Caroline Glick on Intellectual Bondage.
"How could you report the war in Iraq if you sided with the Americans?"
"How can you say that George Bush is better than Saddam Hussein?"
These are some of the milder questions I received from an audience of some 150 undergraduate students from Tel Aviv University's Political Science Department. The occasion was a guest lecture I gave last month on my experiences as an embedded reporter with the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division during the Iraq war.
Many of the students were visibly jolted by my assertion that the patriotism of American soldiers was inspirational. The vocal ones among them were appalled when I argued that journalists must be able to make moral distinctions between good and evil, when such distinctions exist, if they wish to provide their readership with an accurate picture of the events they describe in their reports.
"Who are you to make moral judgments? What you say is good may well be bad for someone else."
It's hard to imagine how we can hope to achieve some sort of balance in the views presented on American campuses if this sort of myopia prevails even in Israel's institutions of higher learning. There's no doubt that it does. Consider this:
When the show was over, and the students began shuffling out of the lecture hall, a young woman approached me.
"Excuse me," she said with a heavy Russian accent.
"How can you say that democracy is better than dictatorial rule?"
"Because it is better to be free than to be a slave," I answered.
Undeterred, she pressed on, "How can you support America when the US is a totalitarian state?"
"Did you learn that in Russia?" I asked.
"No, here," she said.
"Here at Tel Aviv University?"
"Yes, that is what my professors say," she said.
And this:
In the mid-1990s, a Tel Aviv University graduate student conducted a survey of the political views of university professors.
The student discovered that not only were the professors overwhelmingly self-identified with far left and Arab political parties, most also expressed absolute intolerance for the notion that professors with right-wing or even centrist views should be allowed to teach in their departments. "Over my dead body," said one.
All of this is well known. Yet knowing of the professors' radicalism, and seeing the effects of such dogmatic views on university students, are different things.
It's beyond puzzling. And Glick makes too many good points to adequately summarize here.
Eighth (and last) light tonight.
Shabbat Shalom.
Chag sameach.
