Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at UC Irvine and a fierce opponent of Israel. He exploded at me one day on campus when I said he was an anti-Israel activist in front of his class during an open speaking event he was hosting. He said that a “slanderous” remark.
LeVine also writes for the despicable Al Jazeera. Here is his latest in which he defends the report recently issued by a UN agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), that called Israel “an apartheid state”. That was the one that our ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, rightfully rebuked. As a result of the outcry, the head of the agency, Rima Khalaf, resigned.
LeVine left out that one of the report’s writers was the discredited academic, Richard Falk, a long-time hater of Israel. Anything with Falk’s name on it is highly dubious.
But he drags up the old Goldstone Report (that even Mr Goldstone disowned), Desmond Tutu, his UCI Israel-bashing colleague David Theo Goldberg, and even the traveling Israel-basher, Ben White, who as far as I can tell, makes his living traveling from campus to campus giving presentations against Israel.
But here is the real whopper in LeVine’s article (You’d better be sitting down for this one.)
“Not surprisingly, Israeli officials were quick to question ESCWA’s credibility, given its membership of 18 Arab countries excluding Israel despite its location in western Asia (unlike Tunisia, for example) and the fact that the human rights records of most members are little better than Israel’s.”
Here is a list of the 18 member countries of the ESCWA:
Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, The Sudan, The Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, The United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
And LeVine thinks that most of those countries have better human rights records than Israel albeit just a little? Mauritania still practices slavery, for God’s sake!
Looks like another Campus Watch “Howler of the Month” award for LeVine. I think he already holds the record.
