Tony Judt does not like the "settlements" in Israel and he tells us about his opinion in the Times today, in "Fictions on the Ground."JTA says that Tony Judt in the Times called Bar Ilan University a Madrassa.
In an Op-Ed in The New York Times, historian Tony Judt slams American acceptance of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and portrays Bar-Ilan University as a Taliban madrassa, writes JTA Managing Editor Uriel Heilman.No. That is not what Judt did. Here is what Judt actually wrote,
(It is not by chance that he chose to deliver this speech at Bar-Ilan University, the heartland of rabbinical intransigence where Yigal Amir learned to hate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before heading off to assassinate him in 1995.)Notice the parenthesis. It's not the main point of the article. And by the way there is no comparison to the Taliban or to a madrassa. Judt is actually correct that BIU is right of center as an institution overall. But it is a pluralistic, democratic school. It's a pure Judt fantasy to say that BIU teaches hate and assassination.
They say all the time in the universities when people object to over the top speeches (usually left wing, but sometimes in defense of inviting an Iranian nut-job to a campus), that the answer to that byproduct of free speech is more free speech.
We don't agree with Judt's opinions and we don't like his outrageous rhetoric.
Apparently the JTA editors believe that the answer to such egregious writing is even more ridiculous scribbling.
Just to show the obvious shoddiness of Judt's writing, I found him (in my issue of the Times at least)stating that Yigal Amir murdered Rabin in 2005.
ReplyDeleteglad you picked up on that. we saw that the online version which we read has a note - that was the case and they corrected it - hey why bother with the facts when you can just spout off any opinion you want?
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