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Harvard President Speaks out on Middle East
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.
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. I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout. 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.
Indeed, I was struck during my years in the Clinton administration that the existence of an economic leadership team with people like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Charlene Barshefsky and many others that was very heavily Jewish passed without comment or notice -- it was something that would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago, as indeed it would have been inconceivable a generation or two a go that Harvard could have a Jewish President.
Without thinking about it much, I attributed all of this to progress -- to an ascendancy of enlightenment and tolerance. 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. Consider some of the global events of the last year:
* There have been synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews, or the painting of swastikas on Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. Observers in many countries have pointed to the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.
* Candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust reached the runoff stage of elections for the nation's highest office in France and Denmark. State-sponsored television stations in many nations of the world spew anti-Zionist propaganda.
* 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. The NGO declaration at the same conference was even more virulent.
I could go on. 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.
For example:
* 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.
We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position. 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.
I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy -- a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But this depends on all of us.
President Lawrence H. Summers
Harvard University
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.
Indeed, I was struck during my years in the Clinton administration that the existence of an economic leadership team with people like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Charlene Barshefsky and many others that was very heavily Jewish passed without comment or notice -- it was something that would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago, as indeed it would have been inconceivable a generation or two a go that Harvard could have a Jewish President.
Without thinking about it much, I attributed all of this to progress -- to an ascendancy of enlightenment and tolerance. 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. Consider some of the global events of the last year:
* There have been synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews, or the painting of swastikas on Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. Observers in many countries have pointed to the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.
* Candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust reached the runoff stage of elections for the nation's highest office in France and Denmark. State-sponsored television stations in many nations of the world spew anti-Zionist propaganda.
* 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. The NGO declaration at the same conference was even more virulent.
I could go on. 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.
For example:
* 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.
We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position. 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.
I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy -- a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But this depends on all of us.
President Lawrence H. Summers
Harvard University
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To say out loud what many of us in the Harvard community have long believed: namely, that singling out Israel, among all the countries in the world, for divestment, is an action which is anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.
A recent open letter by one of the signatories [of the boycott petition] made it clear that he regards Israel as the "pariah" state, a word historically used by anti-Semites to characterize the Jewish people.
As an advocate and practitioner of human rights throughout the world, I can confidently assert that Israel's record on human rights is among the best, especially among nations that have confronted comparable threats. Though far from perfect, Israel has shown extraordinary concern for avoiding civilian casualties in its half-century effort to protect its civilians from terrorism. Jordan killed more Palestinians in a single month than Israel has between 1948 and the present.
Israel has the only independent judiciary in the entire Middle East. Its Supreme Court, one of the most highly regarded in the world, is the only court in the Middle East from which an Arab or a Muslim can expect justice, as many have found in winning dozens of victories against the Israeli government, the Israeli military and individual Israeli citizens.
There is no more important component in the protection of human rights and civil liberties than an independent judiciary willing to stand up to its own government. I challenge the proponents of divestment to name a court in any Arab or Muslim country that is comparable to the Israeli Supreme Court. Israel is the only country in the region that has virtually unlimited freedom of speech. Any person in Israel whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian can criticize the Israeli government and its leaders. No citizen of any other Middle Eastern or Muslim state can do that without fear of imprisonment or death.
Israel is the only country that has openly confronted the difficult issue of protecting the civil liberties of the ticking bomb terrorist. The Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that despite the potential benefits of employing non-lethal torture to extract information, the tactic is illegal.
Brutal torture, including lethal torture, is commonplace in nearly every other Middle Eastern and Muslim country. Indeed, American authorities sometimes send suspects to Egypt, Jordan and the Philippines precisely because they know that they will be tortured in those countries. Nor is Israel the only country that is occupying lands claimed by others. China, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Spain, France and numerous other countries control not only land, but people who seek independence.
Indeed, among these countries Israel is the only one that has offered statehood, first in 1948 when the Palestinians rejected the UN partition which would have given them a large, independent state and chose instead to invade Israel. Again in the year 2000 Palestinians were offered a state, rejected it and employed terrorism.
