About 18 years ago a middle aged MA student named Teddy Katz, submitted a masters thesis to the University of Haifa that had been prepared under the supervision of Israels most extremist and anti-Zionist academic, Ilan Pappe. Pappe likes to describe himself as Israels most hated person and I suspect he may be on to something there.
He spends his days addressing anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rallies and conferences around the globe and likes to write Israel-bashing pieces in the PLOs journal. He appears in al-Ahram. He has openly called for Israel’s destruction – to be replaced by a Palestinian state with Abbas as its dictator.
He ran for the Knesset on the slate of the Arab Stalinist party HADASH.
The MA thesis in question claimed that a platoon of the Alexandroni brigade of the Hagana had in 1948 conducted a massacre of Arabs at the town of Tantora near Haifa when the town was conquered in Israels war of independence.
It was of course, as it turned out, a complete fabrication based on some Arabs suddenly recovering from repressed memory syndrome after 50 years and claiming there had been a massacre when they were infants. Except when the tapes of interviews with these folks were checked out, it turned out even these Arabs had never said there was any massacre but rather that the Hagana had been very nice about helping the civilians.
Katz and Pappe had simply invented the story. When word hit the press, the Hagana vets organization sued Katz and the University of Haifa for libel. Eventually the matter reached a court settlement in which Katz agreed to admit publicly he had lied, publish a retraction at his own expense, and apologize to the vets. Katz was represented in all this by ultras-leftist lawyer Avigdor Feldman, who took time off from his usual passion for representing Arabs who have murdered Jewish children.
Feldman was present when Katz signed the court settlement.
But a few days after that, Katz tried to back out of the settlement, probably under encouragement to do so by Pappe, who continues to insist the massacre really took place even though not a shred of evidence has ever been discovered by anyone that there had been one. (Even Arab journalists and reporters who had been present at the battle never claimed there had been any massacre.) The judge refused to allow Katz to back out of the deal. When Katz refused to publish the retraction, the vets successfully sued Katz to recover their costs. Pappe and the communists then organized a campaign to try to raise cash to help out Katz with this.
Meanwhile, the University of Haifa looked ridiculous in all of this and demanded that Katz submit a revised version of the thesis if he wanted a degree. The original version had been awarded a grade of 97 by Pappe and his collaborators.
Katz ultimately did resubmit a revised thesis. This week the University of Haifa rejected it, after five independent reviewers had read it and dismissed it as garbage. Pappe and his comrades are running about now insisting that these five were lackeys of Ariel Sharon and George Bush or some similar sort of academically scrupulous argument. The University agreed to kick Katz out by granting him a MA degree without a thesis, an act of cowardice by the campus authorities. Katz should have been simply expelled permanently and Pappe fired for his role in the fabrication and charlatanism.
Anyway, I have decided to make an alternative proposal about how the university could better resolve things. Why not just let Katz write a completely NEW thesis on a different topic under Pappes supervision? This time the thesis should be on one of these topics:
- An oral history proving the Germans never killed any Jews in Auschwitz.
- An oral history proving that Lincoln actually shot John Wilkes Booth at that theater.
- Proof that the Mossad was really behind the attack on the WTC on September 11.
- An oral history that proves that Jews drink the blood of gentile children on Passover after all.
I bet Pappe would give the new thesis a grade of 98!
Topic: Ilan Pappe shown to be a fraud and a liar. (Read 1730 times)