On 30 May 2006, Rabbi Tovia Singer of Israel National Radio (known as the “Chief Rabbi of Newstalk Radio”) interviewed me for his show. You will find the interview below, complete with a hyperlinked transcript. Before turning to that, however, I would like to tell you a little bit about the people interviewing me, because they are important.

Something remarkable is going on in Israel. A movement launched by Hajj Amin al Husseini, who was, with Adolf Eichmann, co-architect, organizer, and enforcer of the German Nazi extermination of the European Jews,[1] is being given a large chunk of territory, by the Jewish state, even as this movement continues to attack Israeli Jews with terrorism.

It is enough to force the question: Who is running the Israeli government?

The question is sharpened when you look at the Israeli media, because then you realize that the Israeli government is using its powers of coercion against Israeli citizens who disagree with these policies.

One group of Israelis who disagree, and who have been persecuted by the Israeli government, includes the brave people who work at Israel National Radio. If you look up this radio station in Wikipedia, you will be told the following, by way of introduction:

“Arutz Sheva Israel National Radio is a right wing religious-zionist Israeli radio station. Founded in 1988, it formerly broadcasted [sic] on the Israeli airwaves from a ship in the Mediterranean Sea outside of Israel’s territorial waters until being shutdown by the Israeli government. Currently it only broadcasts over the Internet from its website which it has been running for about the last ten years. It was forced to broadcast from a ship because Israeli law only permits private radio stations on the local level.”[2]

What you see above is the mainstream representation of any Jew who dares to defend the Jewish state: he is ‘right wing’ (if he happens to be religious, the case is closed). By contrast, those who support a genocidal terrorist movement founded by an architect of the WWII extermination of the European Jews... -- they are ‘left wing.’ You see? So defending the Jews from the Nazis must be what the ‘far right’ does...

This way of speaking is absurd, as I have taken some pains to show elsewhere.[3] But insistent absurd language -- which this is -- is evidence of effort, and effort has a point. What is the point of this effort? The answer is simple: ‘leftists’ are supposed to be bleeding hearts who defend third-world peoples from oppressive colonialists, so by saying, over and over again, that it is ‘leftists’ who support PLO/Hamas, naturally because ‘leftists’ are in favor of ‘peace,’ lots of people will naturally come to understand that the ‘good guys’ are the antisemitic terrorists of PLO/Hamas, for whom a state is sought right on Jewish soil (the achievement of this state is what ‘left wingers’ in fact mean by ‘peace’). By symmetry, the Israelis must be the supposedly colonialist/aggressor ‘bad guys.’ None of this is based on history or even reasoning. It is simply a grammatical consequence of having labeled the opponents of the Jewish state ‘left wing’ and its defenders ‘right wing.’ Such labeling is of course quite clever if your objective is to destroy the possibility of grass-roots support for the Jewish state.

Now, take a look at the last sentence in the Wikipedia quote above: Israel National Radio, it tells us, “was forced to broadcast from a ship because Israeli law only permits private radio stations on the local level.” In other words, in Israel, by law, the government -- the same government that is giving away Jewish soil to a movement tracing its roots to the Nazis -- has a monopoly over radio broadcasts at the national level. But what is the ‘national level’ in Israel? To get a sense for this, consider that in the Tel-Aviv-Yafo area, between the Mediterranean sea and the border of the West Bank (what Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is trying to turn into Israel’s international border), you have a grand total of 18 kilometers (11 miles). This is considerably smaller than the diameter of, say, Mexico City. And this is the most densely populated area of Israel -- perhaps half of all Israeli Jews live here. Israel is a such a tiny place that the entire distinction between ‘local’ and ‘national’ almost collapses, so by decreeing a government monopoly for all radio broadcasts at the national level, the government makes it impossible for a private radio station to reach all of the scant 7 million or so people who live in Israel, the doubling of which would still not fill Mexico City (which city is serviced by quite a few radio stations that reach all of its close to 20 million inhabitants).