There are, of course, difficult issues to be resolved in the Middle East. These include the future of the settlements, the establishment of Palestinian self-governance and the prevention of terrorism. These issues will require compromise on all sides.
Members of the Harvard community must be free to criticize Israel when they disagree with its policies or actions, as they criticize any other country in the world whose record is not perfect. But to single out the
Jewish state of Israel, as if it were the worst human rights offender, is bigotry pure and simple. It would be comparable to singling out a black nation for de-legitimation without mentioning worse abuses by white nations.
Those who sign the divestment petition should be ashamed of themselves. If they are not, it is up to others to shame them.
Among those who signed this immoral petition was Winthrop House Master Paul Hanson. I wrote to Prof. Hanson challenging him to debate me in the Common Room of Winthrop House about his decision to sign the petition. He refused, citing "other priorities." I can imagine few priorities more pressing than to justify to his students why he is willing to single out Israel for special criticism.
Accordingly, I hereby request an invitation from the students of Winthrop House to conduct such a debate, either with Hanson present or with an empty chair on which the petition which he signed would be featured. Universities should encourage widespread debate and discussion about divisive and controversial issues. A House master who peremptorily signs a petition and then hides behind "other priorities" does not serve the interests of dialogue and education. I hope that Hanson will accept my challenge, and that if he does not, that I will be invited by his students to help fill the educational gap left by the cowardice of those who have signed this petition and refuse to defend their actions in public debate.
Let me propose an alternative to singling out Israel for divestment: let Harvard choose nations for investment in the order of the human rights records. If that were done, investment in Israel would increase dramatically, while investments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Philippines, Indonesia, the Palestinian Authority and most other countries of the world would decrease markedly.
By Alan M. Dershowitz,
Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School.
Opinion page, Harvard Crimson, Sept. 23, 2002
They don't even *try* to defend what Israel has done, simply ignore it, as though Sharon has done nothing wrong. There isn't one word about the atrocities.
I hope the students hear this.
http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html
I have listened to University president after president and have come away disgusted by their ignorance and conservative, unenlightened ideas.
I assume that the everything-can-be-legitimized-if-god-is-on-your-side thinking Dershowitz utilizes when Israel is at issue also undergirds his current campaign to have torture legitimized as an American interrogation technique. He's a good enough appellate lawyer to know the illegitimacy of state-sponsored torture. The only way his torture campaign makes sense is if you see that he's left sense behind.
Sixty Minutes
Dershowitz has been touting torture as a technique for interrogating terrorists for some time and in a lot of places. He probably reached his largest audience in the 60 Minutes segment aired September 22. The segment, which was hosted by Mike Wallace, had several other speakers, among them Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and a retired one-eyed French general who tortured Algerians years ago and thinks the US should do it now. But it was Dershowitz who had most of the airtime.
Dershowitz is a very physical speaker. When he gets polemical, he jabs at his listener or audience with one, sometimes two index fingers, and he punches individual words out, almost shouting. His first statement on the program, for example, went like this (with the words in capitals said far louder than the words not in capitals):
If you got the ticking-bomb case, the case of the terrorist who knew preCISE [begins poking with one finger] ly WHERE and WHEN the BOMB would go off and it was the only way of saving five hundred, a thousand lives, EVERY [begins poking with two fingers] democratic society WOULD HAVE and will use torture.
That may give you some idea of the style. I won't try to imitate that any more. And I'll put it in more readable type:
DERSHOWITZ: If you got the ticking-bomb case, the case of the terrorist who knew precisely where and when the bomb would go off and it was the only way of saving five hundred, a thousand lives, every democratic society would have and will use torture.
MIKE WALLACE: Just in a ticking bomb case?
DERSHOWITZ: If anybody has any doubt about that, imagine your own child being kidnapped, the kidnapper being there, and mockingly telling you that the child has three hours of oxygen left and refusing to tell you where the child is buried. Is there anybody who wouldn't use torture to save the life of his child? And if you would, isn't it a bit selfish to say "It's okay to save my child's life but it's not okay to save the life of a thousand strangers? That's the way people will think about it.
