Deja Vu: The Lobby Takes Aim at Another University Professor

It's another Israel Lobby hit-job, just like the one that resulted in Norman Finkelstein being denied tenure at De Paul University, Chicago. This time it's William I. Robinson of the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), who like Finkelstein is a Jewish academic, and who, also like Finkelstein, has the overwhelming support of his students against the debate-stifling, free speech-suppressing tactics of the Zionist Lobby.

Leading the campaign against Robinson is the notorious ADL of B'nai B'rith and the Simon Weisenthal Center, who were alerted of Robinson's alleged "anti-Semitism" by two Jewish students attending one of his classes.

Two Jewish students dropped the class, saying they felt intimidated by the professor's message. They contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which advised them to file formal complaints with the university.

In their letters, senior Rebecca Joseph and junior Tova Hausman accused Robinson of violating the campus' faculty code of conduct by disseminating personal, political material unrelated to his course.

"I was shocked," said Joseph, 22. "He overstepped his boundaries as a professor. He has his own freedom of speech, but he doesn't have the freedom to send his students his own opinion that is so strong."

Does that even make sense? Presumably, free speech is ok by Joseph as long as your opinions aren't too 'strong'. The message that poor little Rebecca is referring to is an email that Professor Robinson forwarded to his sociology students containing information, images and commentary regarding the recent Gaza massacre. What the Terror State did to Gaza is definitely "shocking", but check out the content of the original email and see how "intimidated" you feel. Even the slavishly pro-Israel Zionists at The New Republic are sick of all the fuss, exclaiming "Enough With the Campus Inquisitions!"

An Interview with William Robinson
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor

By DOUG HENWOOD

Doug Henwood: We're now joined by William Robinson, who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California in Santa Barbara, someone I met about six or seven years ago at a conference and, although I've disagreed with him on some issues, I thought he's a serious and thoughtful guy. I was very distressed to learn, reading Insider Higher Ed, the website, today that he's being persecuted by the Zionist lobby for an e-mail that he sent around to some of his students. Welcome William Robinson, tell us the story of what you sent and what's been happening.

William Robinson: Yes, good afternoon to everyone. I included some material which was highly critical of the Israeli invasion of Gaza as part of the reading material for a course on globalization and global affairs, and this was in January. And I am now facing charges, here at the university, of anti-semitism and violating the faculty code of conduct because two students in the course - there were eighty students - these two submitted a formal letter of complaint that they found offensive the material condemning the invasion of Gaza. The students immediately withdrew from the course, I don't even know them personally. And what is particularly egregious about this case is not that the students submitted a complaint - any student is allowed to do that - but rather that the university took the complaint seriously and is actually prosecuting me...

DH: You have tenure right?

WR: Yes, I am tenured, I am a full time professor...

DH: So in theory you're protected against persecution for your beliefs.

WR: No, in theory, I have total, I and even if I don't have tenure, have academic freedom, and this is in total violation of my academic freedom and of all of the principles of academic freedom, and of the university's own charter on academic freedom, and the American Association of University Professors principles and procedures on academic freedom, so there is absolutely no basis for any of this. What's going on, and I want to explain, behind the scenes we have been able to find out - students on campus and faculty have formed a Committee to Defend Academic Freedom which is taking up this issue, and by the way, there is a blog that they put up with all of this information, which at some point I would like to give your listeners - but we have found out that the Anti-Defamation League, which, as you know, and your listeners probably know, is an organization which, at one time, did very good and very important work in denouncing anti-Semitism, but since then has become a, basically, a mouthpiece for the Israeli government, a defender of the policies and practices of the Israeli state, and goes after and attacks anyone that criticizes those policies. So these students did not even accuse me of doing anything which we would consider anti-Semitism - discrimination against Jews, against the Jewish religion and so forth - they said openly and outright that the professor introduces material which criticized the state of Israel and that equals anti-semitism.

DH: Now, I think some people found offensive that you had likened Israeli behavior to the Nazis. Is that an issue?

WR: Well I didn't do that. What I did was I forwarded several items from the world media, from the internet media. One item was an article written by a Jewish journalist in a Jewish newspaper here in the United States, and it was criticizing the invasion of Gaza...

DH: So you didn't endorse this position?

