Prof. Steven Plaut
Steven Plaut teaches at the University of Haifa and is author of "The Scout" (available from Gefen Publishing House). More of his writings can be seen on the New Plaut Blog, as well as in numerous electronic and print newspapers.Okay, folks, fast current events quiz.
Question: When is it a felony to yell, "Drop dead!" at a cop?
Answer: When the person yelling is an anti-Left Israeli professor.
(No, not this anti-Left Israeli professor; I do not yell at Israeli cops.)
The professor in question is Hillel Weiss, a controversial fellow who teaches Jewish literature at Bar-Ilan University. Weiss is active in the decidedly anti-Left "Professors for a Strong Israel" (as am I) and in pro-settler and "right-wing" protest groups. He was in the news last year for being involved in a group calling itself "Sanhedrin," which threatened to issue religious rulings against those who participated in the expulsion of Jewish settlers. (Had they carried out their threat, there was an off-chance that some officials might have been denied an aliyah to the Torah if any synagogues were to take the pronouncements seriously.)
In another matter, Weiss was cited in the press calling for "acts of Pinhas" with regard to the Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem, and the prosecutor investigated whether this might have been intended as a call to violence. As far as I know, nothing came from the interrogations of Weiss in the matter. The amazing part of that episode is less the McCarthyist interrogations by the police of Weiss than the fact that anyone in the Israeli prosecutor's office knew what an "act of Pinhas" was.
A few days ago, Weiss was "overheard" (caught by news camera) cursing out a colonel in the Hebron brigade of the Israeli army when the colonel was engaged in evicting some Jews from a home in the city. Weiss told the colonel to drop dead. Actually, he was a bit more lurid in his cussing than that, wishing the colonel to be the source of mourning for his own mother and that the colonel's wife be a widow and his children orphans. It all amounted to "drop dead."
Now, you might question the good taste of those comments, but should they be a felony? Should Weiss be prosecuted and fired from his job at Bar-Ilan University?
Well, if you share the Haaretz viewpoint of what constitutes free speech, then you will agree that Weiss is a felon, but if you have any sense of democracy and freedom of speech, you will not.
The President of Bar-Ilan University - who never quite got around to firing the other professor there who made headlines this year for endorsing medieval blood libels against Jews (Ariel Toaff) - set up a campus committee of inquisition to see if Weiss deserves to be fired for his "crime." No Bar-Ilan sanctions were ever implemented against Toaff and he was allowed to retire and draw his nice pension.
Meanwhile, overnight, Weiss became the right-winger that the Israeli media and politicians most love to hate. Ehud Barak, now again head of the Israeli Labor Party, demanded legal actions against Weiss. The newspapers are calling for Weiss' defenestration. The police and Attorney General are planning to crucify him. The Jerusalem Post claims Weiss will be probed (and I hope for his sake it is not the same way my doctor does it).
Putting aside the questions of taste in the specific words chosen by Weiss in what appears to be a moment of temper and hotheadedness, just what did Weiss do that was so terrible? The media moguls rolling their eyes and beating the tables with their shoes are demanding action against Weiss, but they are exactly the same people who have never had a word to say about far-leftist professors in Israel endorsing terror, cheering when Palestinians murder settlers, justify terror, promote boycotts of Israel, and so on. The late Professor Baruch Kimmerling, for instance, regularly justified terrorist atrocities against Jews.
Nor have the media commentators ever called for legal actions or sanctions against Arab politicians or other Arabs who publicly endorse terror, call on Israel to be annihilated, deny the Holocaust, or in some cases engage in espionage. So, the outrage being expressed in such elegant posturing by these people is highly selective.
Ehud Barak's sudden interest in academic extremism in Israel would also be much more convincing if he had ever spoken out about the trashing of academic standards at Israeli universities in order to hire and promote leftist traitors and seditious post-Zionists working for Israel's destruction. What about those Israeli leftist professors who not only curse police and soldiers, but who regularly attack them violently at "anarchist" demonstrations? Prof. Anat Matar from Tel Aviv University, to name but one, has been arrested for assaulting police. And among the Bar-Ilan University professors not being investigated by a commission set up by the president of Bar-Ilan is Dr. Kobi Snitz. He's a mathematician who is very active in the violent "anarchist" attacks on Israel's security wall and on Israeli police and soldiers (I do not know if Snitz himself has engaged in violence).
Why does Barak have nothing to say about them?