So if you oppose torture you're selfish? The analogy turns the basic principle of criminal law topsy-turvy. The purpose of criminal law is to remove from the individual the need to and right of avenging criminal injury; the state, which is presumably objective and fair, takes on those tasks. People who are injured by a criminal may want to reciprocate in kind, but in civilized society that is not permitted. The reasons are very simple: how can society be sure that the violent action you take to avenge violent action will be appropriate, that it will even be delivered to the right person? Civilized society substitutes the notion of justice for the obligation of revenge, the rule of law for the rule of personal power. Of course someone knowing that Dershowitz's mocking kidnapper knew the secret that would save a child's life would want to extract that secret by whatever means. But that is not the same as policemen torturing people who may or may not know something they want to know.
WALLACE: And that is how, Dershowitz says, some people have begun to think about terrorism suspects in custody right now. "The question is, would it be constitutional?
DERSHOWITZ: It's not against the Fifth amendment if it's not admitted in a criminal case against the defendant. But it may be in violation of due process. But what is due process? Due process is the process you are due under the circumstances of the case. The process that an alleged terrorist who is planning to kill thousands of people may be due is very different than the process that an ordinary criminal may be due.
Dershowitz, a defense appeals lawyer, is here advocating the administration of punishment before trial. He's juxtaposing "an alleged terrorist" ("alleged" means that someone has made an accusation that the person in question has committed an act of terrorism or is thinking about committing one) and "an ordinary criminal" (someone who has been convicted). He's talking like a politician, not a lawyer. This is sophistry of the worst kind. The murders of civil rights workers by a Mississippi sheriff and his friends weren't against the Fifth amendment either-but they were indeed a violation of due process and they were also murder. Dershowitz treats due process as if it's some evanescent talking point, the legal equivalent of situational ethics. But it's not the circumstances of the case that sets the terms of due process; it's the law. And, thus far anyway, torture is against the law in the United States of America. And notice how, as Dershowitz warms to his argument, the numbers of potential deaths escalates: what was "five hundred, a thousand" a moment ago is now "thousands of people."
WALLACE: So if a liberal defense attorney says it, what chance does a suspected terrorist have?
An excellent question, which Dershowitz evades entirely. He ignores the potential abominations and instead goes to amoral utilitarianism:
DERSHOWITZ: I want to bring this debate to the forefront. It's going to happen. And If it's going to happen we can't just close our eyes and pretend that we live in a pure world.
WALLACE: And if it's going to happen we might as well make it legal by having judges issue what he calls "torture warrants," in rare cases.
DERSHOWITZ: Get a warrant. Justify in front of a judge the fact that this is the only conceivable way to save thousands of lives which are immanently endangered.
WALLACE: Torture warrants. I must say, it sounds medieval.
DERSHOWITZ: Well, It sounds like a contradiction in terms, because torture sounds illegal and a warrant sounds legal. My suggestion is that we bring it into the legal system so that we can control it. Rather than keeping it outside of the legal system where it exists in a nether land of weak approval.
That's the way Dershowitz would deal with violent abuse of civil and human rights by the police: since it's going to happen, we should legalize it.
What's wrong with this logic is this: bringing something into law only makes it legal; it does not make it right. Hitler got the Reichstag to legitimize nearly everything he did. The Nazis didn't just commit abominations against those groups they loathed. They legislated those abominations. The worst of what they did was perfectly legal. The only things absent were morality, justice and decency.
Kenneth Roth, who was a former federal prosecutor before he became executive director of Human Rights Watch, commented, "Alan Dershowitz has been spending too much time on the lecture circuit. He should go back to the classroom for a bit....A judge has no right to allow something that the Constitution flatly prohibits under any circumstances and that is the cruel, degrading treatment involved in torture." Roth pointed out that the US is signatory to anti-torture treaties. But Dershowitz would use illegal behavior by government agencies in the past to justify ignoring all of that:
DERSHOWITZ: If anybody has any doubt that our CIA over time has taught people to torture, has encouraged torture, has probably itself tortured in extreme cases, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
His rationale is entirely utilitarian:
DERSHOWITZ: I have little doubt that torture has, on occasion, prevented the deaths of innocent people. That's what makes this issue so complex.
