The Massachusetts Teachers Association vs. Truth, Facts and Jews (part 2)
A serious post where we take a long trip down the abyss of infinite lunacy, courtesy of an "Anti Palestinian Racism" webinar by Anti-Zionist UMass Boston faculty.
Recently, we reported on a webinar held by The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) on March 21 and created by our very own UMass Boston faculty. The webinar was officially about “Anti-Palestinian racism”, but according to participants it trafficked in crude anti-Israel propaganda and antisemitic tropes. Our professional union, whose job is to bargain for our rights as workers and educators, found it fit to use our membership dues to hold an overtly antisemitic webinar.
The recording of the event was not available to the public so we could only speculate on what REALLY went on there, until one of our loyal readers shared its contents with us. Thanks to a bunch of diligent teachers who sat in and carefully transcribed the whole event, we finally had the privilege to peek into some of the most twisted and deranged minds our fine institution employs. And oh boy, do we wish we didn't. Part of our innocence was lost forever during this experience. We will never regain all of our sanity.
For the sake of brevity and the sanity of you, dear readers, we will not describe the whole event in detail - just the really juicy parts - and it is still going to be very long. We also toned down our satirical bend - this post is sort-of serious. We thank our expert friends and readers for fact-checking and directing us to relevant sources.
Brace yourselves, it is going to be awful. Really really for real awful.
Introductions, Greetings and Lies
First came an introduction by the MTA president, Max Page, who promised that the MTA was fully committed to open dialog (especially on the Sabbath when many Jews cannot attend) and that he knows that the topic is controversial but worry not - he is a Jew himself which makes it totally OK! He added that the webinar does not represent the official view of the MTA (but calling the war in Gaza genocidal actually does). Wow. That was reassuring.
Then came a strict warning against recording the event for non-internal purposes (but there is no law against transcribing or taking screenshots, which is why you’re reading this).
The moderator, former MTA president Merrie Najimy, said nice things about how everyone should be in solidarity so no one would notice the absurd statements that followed. For example - did you know that there are only two kinds of Jews - Arab Jews who are native and European Jews who are foreign invaders? Or in her words:
Before the creation of Israel, the land of Palestine was populated by Jewish Arabs, Palestinian Arabs, Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs. They were all living for the most part peacefully. So there is indigeneity. They weren't European Jews, but there were Jewish people living in the Middle East.”
We quickly googled: “How many Jews were in Israel before 1948?” The answer was 174,000 in 1931 and 630,000 in 1947. Did all, or any of them, identify as “Jewish Arabs?” We’ll leave it to you, the readers, as a homework assignment. But here is a hint: even Jews who came from Arab countries generally dislike the term “Arab Jews”.
She concluded: “And quite frankly, if Arabs and Jews and Palestinians and Jews lived together once, they can live together again”. But did they? And can they? We hope so, but some of the campus campers don’t.
A Brief and Not Exactly Sincere History of the Region
Then came a UMass Boston political science Professor who started by saying that Palestine always existed - the proof is the biblical Philistines, and that there was a historic state of Palestine.
Fact check: False on both accounts. Philistines are unrelated to present day Palestinians, the name Palestine was given by the Romans and invented by the Greeks, and there was never an independent state called Palestine. In the relevant time period Palestine was never Arab but an Ottoman, then British territory. Also: The biblical Philistines were foreign invaders. Oops.
She also claimed that the idea of a Jewish state
“…was a Western idea because the Holocaust was inflicted on the Jews of Europe – by Europeans, on Europeans. And the Palestinians proceeded as a great tragedy but they could not understand why they had to pay for the massacres that the Europeans did on their fellow citizens, the European Jews.”
While the Palestinian sentiment may have been valid, did she just pull a Whoopi Goldberg? It’s not that the Europeans ever considered European Jews to be fully European. They weren’t even “fellow citizens” because many countries explicitly stripped Jews of their citizenship before the Holocaust.
Also, the idea of a Jewish state predated the Holocaust by at least several decades.
Then came a lengthy description about the establishment of Israel, the occupation of the West Bank and the Jewish settlements. The description itself was largely correct, but she kept wondering how Jews, especially those pasty European Jews, had the Chutzpah to claim to be indigenous to Palestine.
