Author: Webb

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that’s completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn’t read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.

Chinese workers in Israel sign no-sex contract

Chinese workers at a company in Israel have been forced to agree not to have sex with or marry Israelis as a condition of getting a job.

Charedi Rabbis Rush To Disavow Anti-Gentile Book

Leaders of the country’s most prominent ultra-Orthodox yeshiva are scrambling to distance themselves from a book by one of their disciples, which argues that gentiles are “completely evil” and Jews constitute a separate, genetically superior species.

Studies counted on to allocate funds for the distressed are far apart on the number.

Two new studies to determine the location of Jewish Holocaust survivors, for use in making future allocations to the most needy, differ widely on the number of survivors worldwide, The Jewish Week has learned.

BERLIN (AP) — Nazi Germany used hundreds of hospitals and clinics to kill at least 200,000 handicapped, mentally ill and other institutional patients who were deemed physically inferior, researchers said Tuesday.

A “book burning” scandal has erupted at Canterbury University over an article on controversial Holocaust scholar Joel Hayward.

The decision to recall and destroy copies of the history department’s journal History Now — and dump editor Ian Campbell — is dividing the academic community.

Canterbury lecturer Thomas Fudge, who wrote the offending article, has resigned in disgust and plans to leave at the end of the year.

Dr Fudge said he could not remain at a university that suppressed academic freedom.

“It made me a hypocrite trying to teach my students to think critically and ask the tough questions — all of the academic values that universities are about — and here my department was saying, effectively, we’re going to burn books.”

The article revisits the storm that surrounded the 1993 masters thesis of former Canterbury student Joel Hayward, which questioned the validity of Holocaust history.

Dr Fudge, who lectures on medieval religious dissent and witch-hunting, explored what for Dr Hayward became a career-ending controversy.

He revealed in the article that Dr Hayward had been harassed and received death threats against his children.

Dr Hayward suffered an emotional breakdown and left his teaching post at Massey University in June last year. He now cannot get a job.

The Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: From Holocaust Historian to Holocaust? played on the title of his thesis, The Fate of Jews in German Hands.

The article appeared on May 6. Next morning, Professor Campbell was asked to appear before his editorial committee and history department head Peter Hempenstall.

Professor Campbell said he was effectively pushed: “The fact is that board disapproved of my editorial decision and, as a result, I couldn’t continue as editor.”

An embargo was slapped on the journal and 500 copies recalled.

Staff were later advised that copies of the offending journal had been destroyed on the authority of Professor Hempenstall.

Another May edition of History Now was printed without the Fudge article and an editorial discussing truth and martyrdom.

On May 14, Dr Fudge defended his article at a special meeting of history department academics, calling the censorship “unconscionable.”

Last week, he confirmed to his students that he had resigned.

Professor Hempenstall declined to speak, saying the matter had now become an employment issue between the university and Dr Fudge.

– NZPA

Source: NZ Herald

Last week, when his administration was criticized for justifying the Iraq invasion with forged evidence, President Bush accused his critics of attempting to “rewrite history.” Then Ari Fleisher sneered at “revisionist historians.” As historians, we are troubled by these remarks.