be Israel. There are currently petitions
circulating on most North American university campuses that would seek
to have universities terminate all investments in companies that do business
in or with Israel. There are also petitions asking individual faculty members
to boycott scientists and scholars who happen to be Israeli Jews, regardless
of their personal views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. There have been efforts,
some successful, to prevent Israeli speakers from appearing on college
campuses, as recently occurred at Concordia University. There are no comparable
petitions seeking any action against other countries that enslave minorities,
imprison dissidents, murder political opponents and torture suspected terrorists.
Nor are there any comparable efforts to silence speakers from other countries.
The intergalactic visitor would
wonder what this pariah nation, Israel, must have done to deserve this
unique form of economic capital punishment. If he then went to the library
and began to read books and articles about this planet, he would discover
that Israel was a vibrant democracy, with freedom of speech, press and
religion, that was surrounded by a group of tyrannical and undemocratic
regimes, many of which are actively seeking its destruction.
He would learn that in Egypt, homosexuals
are routinely imprisoned and threatened with execution; that in Jordan
suspected terrorists and other opponents of the government are tortured,
and that if individualized torture does not work, their relatives are called
in and threatened with torture as well; that in Saudi Arabia, women who
engage in sex outside of marriage are beheaded; that in Iraq, political
opponents are routinely murdered en masse and no dissent is permitted;
that in Iran members of religious minorities, such as Baha'is and Jews,
are imprisoned and sometimes executed; that in all of these surrounding
nations, anti-Semitic material is frequently broadcast on state-sponsored
television and radio programs; in Saudi Arabia apartheid is practised against
non-Muslims, with signs indicating that Muslims must go to certain areas
and non-Muslims to others; that China has occupied Tibet for half a century;
that in several African countries women are stoned to death for violating
sexual mores; that slavery still exists in some parts of the world; and
that genocide has been committed by a number of countries in recent memory.
Our curious visitor would wonder
why there are no petitions circulating with regard to these human rights
violators.Are the tactics used to combat terrorism by Israel worse than
those used by the Russians against Chechen terrorists? Are Arab and Muslim
states more democratic than Israel? Is there any comparable institution
in any Arab or Muslim state to the Israeli Supreme Court, which frequently
rules in favour of Palestinian claims against the Israeli government and
military? Does the absence of the death penalty in Israel alone, among
Middle East nations, make it more barbaric than the countries which behead,
hang and shoot political dissidents? Is Israel's settlement policy, which
78% of Israelis want to end in exchange for peace, worse than the Chinese
attempt at cultural genocide in Tibet? Is Israel's policy of full equality
for openly gay soldiers and members of the Knesset somehow worse than the
policy of Muslim states to persecute those who have a different sexual
orientation than the majority? Is Israel's commitment to equality for women
worse than the gender apartheid practised in Saudi Arabia?
Our visitor would be perplexed to
hear the excuses made by university professors and students for why they
are prepared to delegitimate Israel while remaining silent about the far
worse abuses committed by other countries. If he were to ask a student
about the abuses committed by other countries, he would be told (as I have
been): "You're changing the subject. We're talking about Israel now." This
reminds me of an incident from the 1920s involving then-Harvard president
A. Lawrence Lowell. Lowell decided that the number of Jews admitted to
Harvard should be reduced because "Jews cheat." When a distinguished alumnus,
Judge Learned Hand, pointed out that Protestants also cheat, Lowell responded,
"You're changing the subject; we're talking about Jews."
It is not surprising, therefore,
that as responsible and cautious a writer as Andrew Sullivan has concluded
that "fanatical anti-Semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler's, is now
a cultural norm across much of the Middle East and beyond. It's the acrid
glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis.
They all hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed."
Our intergalactic traveller, after
learning all of these facts, would wonder what kind of a planet he had
landed on. Do we have everything backwards? Do we know the difference between
right and wrong? Do our universities teach the truth?
These are questions that need asking,
lest we become the kind of world the visitor would have experienced had
he arrived in Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
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(Alan M. Dershowitz is a professor
of law at Harvard and author of, most recently, Why Terrorism Works. This
essay is based on a speech made to the United Jewish Appeal of Toronto.)
