Hey, this was on Duke’s web site…

The following is a letter from Dr. Beinin that appeared in the Sunday Magazine in California.

A JEW'S OWN EXPERIENCE OF THE ZIONIST LOBBY

Last Sunday in San Francisco, the ADL sponsored “Finding Our Voice,” a conference designed to help Jews recognize and confront the “new anti-Semitism.” Ten days before, Jews silenced my own voice.

I was supposed to give a talk about our Middle East policy to high school students at the Harker School in San Jose. With one day to go, my school contact called to say my appearance had been canceled. He said, “a certain community of parents” complained to the headmaster. He added that the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley had played a role.

I was raised a Zionist. I went to Israel after high school to live on a kibbutz for six months. I met my wife there. We returned to Israel four years later, thinking we’d spend our lives on a kibbutz, working the land and living the Zionist dream. Why did the council feel the need to silence me?

This was not our first run-in. I have long advocated equal rights for the Palestinians, as I do for all people. I criticize Israeli policies. I crossed the council’s line of acceptable discourse. Hosts like the Harker School, and others, are intimidated, and open dialog on Israel is censored.

In 2005, Marin’s Rodef Sholom synagogue caved to the council and revoked my invitation. Roy Mash, a board member, resigned in protest. In his resignation letter he asked whether “given Judaism’s long and deep tradition of concern for justice and ethics, a Jewish venue is (not) precisely the setting most appropriate for a speaker like Dr. Beinin?”

I moved to Israel expecting to find social justice pursue, but what I saw in Israel called this into question.

I tended livestock on Kibbutz Lahav, which was established on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. The Palestinian inhabitants had been expelled and forbidden to return. One day we needed extra workers to help clean manure from the turkey cages. The head of the turkey branch said we should not ask for kibbutz members to do the work because, “This isn’t work for Jews. This is work for Arabushim.” “Arabushim” is an extremely derogatory racial term.

I had participated in the civil rights movement in America, picketing Woolworth’s stores that wouldn’t serve African Americans. Yet in Israel I discovered the same, stark racism.

Organizations claiming to represent American Jews act as if the highest purpose of being Jewish is to defend Israel, right or wrong.

No one is spared. New York University Professor Tony Judt also moved to Israel with notions of justice. Judt learned, as I did, that most Israelis were “remarkably oblivious of people who they had kicked out, and were suffering in refugee camps.”

In October, the Polish Consulate in New York canceled a talk by Judt after pressure from the ADL and the American Jewish Committee.

The Zionist lobby knows it cannot win based on facts.

abdul alhazred how much did you win? $$....lol. QRS,I've been waiting two days for the next question....