Western Professors Pillory Israel Via Terrorist-Run Turkish University Center (Part I)

(JNS) Discredited University of Exeter history professor Ilan Pappé condemned the “criminal identity and nature of the Zionist project in Palestine” and Israeli “genocidal policies” during a June 19 webinar. Along with like-minded Israel-hating academics, he addressed “The Dialectics between Zionist Settler-Colonialism, Racism and Palestinian Decolonization” for a conference of Istanbul Zaim University’s Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA).

CIGA’s June 18-23 second annual Palestine Conference on “Challenging Apartheid in Palestine: Reclaiming the Narrative, Formulating a Vision” achieved considerable notoriety thanks in part to CIGA’s director, Sami Al-Arian. A federal court convicted this Palestinian-American former University of South Florida professor in 2006 for supporting the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which ultimately led to his deportation to Turkey in 2015.

At CIGA, Al-Arian has continued his long-established record of demonizing and calling for Israel’s destruction, which, as the conference showed, numerous academics in America and abroad zealously promote. They also turned a blind eye to CIGA’s support from the government of Turkey’s authoritarian Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has persecuted thousands of academics and journalists throughout Turkey.

Pappé’s presentation, “A Century of Colonization and Resistance: What Does It Tells Us About the Future,” continued the conference’s slander of Israel as an imperialist colony. “All Zionism is a settler-colonial project,” he said while discussing the “connection between whiteness and Zionism” and “Jewish white racism.” Such “equating Zionism with racism and colonialism” was for him the “best antidote for the weaponization of anti-Semitism,” but not an actual form of anti-Semitism itself, he said. Israel’s supposed illegitimacy led him to reject a two-state solution, for “partition is a colonist method of divide and rule.”

Columbia University professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history Joseph Massad further rejected any Jewish national liberation in Israel in his remarks on “Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Colonization.” Israel was born from an “alliance between European anti-Semitism, European colonialism, and the Zionist movement, an alliance that has persisted unhindered to the present,” he concluded. During the panel discussion, Massad dismissed Zionists as “lazy ideologues” who repeat common historical justifications for imperialism (e.g., benefiting the natives). Yet the blatantly anti-Israel New York Times “is utterly racist in its coverage of what happens around the world,” he said.