Professor 's "Israel=Nazi" comparison worse than reported : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

A university professor in Santa Barbara sent out an email message to his students equating Israel with Nazi Germany and Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto.

The way it is being reported, it sounds like perhaps the professor was simply sending out some source material for his course:

Two students at the University of California-Santa Barbara say they were shocked when a professor compared Israeli actions to those of German Nazis.

University of California-Santa Barbara senior Rebecca Joseph said sociology Professor William I. Robinson acted inappropriately when he sent students a message comparing Israel's Gaza offensive to the Holocaust, the Los Angeles Times said Thursday.

And Robinson characterizes it the same way:

“My right in accordance with the Code ‘to present controversial material relevant to a course of instruction’ is being flagrantly violated and I am under harassment,” Robinson said in a makeshift press release. “The essence of the students’ complaint, as they themselves state it, is that my introduction of material into my course critical of Israeli state policy constitutes anti-Semitism, and this is the only argument made by the complainants to substantiate their charge of anti-Semitism.”

But when you look at the details, it is much, much worse:

The contents of that e-mail, which Robinson reportedly sent to students on Martin Luther King Day and ran under the heading “Parallel images of Nazis and Israelis,“ included 42 side-by-side photos (like the one at left) that have made Robinson the focus of an academic investigation.

Here’s a portion of what he wrote:

I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing “with love” on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children.

Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw - a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnutrition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to the quick death of Israeli bombs. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide (Websters: “the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy, a whole national or ethnic group”), a process whose objective is not so much to physically eliminate each and every Palestinian than to eliminate the Palestinians as a people in any meaningful sense of the notion of people-hood.

Do professors normally send out 42 pictures of something to prove a point? Robinson didn't find these pictures himself; he was clearly copying things from anti-Israel websites on the Internet

Cleveland Indy Media Center