Prof. Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania published an article just after the October 7 massacre. Gaza, the scholar argued, is actually a prison, and the solution is to dismantle the prison. "Everyone knows how brutal escaping prisoners can be," he wrote, justifying the horrors committed by Hamas.
This professor, just like all of Hamas's academic propaganda mouthpieces, did not mention in one word, only one, Hamas's rejection of any proposal by the international community to lift the closure. A decade ago, he published an article titled: "Israel can benefit from Hamas."
Read and rub your eyes. Lustick is an avowed supporter of BDS, meaning the elimination of Israel. How many students' brains has he poisoned already? He is also a primary supporter of a "one-state solution."
Please let Lustick absorb in the prestigious neighborhood where he lives ISIS supporters, who think that the United States should be destroyed. Only later, and as someone with experience, will he tell us whether it is worthwhile to establish one state with Hamas supporters. Until then, he is asked to keep his mouth shut.
Dr. Sarah Roy of Harvard has dedicated her life for the past two decades to legitimizing Hamas. "I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors," she makes sure to point out in every publication in the service of Hamas. She never bothered to mention the huge investments made by Hamas in the huge project of the underground tunnels and the industry of death as an expert on the Palestinian economy. Why confuse theories with facts?
"Israeli Arabs," said Noam Chomsky, considered the greatest global public intellectual, "cannot purchase ninety percent of the land in Israel." Here we have a winning argument to prove that Israel is an apartheid state. There is only one problem. Never happened. But damn the facts. The main thing is that there are theories.
The terrorist attacks in the United States, wrote Prof. Juan Cole, former president of MESA (Middle East Studies Association), were committed also "in response to the Israeli attack on Jenin". Well, the 9/11 terror attack was in 2001. The fiercest battle in Jenin took place in 2002. Is there a limit to lies? There isn't. There should be.
We can go on. And it seems that the more prestigious a university is, the greater the amount of distortions and lies. The common denominator of all these professors is not the delusional theories. The common denominator is that they have exempted themselves from facts. I've already written a book about intellectuals like Lustick. And since I wrote it, they've provided me with materials for two more books.
In recent years, I have searched, and haven't found, a professor from the well-known herd to tell his students that Hamas's Al Aqsa TV channel preaches the extermination of Jews and Christians. And I haven't heard a single professor tell his students that Hamas, as mentioned, rejected any proposal to lift the closure. And I haven't heard any of them criticize the fact that Hamas preferred to invest the money it received in an industry of death rather than prosperity. They will spread every pip of Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's extreme right ministers, to prove that Israel is a racist country. But they will ignore the calls for annihilation of Jews and Christians by Hamas leaders.
There are honest and decent intellectuals and academics in the United States. But they are in the minority. They are on the defensive. Their voices are barely heard. And the intellectuals from the majority group are the propaganda department of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They are a mechanism that works in the service of the axis of evil. They are not just Israel's problem. They are a problem of the free world.
Ben-Dror Yemini is the author of INDUSTRY OF LIES