She then claimed that Israel is an Apartheid state, disingenuously not making any distinction between the Palestinians/Arabs who are full citizens of Israel and those in the West Bank who are under Israeli military control. She also claimed:
Now Israel definitely did not want to become a settler state because Israel wanted to eliminate the Palestinians, did not want to live with the Palestinians or depend on the economy.
If it is true then Israel did an awful job at that, considering that the Palestinian Arab population in Israel/Palestine skyrocketed from 700,000 in 1948 to over 7 million today, almost two millions of whom are Israelis who actually live with the Jews.
As for the economy… suffice to say that Israel’s GDP is 50 times that of the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli occupation may be partly at fault, but there are certainly other factors at play.
Time For The Real Show to Start
If you thought the above was problematic, just wait till you hear from our one and only Hamas Cheerleader Extraordinaire, Prof. Khayke Scottish, who made the former speakers sound like Israeli government propagandists.
Prof. Scottish needs no introduction to our readers. She is a well-known terror apologist who dedicates her entire life and work to produce more good little soldiers for the noble cause of destroying the West.
And she went right for it.
You see, according to her it is not a conflict, the conflict is not centuries old (wait, we thought there was no conflict…), it’s not complicated, there are no two sides, and violence only comes from one of the two sides (wait, we thought there were no two sides…). We want to live in Khayke’s world where nothing is complicated and everything is so clear-cut.
She started by repeating, ad nauseam, the usual talking point about Zionism being settler-colonialism which, as opposed to just good old colonialism, doesn’t have a home base. It is very convenient since Jews didn’t have their own country back then… which raises the question - where DID the Jews come from? Don’t say “Poland” because Poland didn’t colonize Palestine, did it? And why did only ONE specific ethno-religious group in Europe go out to colonize, of all places, a small random territory in the Middle East with hardly any natural resources? It will forever remain a mystery.
She then showed a map comparing the colonization of America by the whities to the Palestinian supposed loss of land between 1946 to 2000. It looks like nearly all of the bottom left map was Arab owned in 1946 and the Jews came and stole it, right? Wrong. Most of the land never belonged to Arabs but was state-owned (read: British mandate owned), and most of the green area on the left-most map was uninhabited.
A Brief And Sincere History Lesson
Now, let’s revisit the above claim that the idea of a Jewish state was new and Western. In a way it is true, but so was the entire idea of dividing the Middle East into nation-states.
Why is it that for these people, world history always starts in 1948 and always in relation to the British mandate of Palestine, itself being 2% of the totality of the formerly Ottoman Middle East? The answer is - optics, optics, optics. When the dust settled after WWI, it transpired that the Allied powers won 1,500,000 km² of lands from the Ottomans and eventually created several countries, including what is today Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, (Trans)Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and four states on the Arabian Peninsula. The Kurds were promised 350,000 km² and got nothing. The Assyrians were promised nothing and got… nothing. The Jews got 14,000 km² (1% of what the Arabs got) for their “Jewish ‘national home.’ ” Can you find it on the map? (Hint: Find #11 and split it further into two). Did you hear all the complaints about Lebanon, Jordan or Palestine being a new, Western idea? Neither did we.
Get Your Own Copy of The Protocols Of the Elders of Zion
Back to the show: After some more settler-colonialism talk came the million dollar question, if you will: If Zionism is indeed settler-colonialism, why does no one ever talk about it? But like, ever, nowhere, at all, never?
We’re glad you asked, because here comes the highlight of the talk: It’s the evil Jews Zionists and their network of money, power and secrecy. Why, wasn’t it obvious?
The next slide shows what seems like Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifting former British Prime minister Boris Johnson with a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You see, Zionism is not a Jewish liberation movement but actually a well funded, secretive, well oiled propaganda machine that infiltrates all areas of society and all countries. It encompasses several organizations such as the AIPAC, the ADL and even the Jewish student organization Hillel. No one is outside Zionism’s sphere of influence, not even President Biden because it makes total sense that Israel (Area: 8,019 mi², population: 9.5 millions) controls the United States (Area: 3,796,742 mi², population: 335 millions).
Rings a bell, right?
