Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Fred Gottheil, a professor of Economicsat the University of Illinois.
FP: Dr. Fred Gottheil, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to discuss with you today a recent experiment you did — The Statement of Concern — which exposed the hypocrisy of leftist academics who pretend they care about women’s rights and the rights of gays and lesbians.
Tell us about the Statement of Concern, what motivated you to do it and what its results have been.
Gotteil: My “Statement of Concern” came about more by accident than by design. I was searching for someone or some subject on Google.com — can’t remember exactly — when I chanced upon multiple listings of Professor David Lloyd’s anti-Israel petition. That was in early January, 2009, just after the Gaza war. Lloyd’s petition, addressed to incoming President Obama, asked for a US abandonment of Israel. His four-page argument read as if it were written by Ahmadinejad himself. Of course, that wasn’t really interesting, considering the source. But it was the lead-in heading on so many of these petition-carrying sites that drew my attention. It read something like “900 Academics Sign Petition Against Israel …" I became more curious about who these 900 academics were than about the substance of the petition and found myself going carefully through the list of those 900. Did I recognize any? Indeed I did. Six were on faculty at the University of Illinois and one actually affiliated with its Jewish Studies Program! A few more were “the usual suspects” types but I couldn’t help but wonder who the others were and why they would sign onto such a distorted account of Israel.
I began searching through their web sites, making note of the signers’ research interests and department affiliations. That’s when I discovered that many were faculty in women and gender studies departments. The thought occurred to me: Would these same 900 sign onto a statement expressing concern about human rights violations in the Muslim Middle East, such as honor killing, wife-beating, female genital mutilation, and violence against gays and lesbians? I felt it was worth a try. My ‘Statement of Concern’ became a four-page document providing evidence of these human rights violations and identifying leading authorities – mainly Muslim clerics and professors – who condoned these anti-women and anti-gay practices. By late spring, I had the email addresses of 675 who signed Lloyd’s petition and sent them my ‘Statement of Concern,’ requesting their support. The results were surprising even though I thought the responses would be few. They were almost non-existent.
FP: What do you think explains this double standard on the Left in general and among leftist academics in particular?
Gottheil: Good question. And not an easy one to answer. I certainly claim no expertise but let me take a stab at it. You know, it’s not one size fits all. Some on the Left identify Israel with the US and that’s damning enough. Others, I think, see themselves as championing the cause of third-world people and, in this kind of mind-set, see Israel as white and successful, a deadly combination. There are some leftists — Marxists, mostly — who claim to oppose any form of nationalism and therefore regard Jews who are Zionist as enemy. Incidentally, these same leftists don’t seem to get too upset with African-style nationalism or even Arab-style nationalism. It’s just Jewish nationalism that gets their goat. Interesting, isn’t it? And we can’t discount the gorilla in the living room: plain old Anti-Semitism. It’s alive a well among the Left, and despite their vociferous denials, a growing phenomenon. In this respect, the academic Left is hardly different from the non-academic Left. They may be just a little more sophisticated in their loathing of Israel, but scratch the surface and it’s all the same.
FP: What conclusions do we make from your experiment?
Gottheil: What conclusions do I draw from this? The academic leftists are caught in an ideologically discriminatory trap of their own making. It turns out that with all their professing of principle, they are sanctimonious bigots at heart. And some are so obsessed about Israel that they would undermine their own selfinterest. Witness the faculty in gender studies who signed the anti-Israel petition but didn’t sign my “Statement of Concern” which is about discrimination of women, gays, and lesbians in the Muslim Middle East. Sort of pathetic, actually.