WALLACE: And if a foreign country uses torture, excessive force, to get information, that information can then be used in a US court?
DERSHOWITZ: [grinning] Unresolved issue of Constitutional law. If we had anything to do with it, it's clear it cannot be used in an American court. But if serendipitously a silver platter is presented to us on which there is a confession elicited by another agency and if it's a reliable confession, probably it could be used.
"Serendipitously" the way those thugs of Henry II serendipitously murdered Thomas Becket in 1170?
WALLACE: Professor Dershowitz, had we been having this conversation on September tenth, people would have said "What in the dickens are those two fools talking about."
DERSHOWITZ: Prior to September 11th I used to give a hypothetical in my class, If an airplane loaded with terrorists and civilians were flying toward-I used to use the Empire State Building-would it be appropriate to shoot it down? That was a debatable issue on September 10th. It was not a debatable issue on September 12th. Things change. Experiences change our conception of rights.
They very well may, but is that the way the law should work? Should last week's or last year's atrocity change our basic ideas of justice and decency and due process? Should our fundamental ideas and principles be victim to the whims of the most depraved and vicious? Is there nothing worth holding on to? Is torture our only reasoned response?
The hot lead enema
Alan Dershowitz's situational take on the utility of torture is not new. A good deal has been written on the ethics, legality and efficacy of torture. What is surprising is that someone who at one point in his career presented himself as a civil rights lawyer and as recently as the September 22 60 Minutes broadcast allowed himself to be introduced as one, is beating the drum for torture of police suspects on the chance that such torture might deliver useful information. You'd have thought that someone who really believed in the law and in the U.S. Constitution would know that adopting the bad guys' methods doesn't make you more efficient; it only makes you one of the bad guys. As Bill Kunstler used to point out about the First Amendment, you don't need it to protect Mother Teresa, you need it to protect someone nobody agrees with or wants to listen to. If you don't protect it for them, one of these days it may very well be you they'll be silencing.
In the same 60 Minutes segment in which Alan Dershowitz so eloquently endorsed torture, Mike Wallace and an attorney talked about a terrorist who had been tortured by police in the Philippines. The Philippine police gave the information he provided to the FBI, who then used it in a trial that ended with the man being given a life sentence in a US penitentiary. Kenneth Roth pointed out that the same man confessed in the same torture session to the Oklahoma City bombing. And that, he said, is a key problem with torture: in addition to being immoral and illegal, it's not very reliable.
Lenny Bruce had a routine about a man who is brought to a room where he proclaims that he would never betray his country. Then he says (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "What are they doing to that guy over there? Why are they putting that funnel in his ass? What are they doing with that molten lead? They're pouring it in the funnel? The funnel that's in his ass? They're pouring hot lead in his ass? They're giving him a hot lead enema? Okay, I'll tell you anything. I'll tell you about my mother. I'll make up secrets."
Questions that remain
I have a whole bunch of questions I wish Mike Wallace had asked Alan Dershowitz about his torture program. Here are a few of them:
-What do you do when you get real masochist, somebody like Jack Nicholson's character Wilbur Force in Roger Corman's 1960 Little Shop of Horrors? How do you torture effectively somebody who says "Thank you" and "Can you do that one more time, only a little harder," after every abominable thing you do?
-What if the one person who you think knows the secret is a 12-year-old girl? How much torture is appropriate for a 12-year-old girl who might possibly know something really bad and won't tell? Or who keeps saying, no matter what you do to her, "I don't know what you're talking about?"
-Is the torture any less legitimate if the torturer loves his work, particularly when it's certain kinds of people, like 12-year-old girls who won't fess up?
-How much torture is appropriate before you decide that maybe this person doesn't know anything?
-How much torture is appropriate before you decide that the person is starting to make stuff up?
-How do you undo the harm you did when you realize you tortured the wrong woman?
http://www.ajc.org/InTheMedia/RelatedArticles.asp?did=639