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January 1,2008/ 24 Tevet 5768 An MA Thesis at Hebrew U. & The Pursuit of Excellence? When you go forth to war against your enemies and the Lord your G-d has delivered them into your hands and you have taken them captive and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and desire her that you would want her to be your wife, then you shall . . .shave her head and pare her nails and shall put the clothing of her captivity away . . . a full month . . . . and . . . if you have no delight in her [i.e., desire] then you shall let her go wherever she wills. . . . –Deuteronomy, 21:10-14 And thus the Book of Deuteronomy instructs a Jewish soldier how to behave with a captive woman. If he desires her, he must wait a month. In the meantime, the Torah demands that he make her unattractive so as to blunt his desire. Only then, after looking at her unattractive appearance for thirty days, is he allowed to have intercourse with her—after marrying her. The soldier is not given license to rape her under any circumstances and only upon marrying her is she permitted to him. From the beginning of our nationhood, the Jewish people were warned that when their soldiers took female captives, they were not allowed to act as other soldiers in other armies have done. The Torah says quite clearly that the captive woman is not to be treated as a slave or whore. Why? Because our Creator has so commanded us. From generation to generation, as long as we were sovereign in our own land and had our own army, these words of the Torah were law and were ingrained into the psyche of our soldiers. It should not be surprising, therefore, that in our reconstituted Jewish state that Jewish soldiers should behave accordingly. Today, however, our Jewish heritage as a motivating guide for the behavior of our soldiers has been cast aside by a young lady at Hebrew University. No longer do our soldiers act morally because we are "a nation that stands alone." The student readily concedes that Israeli soldiers refrain from raping Palestinian women, but not because moral behavior is part of who and what we are. I recently received a copy of the following article reprinted by Naomi Ragen. Read it and weep . . . or laugh, if you are familiar with George Orwell's "Newspeak" and are also getting into the spirit of Purim. Interspersed in the article and at the conclusion of this webpage, are my comments in italics. Editorial Articles by Israel Academic Monitor Associates
Hebrew University Awards Prize for "Research" Claiming that Jewish Soldiers Do Not Rape Arab Women because Israelis are Racists
by Steven Plaut
I wish I were making this up as some sort of a pre-Purim joke. But it seems that the latest anti-Israel outrage coming out of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is its awarding a prize to a graduate student for an essay in which the student claims that Israel is abusing and oppressing Palestinians by not raping their women. Really. So what else is new about bleeding heart Israelis bemoaning the fate of the poor, oppressed Palestinians?
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124674
Gurevitch
Had it not been awarded a prize by a panel of the Hebrew University's distinguished professors, the whole matter could be dismissed as just another idiotic essay by a moonbat [equivalent to Archie Bunker's "dingbat"] grad student, not something worthy of any attention being paid to it. But according to news reports, the essay in question has now been published by the Hebrew University's "Shaine Center," at the enthusiastic recommendation of a Hebrew University professors' committee headed by Dr. Zali Gurevitch. The latter is a radical-leftist anthropologist who taught for several years at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Don't worry, I never heard of it either. His web page is here:
I wonder if the Shaine family know what is being done with their contributions to the university! The essay indicting Israeli soldiers for not raping Palestinian women was the product of the crayon of a MA student named Tal Nitzan. Tal is a she. [Go to GOOGLE and check her out. Tal is one of a group of radical Israeli poets of "conscience"  who have made a career of trashing the IDF and the settlers.] Her main theme is that the "lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose." The "political purpose" is that Israel fears the Palestinians demographically and so IDF soldiers do not rape the women to avoid creating new Palestinians and little intifaders. [The Arab men are already doing a good job at siring hordes of future terrorists without the assistance of our soldiers!] Here is Nitzan at her finest: "In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done." Israeli racism has resulted in suppressed Jewish-male sexual desire for Palestinian women, just another manifestation