Thursday, August 5, 2010
I kid you not. They say college is overpriced and who can blame them? Gabriel Schoenfeld at The Weekly Standard: Zionism 101 at the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a great school. And academic freedom is a great principle. But should there ever be limits on who can teach what?
Consider the following course offering from Chicago's 2010 catalog:
Zionism and Palestine. This course has three broad aims, the first of which is to explore the various strands of early Zionist thinking in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second aim is to analyze how the European Zionists who came to Palestine created the Jewish state in the first half of the twentieth century. The third aim is to examine some key developments in Israel's history since it gained its independence in 1948. While the main focus is on Zionism and the state of Israel, considerable attention is paid to the plight of the Palestinians and the development of Palestinian nationalism over the past century.
This sounds unexceptionable, though one might detect a hint of something amiss in the one-sided reference to the "plight of the Palestinians." In fact, there is something amiss. The professor teaching this course is one John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer is a an expert in international relations. He has no record of scholarship in the history of Zionism, let alone command of the relevant languages to acquire a knowledge of that history.
Hmm Obama went there as did his good buddy Khalid. Now Mearsheimer. Well isn't that nice. They'll be grinding out a good 1000 thousand uberliberal dopes a year now each one banging away on their Macbooks. I sincerely hope they all make the pilgrimage to Gaza and stay there forever.
This is a very important battle. Even pro-Zionists don't teach it correctly. They leave out the promise of one Caliph that if the Empire fell he would deed Palestine to the Jews if he could, and the Treaty of Sevres when his successor did so. Of course, that doesn't justify Israel's existence in the eyes of Jews and Europeans, but it does have a powerful effect on Muslims.