http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/os-ed-stephen-day-israel-040210-20100401,0,7696279.story
I don't care that it is pro Palestinian or anti Israel. What I care about is that his facts are all made up. His oped piece does no service to any causes he might hold dear. The response to Day's article:
Stephen Day, guest columnist for the Orlando Sentinel and instructor at Rollins College, took advantage of his academic position to present propaganda disguised as scholarly opinion. Almost all of the information in his recent article was incorrect.
Mr. Day alleges that the Christian exodus from Bethlehem, and the resultant Muslim majority, is due to Israeli policies in the last few decades. The statement raises at least two logical problems --first, if Israelis discriminated uniformly against Christians and Muslims, why are Christians emigrating at a much faster rate than Muslims? Secondly, Day also fails to take into account when and where the Christians left. The late Christian mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij,who died in 1998,presided over the conversion of Bethlehem to a Muslim majority. Freij once estimated that 45,000 Christians had emigrated since the British mandate began in 1917, as quoted in his obituary in the New York Times. Since the Israeli "separation barrier" was erected only in 2003, following Freij' death by five years, and the Israeli occupation began in 1967, fifty years after the Christian exodus began, Day's equation of the barrier and the Christian exodus is absurd, contradicted by the information available. Rather it was a longstanding demographic pattern, analagous to that going on in Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries with weakening Christian populations.
Moreover, Day also fails to consider the effects of tyranny on Arab public speech. Freij was an outspoken moderate in favor of negotiations with Israel, but was threatened by Yasir Arafat in 1989 with the statement that any Arab who opposed the intifada "exposes himself to the bullets of his own people." The State Department considered this a direct threat to Freij. Thereafter, Freij got the message and followed the party line and blamed Israel alone for Bethlehem's problems. The stifling of moderate opinion thus is generally reduced by the secular Palestinian government into "blame Israel," and quotes from Arab leaders need to be filtered with that censorship in mind.
Day also made a laughable comparison of Israel to Saudi Arabia and to Iran, stating that Israel is a "solely Jewish state." Day apparently does not realize that Israel has a fifteen percent Arab population that enjoys citizenship, votes for Parliamentary representatives, and possesses the same freedoms as do Jewish Israelis. Many of these Arabs would instantly reject the threatened loss of their citizenship in the "Jewish" state of Israel if offered the choice of Arab Palestinian citizenship. Need I ask whether a Jew that supported Israel would have comparable rights in Saudi Arabia or Iran, or might have the option to stay in those countries as full citizens, Mr. Day?
Day also quoted General Petraeus' comment that Israel presents challenges to American national interests, without noting that Petraeus' subsequent complaints about having been severely misquoted in the blogosphere, and his later statement that many other elements such as extremist terror by groups that deny Israeli rights to exist, and a potentially nuclear Iranian state with a leader that denies the Holocaust, also threaten American interests. Shouldn't a scholar have known better?
Finally, Day states that "All Americans should stand with out national leaders" (ie Obama) against Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Here the Left and the Right meet. Pat Buchanan could have uttered that line. Never mind that 300 Congressman wrote a letter to Obama expressing an opposing view. Never mind that few tenure seeking academics would have said that during the Bush years. I am an American who was embarrassed and deeply offended by Obama's oafish and counterproductive diplomatic treatment of Netanyahu, and troubled by Obama's attraction to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority strongman who denied the Holocaust in his doctoral "dissertation" and who still supports terror. Witness Abbas' dedication of a public square to a terrorist, an act that Secretary of State Clinton mistakenly blamed on Hamas.
I am concerned not only that Day turned truth on its head to make his point, but that such activity conceivably could advance his academic career. His statements are not scholarly and his errors need to be pointed out, so that Middle East watchers can make informed decisions based on truth and Rollins students can have a broader platform with which to assess their instructor's pedagogy.
