No this is not a spoof.

You may recall the “Tantura Affair” at the University of Haifa a couple
of years back. This was a case of leftist pseudo-scholarship, fraud, and
fabrication of a “massacre” of Arabs by the Jews in 1948, invented by
University of Haifa leftist extremists.

In 1948, a Palmach unit conquered the Arab town of Tantura south of
Haifa, which was blocking the main road connecting Haifa with Tel Aviv.
Two years ago, a Far Leftist MA student named Teddy Katz, a kibbutznik and
activist in Meretz, wrote a MA dissertation under the supervision of Haifa
University leftist faculty, in which he fabricated a massacre that he
claimed took place there. In fact, the battle was closely watched and
reported in the Jewish, Arab and the international press at the time and
no
one had ever discovered any such massacre. There is absolutely no
physical evidence of a massacre, and not even the Arab propagandists had
ever claimed there had been one. (Bear in mind that cases where Arabs
civilians had actually been killed in battles, notoriously Deir Yassin,
were always reported and well known.) All of Katz’ “evidence” consisted
of repressed memories of Arabs suddenly mysteriously emerging after 50
years.

In fact, there was no massacre at all. The student had simply
invented the story as part of the leftist campaign by self-hating Israeli
Jewish anti-Semites to libel and delegitimize the country. The thesis was
supervised by Ilan Pappe, Israel’s academic version of Taliban John, a
vile anti-Semite who openly calls for Israel’s annihilation, an “academic”
whose publication record consists mainly of anti-Israel screeds published
in a PLO propaganda “journal”, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and by a
radical Druse professor.

Later Katz admitted in court with his lawyer present (the Marxist
lawyer Avigdor Feldman) that he had fabricated the story, this after being
sued for libel by the Palmach veterans organization. SInce then, the
story has come to symbolize the leftist pseudo-scholarship and extremist
faculty sedition common in Israel and especially at the University of
Haifa.

Today, the newest twist to the story was exposed. The IMRA news
service reveals that the PLO itself was involved in financing Katz and his
activities. Pappe by the way has written about the “massacre” for a wide
number of Islamist and anti-Jewish papers and web sites and the “story” of
the “massacre” is now standard fare on the PLO’s web site as well as
neonazi web sites around the world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 3rd, 2002 and is filed under hotnews.