Scott Johnson at Power Line has an important post on post-Summers Harvard, focusing on President Drew Gilpin Faust’s recent comments and an article in Friday’s Crimson by Professor J. Lorand Matory (the faculty member who introduced the 2005 no-confidence motion against Summers).
Matory’s article is entitled "Israel and Censorship at Harvard," in which he asserts there is “a decades-old U.S. practice of threatening, defaming, or censoring scholars who dare to criticize Israel.” He believes that Zionism — the restoration of the modern state of Israel in the land on which it previously stood, formally endorsed by the United Nations in 1947 — is a “convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-Europeans” and was “outmoded” by the “mid-20th century.”
Matory is entitled to his views, of course, but the penultimate paragraph in his article is worth scrutinizing. Here is the paragraph:
Thus, my concerns about Zionism are motivated by neither pro-Arab nor anti-Jewish bias, but by the fear that those who dismiss all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism—or, equally often, as Jewish self-hatred—risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Israel’s defenders convince the world that all legitimately Jewish people are Zionists and that Jewish people are uniform in their opinions about Israel and its policies, then the convinced will conclude that condemning Israel or its policies requires them to hate Jewish people.
Matory has created a straw man, since no one dismisses “all” anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, but the remarkable part of his statement is the rest of the paragraph: he asserts his "concerns about Zionism" are motivated by his "fear" that if those who oppose his views convince everyone that all "legitimately Jewish" people are Zionists, he and people who share his views will unfortunately have to "hate Jewish people."
Does that paragraph make grammatical, logical or moral sense? Is it really possible that a tenured Harvard professor wrote it?