Thursday, May 25, 2017

Noura Erakat, Israel's Smiling Enemy, Speaks at Berkeley

Michael Lumish

{Sponsored by Campus Watch and published by The Algemeiner and Jews Down Under.}

Noura Erakat
If Brooklyn-based "feminist" and Palestinian apologist Linda Sarsour is the progressive-left flavor of the month, George Mason University international law professor Noura Erakat is a more intellectually significant, up-and-coming player in the growing Western, anti-Jewish, Israel-hating business.

Approximately fifty people attended Erakat’s keynote address at the recent UC Berkeley conference on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War, “6 Days, 50 Years: 1967 and the Politics of Time. The conference was part of a larger University of California project "hosted in conjunction with Universities of California, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara."

Erakat, a practitioner of “lawfare” against Israel and the niece of Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat, represents a young, bright, smiling enemy to Israel and the Jewish people.

In her talk, “Taking the Land Without the People: International Law and the 1967 War,” Erakat raised such leading questions as “How has an exorbitant register of death and destruction as experienced in the Gaza Strip during Israel's most recent military offensives become tolerable in the language of law?” and “How has the Palestinian use of force been delegitimized to the point of extinguishing armed resistance by criminalizing all of it?”

The loaded nature of Erakat’s questions will be obvious to anyone with a passing grip on the history of the Jewish people under thirteen centuries of Arab-Muslim imperial rule. Given the lack of human rights for non-Muslims throughout the Middle East, it is laughable that she could ask them with a straight face.

Erakat asserted that the 1967 Israeli victory established “the machinery of occupation” whereby villages were established for the indigenous Jewish population in Judea and Samaria allegedly in direct contravention of international law.

Her principle argument was that the presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria represents a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention prohibiting states from moving people into territories occupied through war. As a skilled attorney and professional harasser of Middle Eastern Jewry in the U.S., Erakat acted as though her interpretation of international law is self-evident when, in fact, it is highly dubious.

Whatever the meaning of the Fourth Geneva Convention in terms of Jewish people building housing for themselves on Jewish land, Erakat rightly noted that Israel faces major international push-back. The “international community,” or so she stated, is opposed to land acquired via war and perhaps more importantly, the Palestinians simply would not allow it. The irony of such a position seemed entirely lost on her.

Naturally, Erakat also dragged out the whiskered canard that since the Six Day War, Israel has used national security as a mere “cover for further colonization.”

If the war was a war of national self-defense, which it was, then Israel has some legal and ethical “wiggle room” for its allegedly aggressive “settler-colonial” behavior. But, according to Erakat, the Six Day War was not defensive. On the contrary, it was a war of Israeli-Jewish aggression against its largely innocent Muslim neighbors.
   
The fatal flaw in Erakat’s approach, if not from a legal perspective then certainly from an ethical one, is that Arab and Muslim peoples oppressed “their” Jews as second and third-class non-citizens from the rise of Muhammad until the demise of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

The Jews of the Middle East are the only people in human history to regain sovereignty after millennia of ethnic cleansing of their homeland. Like the Christians in the Middle East and Europe, Jews suffered the Arab-Muslim imperial conquests from the seventh-century until their failure at the “Gates of Vienna,” which marked the line of Jihadi advance into Europe in 1683.

If the Arabs of the Middle East wish to be viewed as victims of Jewish aggression, it might be helpful if they would stop the genocide of the Christians in the region. It would also be helpful if their religious leaders would stop teaching their children that killing Jews is beloved in the sight of Allah.

One cannot, after all, claim to be a victim of secular racist oppression while ruining millions of lives with religious racist oppression. From an ethical or moral perspective, it simply does not work that way.

Finally, this represents a difficulty within Middle East Studies, more generally, because it is an academic field grinding a political axe against both the West and the indigenous Jewish population in that part of the world.

People are beginning to realize the truth of this matter but, unfortunately, no one has told Noura Erakat.

9 comments:

  1. Another Arab agent bent on destroying Israel How quaint. Roger Waters should write a song about her.

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  2. Niece of Saeb Erakat? His family are colonialist/settlers from southern Arabia. He runs around the world telling audiences about his "Canaanite roots." He is a lying son-of-a-bitch. Apparently she's the same, taking advantage of the historically ignorant pushing the PLO' UR- LIE that these Arabs are "the people of the land."

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    1. They spell their names slightly differently in English for some reason. He is Erekat and she is Erakat. I have no idea why. I would not underestimate this woman, tho. She has looks, brains, charisma, and the kind of easygoing friendliness that makes her very good at what she does.

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  3. Can't believe I can't get upset that GOP candidate "body slammed," an obnoxious reporter. I have changed.

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    1. The Republicans have a golden opportunity in this political moment, but I do not see where they know how to take advantage of it and I am not the least bit certain that I want them to, anyway.

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  4. "Taking the Land Without the People" pretty much sums up the aspirations of the PLO and associates.

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  5. There is no such thing as international law. Its merely agendized political activism cloaked in shameless fake academic rhetoric.

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    1. International law is a failed dream, along with the UN, the EU, the League of Nations, and the War to End all Wars. It's a fantasy. A political wraith with no honest sense of justice and no real power beyond what we give it in our imaginations. And, whatever else it may be, it is anti-Israel and, thus, anti-Jewish.

      If there is any such thing as Cosmic Justice then when Arafat greets Abbas upon his arrival in the Bad Place it will be the United Nations in session for all eternity.

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    2. Why do you say international law is anti-Israel? I know that it is used as a reference to bash Israel, but much of that is inappropriate.
      According to Eugene Kontorovich it is basically treaties and traditional convention and fairly general and non-specific.
      According to Mark Steyn the UN is a 1940's attempt to solve the problems of the 1930's.
      I would agree that it is a work in progress with a bad prognosis.

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