The Israeli government’s monopoly, however, has not quite worked against Israel National Radio (Arutz Sheva), because these people are determined. And smart. They packed the radio station and began broadcasting, as Wikipedia explains, “from a ship in the Mediterranean Sea outside of Israel’s territorial waters,” in this way reaching all of Israel. That sort of thing really irked the Israeli government, as Emanuel Winston explains in an article entitled “Destroying Arutz Sheva”:

“In 1994, on what was a documentable trumped up pretext, [Communications Minister Shulamit] Aloni used the Israeli police to raid the Arutz Sheva ship and confiscate hundreds of thousands of dollars of their broadcasting equipment. This expensive equipment was never returned, although seized illegally, even after a recent High Court order to explain why.”[4]

Why this zeal to prevent Arutz Sheva from broadcasting? Well, consider that Shulamit Aloni, who ordered the Arutz Sheva equipment seized, is described as follows:

“Shulamit Aloni (born November 29, 1928) is a human rights activist, lawyer and former Israeli politician. She is a prominent member of the Israeli peace camp...”[5]

Shulamit Aloni is what they call a ‘leftist.’ She is a “human rights activist,” you see, which immediately means, to everybody, that she is one of the ‘good guys.’ And she wants ‘peace’ because she is “a prominent member of the Israeli peace camp.” Never mind that the “peace camp” is passionately devoted to giving large and strategic portions of the Jewish state to antisemitic terrorists who daily brutalize the Arab populations they are supposedly ‘liberating’ with their effort to exterminate the Israeli Jews. The “peace camp,” naturally, endorses this for the sake of ‘peace.’ Because they are ‘leftists,’ you see.

Now, Shulamit Aloni is fiercely opposed to Arutz Sheva’s ‘right wing’ defense of innocent Israelis who do not deserve to be blown up in the street. Why? Because she is a “human rights activist.” Aloni is naturally affronted by Arutz Sheva’s opposition to the Oslo ‘peace’ process, because Aloni is “a prominent member of the Israeli peace camp,” which means that, as a ‘leftist,’ she has worked hard to bless her fellow Israelis with the epidemic of suicide bombings that dates from soon after the Oslo ‘peace’ process began. Aloni cares so much about ‘peace,’ in fact, that she will not only sacrifice the lives of innocent Israelis to achieve it, she will also sacrifice freedom of the press. (Because she is a ‘leftist,’ you see.)

In order fully to understand Aloni’s discomfiture, consider Emanuel Winston’s explanation of the impact that Artuz Sheva was having on the Israeli public:

“Ten years ago, the Left went wild when Arutz Sheva began broadcasting contesting facts from a ship. They had to go to sea 12 miles beyond Israel’s territorial waters to broadcast because the Labor Party controlled Israel’s communications industry [and] could not tolerate any competition -- particularly from the religious right. As the station and its audience grew, more Israelis began to question the honesty of the Left wing news. For the many years prior to the startup of Arutz-7, the Labor Party had a virtual strangle-hold on the information flowing to the nation.

Arutz-Sheva became a station to listen to as it shined a revealing light on the lies of government officials (and even those out of office) who wanted to give up land in Israel for a questionable peace process with the PLO. Left wing media supporting Labor/Meretz redoubled misleading reports and commentaries to smother the Arutz-Sheva reports.”

Notice that Winston, a defender of Israel, refers to those who support giving Jewish soil to a movement spawned by the Nazis (the PLO), as “the Left.” His own allies -- other defenders of Israel -- are the “religious right.” What is the problem? The problem is innocence: Winston is deaf to how his terms of reference are interpreted by the millions of potentially winnable Jews and Gentiles whose minds need to be won if Israel is to survive. He does not realize that ‘the Left’ means the ‘good guys’ to a great many people, and that the ‘religious right’ means the ‘bad guys.’ By allowing his enemies to teach him how to speak, Winston reduces his audience to his choir.

Now, as we see from the example of Arutz Sheva, any Israeli who dares point out that the Israeli government is giving the country away to terrorists who mean to exterminate the Israeli Jews becomes the victim of the Israeli government. The defense of Israel will not be tolerated. This is why Arutz Sheva is so important: it has been braving enormous institutional disadvantages, plus political persecution, to defend Israel with the truth. In particular, Arutz Sheva has tried to explain to Israelis the most important thing that there is to understand: who exactly the so-called ‘Israeli government’ is collaborating with.