But Khayke Scottish is NOT an Antisemite, because according to her there is absolutely no connection between Jews and Israel or Zionism:
And this is what Zionists and Zionism don't want us to understand or realize, right? Israel does not equal Jewish people. Israel is a state. Jewish people are those of a particular religious practice or faith tradition. Some of them live in Israel, most of whom do not, right?
Fact check: Wrong on both accounts. Judaism is both a religion and a culture/ethnicity and most Jews live in Israel. It also so happens that 75% of Israelis are Jews - by far the only Jewish majority country in the world. What a strange coincidence!
She continues:
So not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews. And finally, not even if all Jewish Israelis are Zionists, there are indeed anti-Zionist Jewish Israelis.
Not all people have two legs but most do. Not all cats have a tail but most do. Not all Hamas supporters are compulsive liars but… OK. You get our point.
She goes even further and claims that Anti-Zionism = Anti-Racism. The only logical conclusion of which is that Zionism = racism. Also, there follows that Anti-Racism = Anti-Zionism, hence BLM should be out of work by now.
In the end of this part the host brought up the perfectly reasonable question: “Is it possible to be pro-Palestinian and pro-Zionist and does Israel have the right to exist?” Both panelists went round and round, avoiding a direct answer.
Jewish Voices for “Peace”
Last came a retired UMass Boston faculty and a member of Jewish Voices for Peace, a very non mainstream Jewish activist group, described by some as a hate group. She said Zionism was bad and ended by quoting JVP's website about their vision for the future.
We imagine Jewish Israelis joining Palestinians to build a just society rooted in equality rather than supremacy, dignity rather than domination, democracy rather than dispossession, a society where every life is precious. A fundamental pillar of that vision is that racism against Palestinians is anti-Semitic, and from our perspective anti-Zionism is actually anti-racism.
Sounds very nice and we know it’s totally going to work, because equality for all, democracy and peace are the hallmarks of every Middle Eastern country, no?
But Wait, Where is the Anti-Palestinian Racism Part?
At this point you may wonder - A good smearing of Israel is always fun, but it wasn’t the subject of our talk, right? Wasn’t the webinar supposed to be about Anti-Palestinian racism?
In reality, the Anti-Palestinian racism part was only at the first few minutes of the talk. We saved it for last because we wanted to present it side by side with what was being said about Jews and Zionism and highlight the double standards of the speakers.
They claim that denying Palestinian peoplehood, indigeneity and right to self determination is anti-Palestinian racism. At the same time, they deny Jewish peoplehood, indegineity and right to self determination.
They claim that smearing those who support the Palestinian movements is racism, but they smear Zionism and Zionists left and right.
According to them, denying funding or deplatforming Palestinians is racism, but they keep silencing and deplatforming Zionists, and they call for a boycott, divest and sanctioning of Israel.
Just a random example:
John Mill, in On Liberty, gives four reasons for letting your opponent speak, two if s/he is right (to avoid missing the truth or part-truth accidentally) and two if s/he is wrong (to see the truth in a new light and to protect oneself from creating a new dogma). Even if Khayke Scottish and Comrade Miller Melnick heard of the book, they obviously never got to the fourth bit.
P.S. - repeat after us: You are not entitled to anyone’s funding.
That’s (almost) all, folx. Some of you may find these pills useful.
But we can’t let you go before you see the last slide where freedom, liberation and Palestine are redefined.
When we sent a draft to some of our friends for fact checking, one astute observer noticed that the above slide subsumed not only the proper State of Israel into Palestine but also the Golan Heights, claimed by Syria. We wonder what the Syrian regime has to say about it.
Thank you for posting this.
A while back I wrote a piece trying to figure out what "Zionism" was. It was a word that had been spat out, since the 7th of October, like some curse word, with the implication being that " here be monsters" like some kind of Nazi or Fascist. I didn't actually know what one had to believe in to deserve such an awful categorisation. Those beliefs must be pretty vile, right?
Like many things categorised as "evil" in our world of woke make believe (eg JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, wearing a hairstyle that doesn't 'belong' to you, etc) the actual 'evil' was somewhat difficult to spot.