WR: I didn't endorse it but I did include, I said, in presenting this material, I said that Gaza is Israel's Warsaw and I explained the context. That's because in Warsaw the Nazi's surrounded Warsaw, concentrated Jews in Warsaw, wouldn't let anyone in, wouldn't let anyone out, wouldn't let supplies in, wouldn't let supplies out; as a result there was famine and disease and so forth...

DH: Which is exactly what's...

WR: ...exactly and precisely what the Israeli's are doing in Gaza. And that's been denounced by the Red Cross, the United Nations, the international human rights organizations, and moreover, academic freedom totally allows me to present such controversial material and that's part of what the university is all about. We academically debate these controversial issues. I want to explain though what happened. We got some inside information in the last week. The president of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Fox-...

DH: Foxman

WR: Foxman, he arrived here in Santa Barbara and he called a meeting with a select group of faculty, and he called the meeting for no other reason than to say that we want Professor Robinson prosecuted, and this is explosive. We have just learned about this; we're going to go public with it. And so there is this outside Israel lobby which has come on to campus, and which is accusing me of anti-Semitism and of doing all of these terrible things in order to create an atmosphere of complete intimidation. You know that anyone who criticizes the policies of the state of Israel is silenced, and is given that label of anti-semitism; that's a way of creating this atmosphere of intimidation, that no one can speak out about what's going on in Israel-Palestine, and so forth. That's the larger context.

DH: Ok, I'm sorry to make this so rushed, but this is a last minute addition and the rest of the show is full, just let me conclude...What can people do?

WR: [Go to] sb4af.wordpress.com. That's the blog that the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom has set up, and a lot of this information is on there, a lot of the documents are on there.

DH: All right, well thank you William Robinson and best of luck in your fight and we'll be back to look at this in the future.

WR: Thank-you, thank-you very much.

DH: I've been speaking with William Robinson, who is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, under persecution by the intellectual police at the Zionist lobby, the Anti-Defamation League.
__

More from Professor Robinson here, and Robinson is interviewed by Hesham Tillawi here on Youtube. Also see another Professor (Donald Douglas) whine about Robinson being 'anti-American', losing the ensuing debate big-time in the comment thread below.

The American Bankocracy

"The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power– political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved. As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future."

Senator Barry Goldwater, 1979

Obama is considered by many to be the Wall Street President, almost as if it's a first in U.S. politics, but nothing could be further from the truth. With the advent of the Global Financial Crisis (or GFC - might as well give it its own acronym since we'll be hearing about it ad nauseam for a long time yet), now is a good time to review the history of the Wall Street Establishment's incestuous relationship with the U.S. government and the extent to which America is ruled not so much by its politicians, but by the banking interests that fund, select and control them.

Murray N. Rothbard's article Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy, written in 1984 and first published by a small financial journal called the World Market Perspective, is an epic historical account of the control and manipulation of the U.S. government by the big banks and their agents, from the Lincoln era all the way up to the end of the Reagan Administration. His article details the massive influence of Morgan and Rockefeller banking interests on the U.S. government and its foreign affairs throughout the 20th century - from within and without - which by 1973 had come together in the form of the Trilateral Commission. This shady organisation has hand-picked, vetted and groomed for office every presidential candidate since Nixon, including Obama.

Rothbard, until his death in 1995, was a Jewish-American economist, author and intellectual, and a fierce opponent of fractional reserve banking and the Federal Reserve [.pdf] (also see Rothbard's The Mystery of Banking [.pdf]). He was also a staunch anti-Zionist [.pdf] who wrote about the hypocrisy of the ADL and the "menace" of what he called "Organised Anti-Anti-Semitism".

The major fount of OAAS [Organised Anti-Anti-Semitism] is the venerable Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), the head of what the grand Old Rightist John T. Flynn referred to during World War II as the "Smear Bund." (Flynn was forced to publish himself his expose of the orchestrated smear of isolationists in his pamphlet, The Smear Terror.) Since the end of World War II, the key strategy of the ADL has been to broaden its definition of anti-Semitism to include any robust criticisms of the State of Israel. Indeed, the ADL and the rest of the OAAS has formed itself into a mighty praetorian guard focusing on Israeli interests and Israeli security.

Rothbard's article Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy is not what I would call entertainment - it's rich in detail and scrutinises the minutiae of each politician's banking and/or commercial connections - but it's a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the financial elite's stranglehold on the government of the United States. And it's probably more important and salient now than it was when it was written in '84.

Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy