L'Affaire Grinberg continues to make waves and arouse fury in Israel.



Just to refresh your memory, a couple of weeks back a leftist extremist from Ben-Gurion University (where else?) named Lev Grinberg, a political sociologist - whatever that is - published an article in a Belgian newspaper calling on Europe and everyone else to end Israeli sovereignty by imposing on Israel a settlement that would be rejected by the majority of voters. It would, however, be a settlement that he and another 2% of Israelis would endorse. He then denounced Israel for engaging in symbolic genocide when Israel recycled the Sheikh Yassin, the head of the Hamas and the man who had ordered murders of hundreds of Israeli civilians, a great many of them children.



Since then, the Israeli media, not exactly bastions of the Israeli Right, have been uncharacteristically enraged at Grinberg. It is not as if there is a shortage of anti-Semitism in Europe these days, such that they are in need of calls by Ben-Gurion University extremists against Israel perpetrating genocide. Anyway, Grinberg himself has been trying to minimize the media flack against himself through creative deconstructionism of his own words, engaging in the usual post-modernist gibberish about how words just don't mean what they say.



Meanwhile, the Israeli Left has been screaming that any criticism at all of Grinberg represents McCarthyism and assaults on academic freedom. Grinberg has been insisting that by symbolic genocide, what he was really trying to say is that when Israel killed Yassin, Yassin was a national symbol of Palestinian nationhood, and so offing Yassin was symbolic genocide of the Palestinian nation.



Now think about that for a nanosecond or two. If killing Yassin was symbolic genocide, then just what would Grinberg have called it if some group of Jewish partisans in 1943 had actually been successful in assassinating Hitler? I mean, after all, Hitler was also a national symbol. The answer is that this would also have to be symbolic genocide by Jews of Germany, in Grinberg's scholarly opinion.



The latest leftist to chirp in about how criticism of Grinberg is suppression of free speech and academic freedom is Zeev Segal. He writes an Op-Ed in Haaretz today bewailing Limor Livnat's criticism of Grinberg. Segal is a lawyer who teaches in the Department of Policy Studies (not the law school) at Tel Aviv University. Segal is aghast that anyone should threaten academic freedom and pluralism in academic opinion by criticizing Comrade Grinberg.



One little problem though. There are some serious questions about how honestly Segal himself believes in free speech and academic pluralism. Let me tell you a little anecdote:



About 10 year sago, I got a call from this same Zeev Segal. At the time, I was writing a lot against attempts to introduce affirmative action into Israel in any form, and I was especially opposed to the most common forms of affirmative action, namely dumbing down standards, arbitrary ethnic and gender discrimination, and fashionable quotas. Segal was organizing a panel discussion on affirmative action for Tel Aviv University students and asked if I would take part. I agreed. The panel discussion was not just a random campus event, but rather a course event and attendance was required for students in the Department of Policy Studies.



When I got there, I discovered that the panel discussion was not to be a serious debate at all. Instead, it was a session in leftist indoctrination. For two and a quarter hours, the students were subject to harangues from six different people, every single one of them supporting affirmative action quotas and lowered standards, including a couple of feminists and some other leftist activists and professors. At the end of two and a quarter hours of one-sided indoctrination, Segal introduced me to the assembly and announced that I would be allowed three minutes to present the other side of the affirmative action debate. Segal's introductory words and tone made it clear I was there only as a form of comic distraction. Two feminists in the audience started screaming that I should not be allowed to speak even for three minutes.



I went to the podium, announced that the rules of the debate did not appeal to me and so I was relinquishing my three minutes. I then left the hall and about a dozen students ran after me to shake my hand.



I mention all this because I think it helps put into context the sudden devotion by the same Zeev Segal to academic pluralism, and to fair and balanced free speech on campus.