I discovered that although I'm not Jewish, I am one of these unmentionables; a Zionist. Zionism, my reading informed me, constituted the 3 primary beliefs that (a) the Jewish people should have their own homeland where they could again determine their own destiny free from the fear of persecution that had bedevilled them for centuries (b) that this state should be located somewhere in the region that had once been their homelands and upon which there had been a continual Jewish presence, albeit mostly in a minority since the Romans kicked them out and (c) that this state should have the right to protect itself both militarily and economically.
I am not entirely sure which of these principal pillars is deemed to be so worthy of hate? With the possible exception of (b) they seem pretty much the norm for any state. The issue with (b) is the location. It's always location, location, location. In this case, however, it seemed that history (or maybe God?) had paved the way; nobody actually 'owned' that region and there wasn't actually a 'country' there in the usually accepted sense of that word.
The region had been 'owned' by various entities for around 2,000 years by right of conquest. And guess who the original conquered were? Since that time there had been no other nation state in existence defined by that geographical region. When the last 'owners', the Ottomans, were conquered, the Brits were given the mandate to sort it all out, eventually.
After the false start of around 1920 when it was proposed that the Jewish people would have 20% of what is now Israel, a proposal agreed upon by the Jewish people living there, we ended up in 1948 with the establishment of the state of Israel consisting of just over 50% of the land - although a fair chunk of that was the Negev.
A very sizeable chunk of the region that had been called Palestine was used to create the new country of Jordan. Curiously, the Palestinians don't seem to want this back, even though it was land taken from them by the Brits. This interesting fact indicates that, maybe, there's a bit more to this conflict than just land ownership.
Within a day of its establishment this new country of Israel found itself at war with the other 50% of the region that, minus Jordan, had been carved up. If you were asked to place a bet on the victor at that time you probably wouldn't have put your money on Israel, but win the war they did.
It is hard to know what history would look like today had that war never been started.
What I find very interesting is that much of the pro-Palestinian narrative I've seen - and you can see it in the posters in the current campus protests - consists of mentioning the establishment of the state of Israel and then, seemingly out of nowhere, these evil Zionists just kicked around 400,000 Palestinians (who weren't at the time technically Palestinians) off their land. It's as if there was a whole bunch of people were there singing the Islamic version of Kumbayah round their campfires at night when in marched the Zionist thugs to kick them off their land.
No mention is made of the context of a brutal civil war.
Perhaps it's because Israel didn't actually start that war? It's kind of hard for the Zionists are aggressors narrative when it turns out that in the single biggest sequence of events that set the tone for the next 75 years, the nasty Zionists turn out to be the non-aggressors.
Incidentally, you also won't often hear of the upwards of 400,000 Jewish people who were kicked off their land by the neighbouring states at around the same time. It's as if expulsion only matters one way.
I can't remember which Israeli Prime Minister said something like "If Israel laid down its arms there would be no Israel. If Palestine laid down its arms there would be peace". I fully believe that. The historical record of Israel trying to find peaceful solutions through negotiation is well-documented. I do not see the evidence for portraying Israel as some kind of Zionist Hate Monster.
This is not to say that Israel over the years has not done some terrible things. But that's an accusation that can be levelled at many countries. Iraq, Afghanistan, anyone? Didn't we in the West also do terrible things in these places to pursue what we believed to be in the interests of our own security?
There's much I still have to learn about the history of the conflict in the region and I'm fairly sure there are some significant things I'm missing, but the conventional pro-Palestine narrative with words like colonial, apartheid, genocide, etc is so facile as to beggar belief.
There are 2 contexts that are often missed out, or glossed over somewhat. The first of these is the religious aspect; this conflict is not merely about land but is mixed in with a clash of religious ideologies. The second context, which I've already mentioned, is that of war.
Although we often think of the initial war, not started by Israel in 1948, as 'over', I'm not sure that's correct. I think it's still ongoing to some extent. The actions of Israel should be interpreted from within that context; they're doing what they need to do to survive, or at least what they judge they need to do to survive.
Even within that context we might still come to the conclusion that Israel goes too far at times, but the context and historical record does not lend itself to the notion that Israel and 'Zionists' are some lunatic monstrous demons hell-bent on genocide. Quite the opposite in my view.