On 17 June 2003, Israel National News, Arutz Sheva’s internet effort, published the following piece, which documents how the controlling core of the PLO, Al Fatah, emerged from Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, with the objective of continuing this Final Solution by exterminating the Israeli Jews:

I have now provided a more thorough documentation of the Palestinian movement’s history here:

Why is this information so important? Because if the millions of potentially winnable Jews and Gentiles (especially the US citizens) are made to understand that the Israeli Jews are fighting the Final Solution, the pressure to destroy Israel will ease, and then the Jewish people may avoid the impinging Catastrophe. In other words, this is perhaps the single most relevant piece of information to Israel’s -- and therefore to the Jewish people’s -- security.

For me, the most important consequence of the publication of the first article, in Arutz Sheva, was that I was fired from the University of Pennsylvania. This means two important things:

1) Arutz Sheva matters; and

2) an interest larger than the elite running the Israeli government does not want Israel defended. Because, you see, the University of Pennsylvania is, not coincidentally, in Pennsylvania, not in Israel, and so I was fired not by the Israeli government but by the United States government. (Or at least one gets that impression from the fact that the man who engineered my firing, a fiercely pro-PLO professor in the political science department who insists that he is both Jewish and a Zionist, Ian Lustick, explains in his curriculum vitae that he works for US Intelligence.)

It is difficult for outsiders properly to picture the situation of the people who work at Arutz Sheva, because it is so particular. The government of the Jewish state, run by Jews, is persecuting them, fellow Jews, for telling the truth about the terrorist enemies of the Jewish state and people! And yet this is normal: many Jews in positions of relative power are assisting the enemies of the Jewish state and people.[6] The upshot is that Jewish patriots are attacked even by people whom they correctly perceive themselves to be defending, and against whom they are loathe ever to use the label ‘enemy’ -- because Jewish patriots tend to be people who are in love with Judaism, an ethical civilization that fosters kindness even in people’s thoughts, making it hard for them to think ill of fellow Jews. This deadly innocence renders the Jewish people especially vulnerable.

In the interview below Rabbi Tovia Singer and I struggle in part with such questions. There are no easy answers. But at least we can make a beginning by stating what ought to be the most basic principle: Saying that one is Jewish cannot become a free pass to endanger the survival of the Jewish people, just like being Jewish is not a requirement to becoming a passionate defender of the Jews.

The interview follows, below.

Transcript of the Interview

RABBI TOVIA SINGER (Israel National Radio/Arutz Sheva): Right now, I am joined by Professor Francisco Gil-White. He has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania psychology department where he has been teaching cultural/evolutionary psychology going back to 2001. His appointment at Penn is going to end June 30, 2006.

Why was he fired from one of America’s most prestigious universities?  You would think that maybe instead of evolutionary psychology, he was teaching creationism. I don’t know. What do you think could have gotten him fired? We are going to find out. He is an extraordinary man. His website is www.hirhome.com and he is joining us now on Israel National Radio. Professor Francisco Gil-White, welcome to Israel National Radio.

DR. FRANCISCO GIL-WHITE: Mr. Singer, thank you for having me on.

SINGER: Hey, it’s great having you on, Professor. We had an opportunity to speak briefly before the broadcast. I am reading your bio and I am absolutely astonished [at the] University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know the numbers. It has gotta be 40, I don’t know, 50 percent Jewish and it’s a campus with a strong Jewish life. You would think that at the University of Pennsylvania... -- this is not Berkeley, this is a place where Jewish life thrives and there are lot of students that are pretty pro Israel. You get fired for standing up for Israel. What is this?  What happened there?

GIL-WHITE: That is very surprising. The school is indeed close to 40 percent Jewish, at least the student body is. The most represented group in the psychology department faculty are Jews. That didn’t matter. I was still fired for defending... for defending the Jewish people.

Now, the structure of this is actually stranger than might appear at first because the person who directly threatened me, at first, Professor Paul Rozin, is also Jewish; and the man responsible for orchestrating my firing (that’s political science Professor Ian Lustick) also claims to be Jewish; and the [then] dean of the School of Arts and Sciences who put his stamp on all this, Dean Samuel Preston, also is Jewish.

But in fact, this is normal. It is only strange to those who don’t know, for example, the history of World War II. During WWII, for example, as we have documented on the website, a great great many mainstream Jewish leaders in the United States, when the Holocaust had already begun, devoted all of their effort to sabotaging Peter Bergson. He was the political leader of the Irgun -- of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi -- and he was also the nephew of the Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem. Well this Peter Bergson [his real name is Hillel Kook], when the Holocaust had already begun and everybody knew about it -- it was news all over the world [that] the Jews in Europe were being exterminated -- Peter Bergson went to the United States to try to organize a movement that would put pressure on the United States Government to create a rescue effort for the Jews in Europe who still lived at the time (which was about 4 million). So he went there expecting to find support among the Jewish leadership in the United States but in fact, the mainstream Jewish leaders -- I am not speaking about the Orthodox rabbis, because the Orthodox rabbis actually joined the Peter Bergson movement --  I am speaking of the Reform, some of the very important Reform rabbis, like Stephen Wise...

SINGER: Stephen Wise, yeah.

GIL-WHITE: ...Stephen Wise, and people like Nahum Goldmann, the Jews who had high positions of leadership in the US government in the Roosevelt administration or in the senate... The great majority of those Jews who were the most powerful in the US establishment actually allied with the antisemites and did everything they could to sabotage the Bergson effort. Which… -- all Bergson was trying to do was save as many Jewish lives as he could in the middle of the Holocaust.

And this is a big problem that we have today, those of us who want to prevent the destruction of Israel. Because it is not only happening at the level of mainstream Jewish leaders and Diaspora organizations in the United States and Jewish leaders who today have positions of power in the US government (they’re all putting their effort behind the attack on Israel; they have been assisting the Oslo process; they have been apologizing for the PLO; etc.; etc.). But of course its not purely a US phenomenon, we also have the Jews who are in positions of leadership in the Israeli government cleansing the Jews out of Gaza, and now [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert wants to cleanse the Jews out of the West Bank -- Judea and Samaria -- and give all this territory to the PLO.

So we have across the board this phenomenon that is surprising only to those who don’t pay attention to the facts and have not studied WWII but is in fact a recurrent phenomenon in history: that those Jews who attain positions of leadership in countries where gentiles (who tend to be antisemitic) dominate -- they tend to join with those gentiles and attack the Jews. Now, the thing that was very strange, at least initially to me, was to find that the leadership of the Israeli government was assisting the destruction of the Jewish state. That to me, initially, was shocking but it does fit the general pattern.

SINGER: All you have to do Professor is go to the New York Times any day and you will see Israel slammed and portrayed as though it were some apartheid state. It is the only democracy in the Middle East…

GIL-WHITE: Yes, it is absurd. Israel is one of the most compassionate states in the world.

SINGER: Yeah. I mean, frankly, I would invite… Any Arab in the world can walk down the streets of Tel Aviv, of Jerusalem, with a kefir on, with the whole Islamic outfit on. No one is going to harm you. As a Jew, if I put on a yarmulke, a skullcap, walk down as an Orthodox Jew down the streets of Damascus, Riyadh, I would be killed immediately. I mean there is nothing to talk about.

I am so glad you brought up Stephen Wise, who could have saved thousands and maybe even more Jews. Opportunities were made available to him but frankly the Jews of Eastern Europe weren’t important to him. They weren’t the elite German Jews. The New York Times, old Jews, back then... they knew about the genocide. They were silent about it. They were silent about the genocide during the Holocaust. They were silent.

GIL-WHITE: Well actually the New York Times, which was run and is still run by the Sulzberger family, would constantly shunt news about the Holocaust to the back pages. The record of the New York Times during the Holocaust is dismal. I mean dismal. [And now] Israel National News, of course, has experienced persecution at the hands of the Israeli government. For what? For telling the truth that defends the Jewish people!

SINGER: If you are just joining us now, my guest is Dr. Gil-White. He doesn’t just have a PhD, a doctorate in Evolutionary Psychology [Dr. Gil-White's Ph.D. is in Biological and Cultural Anthropology (UCLA), but his training does include Evolutionary Psychology, which he taught at the University of Pennsylvania -- HIR]. And I don’t even know what that means. He is a leading scholar in this field. As you can imagine, he was given professorship at the University of Pennsylvania -- that’s an Ivy League campus, one of the finest universities in the world -- as you can imagine, he is part of the academic elite. I need to ask you this question. Before we even go into the subject that I want to speak about, do you...? I mean, you study psychology. Can you help me understand what it is about the academic world...? I mean, these are not stupid people, these are high IQ folks. Why are they overwhelmingly so anti-Israel? Obviously, there are many pro-Israel professors -- not only in the United States, but around the world (in the United Kingdom there is a whole group; we are going to bring them on: Academics For Israel, but they are an anomaly). What is so toxic about the academic elite that you are a part of? What is wrong with them?

GIL-WHITE: The first hypothesis that I came up with when I began getting threatened for defending Israel was that… Well, let me -- actually, let me backtrack a second. Let me… In order to answer your question, I'd like to make clear what it is that I was fired for because that will actually shed a little bit of light on your question in a way that I think is very useful.

The piece that got my superiors at the University of Pennsylvania very upset was an article that documents the history of the PLO. In this article, I show that the PLO was created... -- well not the PLO, [but] the controlling core of the PLO, which is called al-Fatah, [and] which was Arafat’s organization from the start -- was created by a leader of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. And the purpose was to continue the extermination of the Jewish people. Around 1970, 69...70, Al-Fatah swallowed the PLO and took it over, and kept the name, but the PLO is essentially Al-Fatah. In other words, the PLO is an organization created by a leader of the Final Solution with the purpose of continuing the extermination of the Jewish people. The PLO is the Nazis, and it is the Nazis that are going to be..., that now have Gaza and will soon have Judea and Samaria. So, when I found this out, it completely changed my position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Before realizing this, I was pro-PLO. I was consuming all of the propaganda that everybody else consumes in the mass media, and I had not done any [research]...

SINGER: So you were... you were on the other side. You used to be a leftist…

GIL-WHITE: I was on the other side. I had not done... I’m sorry?

SINGER: I mean, whatever, we will just call it a leftist. You used to be anti-Israel.

GIL-WHITE: Exactly. I was a standard ‘liberal leftist.’

SINGER: What turned you around?

GIL-WHITE: Well it was finding this out! The first thing that got me thinking was when the allegations against the Israelis in the town of Jenin... Right? There was an allegation: I believe it was in April 2002. The Israeli government was accused of conducting a massacre of Arab civilians in the town of Jenin and, with very little research, it became obvious that the allegations had to be false. The UN refugee camp in Jenin, as the BBC had documented already, had a bombs making factory and an arms making factory of the PLO, and it was also from Jenin that the great majority of suicide bombers were leaving from to go kill innocent civilians in Israel. So, it was obvious that the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] had gone there to fight a nest of terrorists. As we now know -- because everybody who accused the IDF of conducting a massacre there has now retracted the accusation -- the IDF was actually very careful to protect civilians. The PLO, by contrast, was using Arab civilians as bait so that they could lure the Israeli soldiers into different kinds of booby traps that they had set in the refugee camps in order to kill them. The Israeli Defense Forces [were] much more careful to protect Arab civilian lives than the PLO was. The PLO was actually deliberately endangering Arab civilian lives in order to kill Israeli soldiers, which is of course the PLO policy. They -- they strap bombs around young children in order to kill other children. This is their standard policy. So, when we found out that it was obvious that there had been no massacre in Jenin, and yet, despite how obvious this was, the entire mainstream Western media in the US and elsewhere was accusing the Israelis of a massacre, this really got us thinking that there is something very strange about the media with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that's when I began to wonder...

At the time, I was working at Emperor’s Clothes and my [then] colleague, Jared Israel, was the one who initially noticed how strange this accusation was and got us both thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict in a new way. And, as a result of shifting our perspective and doing more research on the Arab-Israeli conflict, I eventually found that Hajj Amin al Husseini, who had been -- before the World War, the Second World War -- he had been the Mufti of Jerusalem, because the British Mandate government installed him as the Mufti of Jerusalem. From that position, he had been organizing terrorist riots against innocent Jews. One after another. And then, when the World War exploded, he met with Hitler in 1941. Hitler promised him that he would invade the Middle East and exterminate all the Jews who lived in the Middle East and then make Hajj Amin al- Husseini the king, and Hajj Amin al Husseini, very grateful, then went to Bosnia where he organized tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim volunteers in very large divisions of the SS that went around Yugoslavia hunting for Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, murdering them in their homes or sending them to the vast concentration camp system known as Jasenovac, in Croatia, where they were murdered. (The children were raped first.) Now, this Hajj Amin al Husseini then also did diplomacy in order to get the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, and he was also responsible for accelerating the death process in the death camps with gas chambers and so forth. So Hajj Amin al Husseini is one of the great architects of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. And this is the man who created, who earlier had created the Arab Higher Committee in Jerusalem, which Arab Higher Committee created Al-Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s organization. And Hajj Amin al Husseini also was the mentor, the personal mentor to Yasser Arafat.

