UC-Berkeley Professor Sandy Tolan: The Mad Hatter Speaks

Sandy Tolan is a graduate school professor at UC-Berkeley. It is more clear than ever that Berkeley awards tenure predicated on incompetence, stupidity and political correctness.

Mr Tolan authored an opinion piece, ‘Never again’ gone mad in Israel, in which he assails Israeli policies are entirely out of proportion to the Palestinian provocations that included the 1,000 rockets fired into Israel since the announced Hamas ‘ceasefire,’ culminating with the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, specifically kidnapped to induce the release of prisoners that have been incarcerated because they were caught committing or planning crimes that would result in the deaths of innocent civilians. Mr Tolan piously declares,

In the name of forcing the release of a single soldier, Israel has seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister’s offices and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not “follow all orders” of the Israel Defense Forces; loosed nocturnal “sound bombs” under orders from the Israeli prime minister to “make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza”; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

The only issue that merits criticism of the Israelis are why they have not responded more forcefully.

As we have noted, the fact that the Hamas government was freely elected is irrelevant. Adolph Hitler was elected in a free and democratic election in 1933. Being freely elected is no guarantee that a government will behave in a civilized way. In the case of Hamas, that is assured. They have continued to ratchet up their racism and bigotry, and they proudly proclaim their antipathy toward Jews. They endorse and remain sympathetic to goals of Hitlers National Socialism. They at once deny the Holocaust and in the same breath, praise the Nazi efforts to exterminate Jews, promising to ‘finish what Hitler started.’

The Israelis are under no obligation to fund, facilitate and aid groups that openly admit their wish to destroy them. That Mr Tolan is upset that the Israelis arrested members of a government sworn to destroy them, only indicates Mr Tolan’s detachment from reality.

Had any European government taken Hitler at his word, and arrested and killed the top echelon of the Nazi Party, 20 to 30 million Russians would still be alive today. Their would be no sailors buried in a cold watery graves in the Atlantic, never to see the sunlight and the coast of France would not have cemeteries with neat rows of crosses and other monuments.

Hitler’s insanity came at a cost of 50 million lives. As Fausta noted,

just asked a question to the panel about the recent reports of the Palestinian election of a Fatah member named “Hitler” in Jenin and the fact that at least 25 PLO members go by the name of Hitler or Abu Hitler. Could any of them comment personally about how Nazism was perceived?

Walid Shoebat: “Mein Kampf has been a best-seller throughout the Muslim world. Haj Amin Husseini, who was a guest in my family’s home, was nicknamed the Fuhrer of the Muslim World.”

“There was never any excuse given for Nazis for their hatred of Jews. When it comes to Islamic terrorists, we make all the excuses in the world”

Ibrahim Abadallah: “Most Arabs consider Hitler a hero precisely because he killed 6 million Jews.”

That the western world did not take Hitler seriously was a mistake- and to a great extent, understandable. Europe had not seen the implementation of racist ideologies and decades of bigotry for a long time. Europeans believed they were past that.

Not so with the Arab world. On the contrary, over the last century they have only reinforced their stated racism and bigotry and they have deliberately infused Islam with a heretofore unknown hatred. The Islam of today is not the Islam of a half century ago. Can you imagine this happening today?

Adolph Hitler had no track record, when it came to the Jews- only rhetoric. The Arab world has both the track record and rhetoric of hate and destruction. If indeed, ‘the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely less valuable than an Israeli’s,’ while that may be a tragedy, and bad for Palestinian self esteem, it is also an accurate reflection of reality. The Palestinians elected Hamas, the Palestinian Nazi Party. That is no different than the Germans electing Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. The self esteem of the German volk suffered because of the choices they made, and rightly so. After the war, Germans had to come to grips with the evil they had wrought. Tolan states,

…that no amount of suffering by innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it fuels, has been driven home endlessly through decades of shellings, wars and uprisings past.

What mindless and self serving drivel!

The Palestinians are suffering because of the choices they made. Nio one forced them- those choices were made freely and independently. As for the Israelis, their collective memory is remarkably clear: There has never been a great movement to save Jews by ‘concerned’ progressives. Tolan mentions not a whit about Arab anti Semitism, preached from the pulpits, racism and bigotry, taught in schools and hate and violence encouraged in Arab media. Why? Because he doesn’t give a damn. If he did, he would say so. In fact, Tolan’s silence on those realities make him an equivalent of Bull Connor, finding justification for his bigotry.

Tolan isn’t done, of course. He talks about the Palestinian refugees:

During the 1948 conflict, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled the violence or were driven from their homes. In the middle of July, when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, more than 30,000 Arabs marched into exile, some for more than 20 miles. Many never made it; those who did were certain they would be coming back in a matter of days or weeks. Fifty-eight years later, they remain in exile.

Tolan neglects to remind his readers of Jews in the Arab world, numbering some 800,000 that were expelled from those countries, starting before the establishment of the State of Israel. Nor does Tolan recall that the fate of those Jews was not limited to dry dusty marches. The Jews in those countries were victims of mass murder and pogroms, no doubt a mere pesky annoyance for the likes of Sandy Tolan. In addition, Tolan doesn’t want you to know that many Palestinian refugees left at the behest pf Arab governments, that promised a ‘bloodbath’ and that they would ‘drive the Jews into the sea.’ The real Naqbah for Tolan is that newspapers and recordings of those Arab radio broadcast exist.

Tolan can’t help himself- and gives himself away, when the only reference to terror he makes is to Baruch Goldstein (he had to go back to 1994 to find the example). That despicable character and event is enough for Tolan to focus on. There is no word of Arab terror or Arab media broadcasts by religious authorities gravely pronouncing that the rape of non Muslim women and children is incumbent upon Muslims in the event of war.

Finally, as a last insult, Tolan reasons:

Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and their nation’s current actions are driven in part by a hard determination, born of the Holocaust, to “never again go like sheep to the slaughter.” But if “never again” drives the politics of reprisal, few seem to notice that the reprisals themselves are obscenely out of scale to the provocation: For every crude Qassam rocket falling harmlessly, far from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down on the Palestinians. For one missing soldier, a million and a half Gazans are made to suffer. In Israel, today, it is “never again” gone mad.

No mention of terror attacks, suicide bombers, attacks on religious sites, weddings, Passover holiday meal and hundreds of other such events. Nor does Tolan consider that although …’every crude Qassam rocket falling harmlessly, far from its target’ is only a matter of design, not intent. Does Tolan really believe that the Palestinians are deliberately missing Israeli civilian targets, and that the attempt to destroy is only a show? Does he believe they want to miss civilian targets? Perhaps Tolan needs to be reminded of what some Palestinians will do if given the opportunity, up close and personal. Think Danny Pearl and others.

We also noted,

Those wretched and ragged Jews did not choose to behave like the Palestinians. Rather than glorify and amplify dysfunction, they built a democratic state, with world class institutions and infrastructure. Rather than glorify hatred and bigotry, they built a functioning state. That truth has not been lost on the Arabs in the region or in Israel herself. Time and time again, those Arabs make clear they would rather live under Israeli control than under the Palestinian Authority. When the Israelis pulled out of southern Lebanon, the Alawites (the privileged clan that claims the Assads of Syria), made clear they too, wanted to remain under Israeli jurisdiction.

Can anyone imagine, any circumstances under which Israelis would indoctrinate their children to believe that killing was a religious obligation? Can anyone imagine Israelis instructing their children to act as human shields for gunmen? Can anyone imagine Israelis publishing textbooks instructing children to hate and slaughter? Can anyone imagine Israelis devoting media programming to extol the virtues of death and murder?

Sandy Tolan believes that the self esteem of the Palestinians needs to be addressed before the stated Palestinian desire to ‘finish what Hitler started.’

Lastly, in what has to highlight his detachment from reality, Tolan says,

The irony is that, contrary to making themselves more safe, the Israelis, just like the Americans in Iraq, are only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.

Mr Tolan does not make clear exactly who hates us in Iraq- and for good reason.

It is a good thing to be hated by evil people, be it in Iraq or the Palestinian Authority. It is a good thing to be feared by people whose stated aim is to do harm and it is a good thing to reviled by those for whom freedom and democracy pose a threat.

Dr Sanity addresses the likes of Sandy Tolan in her excellent post, The “Rennaisance” in Academic Institutions,

What we are seeing in our colleges and universities is no more than the postmodern philosophical word made flesh and dwelling in what used to be our institutions of higher learning. We might as well begin to call them Institutes of Higher Feeling.

It seems to that exceptionally histrionic, paranoid and delusional people– like many of today’s academics– used to dwell in a different kind of institution that has largely fallen out of favor in the mental health field; but perhaps our well-known colleges and universities are at the forefront of a renaissance / revival in this area?

Dr Sanity’s post is superb- for both the content and implications. Read it- and the relevance of Sandy Tolan, et al, is put into proper perspective. Earlier in her post, she quotes Stephen Hicks:

Ask yourself what philosophical theory is now dominant in intellectual circles and when you come up with the answer, you will have identified the subtle poison that is destroying intellectual thought and deliberately undermining truth, reason, and reality. The answer is postmodernism:
By most accounts we have entered a new intellectual age. We are postmodern now. Leading intellectuals tell us that modernism has died, and that a revolutionary era is upon us–an era liberated from the oppressive strictures of the past, but at the same time disquieted by its expectations for the future….
[...]
Having deconstructed reason, truth, and the idea of the correspondence of thought to reality, and then set them aside–”reason,” wries Fouccault, “is the ultimate language of madness”–there is nothing to guide or constrain our thought and feelings. So we can do or say whatever we feel like. Deconstruction, Stanley Fish confesses happily, “relieves me of the obligation to be right…and demands only that I be interesting.”

Ah, the world we live in.

For more on Tolan and Saree Makdisi, see this.