of Zionist racism. ["Suppressed sexual desire"? How many non-dati soldiers are having sex with the female soldiers? Many, we are told. It's hard to believe that our soldiers, with women in relatively close proximity, as well as access to home, are so "frustrated".] Since the absence of rape of Arab women by Israeli soldiers has no parallel in any other human army in wartime anytime in history, the only conclusion must be that Jewish soldiers are far more racist and intolerant than the others. [How does Tal account for the Nazi soldiers who—imbued with their notions of the "Master Race" and laws against race pollution—were responsible for untold rapes during the history of the Third Reich? Obviously, the German soldiers did not permit their ideology from interfering with their sexual proclivities!] Now Nitzan and her guru Gurevitch rule out automatically all other alternative explanations for why Israeli troops do not rape Arab women. The possibility that Israeli troops are simply civilized humans is ruled out as an imponderable. Ditto for the possibility that Jewish ethics serve to deter such abuse of Arab women. Instead, Nitzan claims that Ara b w omen in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are "de-humanized" in the soldiers' eyes. I guess that means they are not rape worthy. You know, unlike Shulamit Aloni, Yael Dayan, and Tamar Gozansky. How did Nitzan reach these cosmic conclusions? By conducting "interviews" with 25 soldiers. That is what the Hebrew University has sunk to. Regarding the 25 interviews as research comprising a MA thesis, I am willing to bet a year's salary that no t a single one of those sold iers said that he was foregoing raping Arab women because he was afraid it would spawn little Palestinian intifada terrorists. So essentially Nitzan is saying that the proof that Israeli soldiers are brutal oppressive stormtroopers is in the fact that they do NOT mistreat and sexually abuse Palestinian women, not even the Palestinian terrorist women apprehended after trying to murder Jews. And as if this were not enough, let us note that not a single one of the many radical feminist mini-organizations that plague Israel had a single moo. Makor Rishon, a rightwing Hebrew weekly (www.makorrishon.co.il) broke the story of this Hebrew University "research" proving that Rape Refusal by Israeli soldiers serves to prove how racist they are.
 From Warsaw to . . . Gaza The Shaine Center for Research in the Social Sciences was established in 1987 following a donation from the Shaine family, USA. Its aim is to advance research in the social sciences. The Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology is responsible for the Center, working alongside an Academic Committee. The Center's main purpose is to support research into a range of phenomena in Israeli society. To that end the Center offers financial support for research carried out in the Faculty for Social Sciences. About two-thirds of the  distributed funds go to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
I used to think that Hebrew University was dedicated to the pursuit of academic excellence. What is academic excellence, you might ask? Study these words of Victor Shepherd, a Protestant minister and Professor Ordiniarius of the University of Oxford which were delivered at a graduation ceremony at Tyndale Seminary in May, 2001: You have asked me to speak to you about excellence, the pursuit of excellence. I am glad to do so, for I relish excellence as much as I abhor mediocrity (mediocrity here defined as contentment with less than our best.) We should shun mediocrity We should aspire after humility. The excellence of that life which has been apprehended by truth and thereafter aspires to do the truth; this excellence has an inherent winsomeness, attractiveness, appeal. Now I am as put off as you by an unrealistic simplicity that refuses to admit the enormous complexity of everything human. When genuine complexity is denied (likely because complexity is threatening) we speak of such simplicity as simplistic inasmuch as we know it's false. Tal Nitzan sees and analyzes the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in simplistic terms. I can understand that. Years ago, Eric Hoffer, author of "The True Believer", warned us that a person blinded by ideology interprets the news to fit his views. But what of Dr. Zali Gurevitch? What of the Hebrew University's "Shaine Center," and its professors' committee which recommended Tal's thesis for the prize? And what about the average Israeli citizen who serves in the army, and his sons and daughters who serve in the army? How can a tax-supported University stand by and award this trash such recognition? Throughout our tortured history, the self-haters in our midst have never failed to inflict new pain (and damage) upon us. Sy
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