When truth and lies are treated the same.
Something I never understood as a kid were the endless reports in the media of celebrities behaving badly. Some were involved in DUI arrests while others wrapped their expensive cars around trees. There was no shortage of family violence that required a police visit, and serious crimes like drugs or theft were not uncommon.
I later realized that those accustomed to fame often can’t get over not being so famous anymore. They understood an ironclad rule: all publicity is good publicity. Just as in math we learned that the absolute value of 2 and -2 is the same, namely 2, a newspaper article about an Oscar nomination or punching one’s ex-wife reaches the same number of eyeballs. Kanye West can have black men standing in a circle in LA, shouting, “Heil Hitler,” as he did recently because he knows that it will get him truckloads of free publicity. So what if it’s negative. Who cares? The world is thinking about me.
The same goes for truth and lies. People can claim that Israel is an apartheid state, though such a suggestion is completely and demonstrably false. One of our boys graduated from the Open University in Israel Monday. We started the festivities at the marina in Herzliya. On the boardwalk were Arab and Jewish families enjoying the beautiful views and gentle breezes. Next to our table sat a soldier on leave, with his army-issued rifle. An Arab family passed by and there was no threat and no one felt threatened. Each family had one boy on a scooter, and the two kids passed each other as they did loops near the parked boats. Israeli Arabs felt as comfortable on the boardwalk as any Jewish family.
Our next stop was the graduation ceremony. As the hundreds of graduates were called to receive their diplomas, I estimated that around 20 percent of those graduates were Arab students, based on name/hometown. They received their degrees and applause just like everyone else. If Israel was truly an apartheid society, would its largest university accept Arab students? Of course not. But if you were to go to Harvard and ask the lunatics on the lawn if Israel was practicing apartheid with its Arab population, they would say 'of course.'
And while the Open University is not in the same league academically as Harvard, there were some unique features that I appreciated. Though the school does have physical campuses throughout the country, most teaching is performed online. We are very proud of our son and the effort he made. Most of his classes were at night; when we were in the U.S., he had classes and exams at 4 in the morning local time. The university gives bachelor's and master's degrees in many fields but it does not have programs in the hard sciences, possibly due a lack of laboratories and qualified instructors. So no, the Open U. is not Harvard. But, there was something that in my mind was impressive.
The evening started with a remembrance of 13 students who were murdered on October 7, 2023. Most of the students begin their studies after their army service. There was quite a range of ages, including one grandfather as well as a husband-wife team that received their degrees together. When the war started, they both went off to their respective units and continued their studies while in the army. The students, being older and many of them having families and/or jobs, were more serious than their 18-22-year-old peers at Harvard who have zero life experience and went to college because that’s what you do after high school. These people came to learn in order to advance themselves, and many did so while running families or working in parallel to their studies. I remember my first lecture at Harvard. A well-known professor slammed Harvard: “They claim diversity, but all of you are of the same age. I remember after World War II, when soldiers came on the GI Bill. We had much more diversity of age and experience than the university has today.”
Harvard, meanwhile, knows no bounds in disgracing itself. Below is a report, also from Monday, from the Jerusalem Post:
“One of two Harvard students who assaulted a Jewish classmate during an anti-Israel protest in October 2023 has been appointed as class marshal by Harvard Divinity School at the upcoming graduation ceremony.
"This comes just three weeks after the other assailant was awarded a $65,000 Harvard Law School fellowship to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The Harvard Law Review website says its $65,000 fellowship goes to recent Harvard Law School graduates with a demonstrated interest in serving the public interest through their work and scholarship.”
The two hooligans in question threw a keffiyeh over a Jewish student and screamed, “Shame, shame, shame,” at him. Imagine if I found one of my Jewish buddies in Harvard Yard and we threw a noose over the head of a black student and screamed, “Go back to Africa!” Would Harvard allow me to be appointed a Class Marshal? Class Marshals are supposed to represent the best of a class. Would Harvard give me a scholarship to work at the Jewish Defense League (JDL)? I don’t think so. But when truth and lies, honor and disgrace, good guys and bad guys are all the same, then why not honor two students who attacked a classmate who was just a Jew?
You would have thought that at some point Harvard would stop with its antisemitism fetish. But it can’t stop. Because of its strong desire to show Orange Man Bad who’s the boss, it’s on the glide slope of evil behavior and cannot get off. Every action is taken to show Donald Trump that he can’t bully them. So they award two guys who attacked a Jewish student—that’ll show the Donald. I really do hope that the president follows through on his threat to transfer 3 billion dollars in Harvard grant money to trade schools.
Because lies are given the same weight as truth online and in the media, arguing with Jew-haters is generally futile. They can claim genocide where there is none; they can scream, “Apartheid!” where everyone is treated equally. There is no way to argue with them because unlike in the past, they are not bound by truth as the ultimate arbiter. They can say whatever they want in our fact-free world. That does not mean that we can do nothing. We need to always put forth the truth and ridicule these liars and frauds for their deceitful positions. Arguing on merits will go nowhere; showing that they are despicable human beings might get some to drop them as sources of their information.
Oh, by the way, real apartheid exists in Palestinian areas. A dentist told me that when he first came to Israel, he had many Arab patients. They used to invite him and his wife for coffee in Ramallah, Birzeit, and elsewhere—and in the 1980s, they would go to these homes. Not anymore. Jews are not welcome. The only Jews in Gaza since 2006 are the hostages held by Hamas. So go figure out where the real apartheid is.