Kindgo
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Summers devotes address at morning prayers to rising tide of bigotry ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
Posted: September 20, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Joseph Farah
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and now president of Harvard University, fresh from a highly charged dispute with one of his own faculty members, is warning of a rising tide of anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States – even in academia.
"I speak with you today not as president of the university but as a concerned member of our community about something that I never thought I would become seriously worried about – the issue of anti-Semitism," he said in his address at morning prayers earlier this week.
After a highly publicized national spectacle in which he was accused of racism by one of his own faculty members, Summers says he never thought he would see the day when the specter of anti-Semitism reared its ugly head in America.
"I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout," he said. "In my lifetime, anti-Semitism has been remote from my experience. My family all left Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. The Holocaust is for me a matter of history, not personal memory. To be sure, there were country clubs where I grew up that had few if any Jewish members, but not ones that included people I knew. My experience in college and graduate school, as a faculty member, as a government official – all involved little notice of my religion."
Summers, who served as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, says he was struck with how little notice the country paid when he teamed with Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Charlene Barshefsky and other Jews to provide the government with economic leadership.
"It was something that would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago, as indeed it would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago that Harvard could have a Jewish president," he said.
He no longer takes such achievement for granted – especially not after his public tussle with former Harvard professor Cornel West – now of Princeton.
West ripped Summers, essentially indicting him as a racist, after the university president complained the black professor did little serious academic work and inflated the grades of his students. While at Harvard, West devoted significant time to projects like a rap CD and Al Sharpton's presidential campaign.
West accused Summers of racism, then left Harvard in a huff for a six-figure job at Princeton. He later called Summers "the Ariel Sharon of American higher education."
"Without thinking about it much, I attributed all of this to progress – to an ascendancy of enlightenment and tolerance," he said. "A view that prejudice is increasingly put aside. A view that while the politics of the Middle East was enormously complex, and contentious, the question of the right of a Jewish state to exist had been settled in the affirmative by the world community. But today, I am less complacent. Less complacent and comfortable because there is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally, and also because of some developments closer to home."
Summers cited synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews and the painting of swastikas on Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. He pointed out political candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust reached the runoff stage of elections for the nation's highest office in France and Denmark. He said state-sponsored television stations in many nations of the world "spew anti-Zionist propaganda." He added that "the United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism – while failing to mention human rights abuses in China, Rwanda, or anyplace in the Arab world – spoke of Israel's policies prior to recent struggles under the Barak government as constituting ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."
"I could go on," he said. "But I want to bring this closer to home. Of course academic communities should be and always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed. And certainly there is much to be debated about the Middle East and much in Israel's foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged. But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."
Summers decried an anti-Jewish trend evidenced, he says, in actions singling out Israel for unfair criticism and punishment:
"Hundreds of European academics have called for an end to support for Israeli researchers, though not for an end to support for researchers from any other nation.
"Israeli scholars this past spring were forced off the board of an international literature journal.
"At the same rallies where protesters, many of them university students, condemn the IMF and global capitalism and raise questions about globalization, it is becoming increasingly common to also lash out at Israel. Indeed, at the anti-IMF rallies last spring, chants were heard equating Hitler and Sharon.
"Events to raise funds for organizations of questionable political provenance that in some cases were later found to support terrorism have been held by student organizations on this and other campuses with at least modest success and very little criticism.
"And some here at Harvard and some at universities across the country have called for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested. I hasten to say the university has categorically rejected this suggestion."
What's the cure? Speaking out, Summers says.
"We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position," he said. "We should also recall that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism. The only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong alternatives vigorously advocated. I have always throughout my life been put off by those who heard the sound of breaking glass, in every insult or slight, and conjured up images of Hitler's Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel. Such views have always seemed to me alarmist if not slightly hysterical. But I have to say that while they still seem to me unwarranted, they seem rather less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago."
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
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