Carnegie Mellon’s Prize for Bigotry

It’s a cliché of the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic repertoire: The trusting young Jew who once believed in Israel’s righteousness, but learns the “facts,” wakes up to the reality that, actually, the nation is a criminal entity and then (heroically) speaks out. Young Jesse Lieberfeld not only produced a lurid screed on the theme, but won a prize for it sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon English department, Student Affairs, and the Office of the President.

Jesse laments that:

I was forever reminded … to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.

This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel’s spotless reputation to the back of my mind. “Our people” were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified…

Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called “conflict” with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. “Genocide” almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms.

No one he knew would dream of portraying Israel harshly? How about Daniel Lieberfeld, his father, who signed an anti-Israel petition at the height of the terror war against Israel in August 2001?

Why is Jesse reminded of Martin Luther King in all this? When friends on his school bus are impervious to “a fresh round of killings” and urge him simply to “defend our race” Jesse recalls the civil rights leader:

Where had I heard that before? Wasn’t it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans 60 years ago?

Hence the essay and the accolades. Jesse explains that speaking out against Israel is like King speaking out against white supremacists.

Jesse’s prize, part of a 2012 Martin Luther King Writing Award and brainchild of Jim Daniels, the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English, is described in a university press release.

Among many questions is why and how poet Jim Daniels came to hold anti-Israel views so extreme that he apparently believes the country is perpetrating a “genocide” (against a population that has been growing at a healthy clip for 60 years) and disregarded Martin Luther King’s own strong support for the Jewish state.