So a great architect of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution is who is behind, was behind, what is now the PLO. When I realized this, then my entire picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict was turned upside down.

SINGER: One of the reasons why all of this becomes so interesting is that the President of Iran has declared a very interesting message. He has declared that on the one hand, the Holocaust never happened and on the other hand, he says, “Look, if you believe that there was a Holocaust, you Europeans are the ones who committed these crimes that we deny occurred, and therefore why should the Palestinian people have to pay for the crimes of Europe? Take the Jews. Move them to Europe.” So everything we are discussing goes to everything that is happening in the world around us.

(...)

SINGER: My guest, Professor Francisco Gil-White, University of Pennsylvania. Professor, welcome back to the show.

GIL-WHITE: Thank you, Mr. Singer.

SINGER: Hey, great having you on. Just a point. And as a number of listeners have asked this question. When you are teaching your class at the University of Pennsylvania you’re not -- I can’t even fathom this -- you’re not discussing your personal views about Israel in the classroom is that right?

GIL-WHITE: The article that I published had nothing to do with my classes. I published it on a website called Emperor’s Clothes initially, and then it was republished on Israel National News. And that’s the article that documents the history of the PLO and shows that the controlling core, al-Fatah, was created by a leader of the Final Solution. That’s what got them really upset, and that’s the reason I was fired.

Uh, now, just to answer your question: What is going on in the academic world that it is so anti-Israel and so irrationally pro-PLO?

One hypothesis that I like is that because the US Establishment has been pushing an anti-Israeli foreign policy... [This] is something that a lot of people don’t want to recognize, but that’s in fact what has been going on. In order to convince skeptics we have published on www.hirhome.com a book that traces the history of US foreign policy towards the Jewish people and the Jewish state. And I emphasize this is US foreign, not domestic, policy, towards the Jewish people and Jewish state, from the 1930s to the year 2005, and we constantly update it as we gather more information. But we already have more than enough documentation to show that the general thrust of US foreign policy towards the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been consistently, consistently anti-Israel. [Now,] once that sinks in, the fact that the universities are persecuting any professors who choose to defend Israel... -- well, it could be that there is an effort on the part of the US Establishment to ensure that the universities reproduce the policies of the US Establishment.

Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that the man who fired me, the man who orchestrated my firing -- Professor Ian Lustick, in the University of Pennsylvania Political Science Department -- is a long-time enemy of Israel. His entire career is one attack after another against the Jewish state, and one defense after another of the PLO. He explains on his CV that he works for US Intelligence. His first job was as an intelligence analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, where they make sure that US Intelligence is in line with US foreign policy goals. That was his first job. And then he has been a consultant for the CIA, for the National Security Agency... -- for all manner of US Intelligence groups. So the fact that this gentleman, who happens to work for US Intelligence, is the one responsible for getting me fired does suggest that there is an effort on the part of the US Establishment to corrupt the academic system so that the anti-Israel US foreign policy will be reproduced or supported by what professors are saying.

SINGER: Now let me just ask you a question, because my instincts are that a university campus, the academic world, is an environment where different ideas, competing ideas could be brought out and folks could discuss them, go back and forth. I would think that a University campus, especially in the United States, would be the last place in the world where a teacher, professor, would be fired, I mean, isn’t that the function of a campus? Where different ideas are brought out for folks to negotiate with and argue over and discuss?

GIL-WHITE: Well that’s certainly the ideal. The reality is nowhere near that, unfortunately.

SINGER: Now, I know this, Professor. I know that listeners right now are confused. They’re confused because you said that the United States going as far back... -- we’re talking about three quarters of a century here -- its policy, its foreign policy with regard to Jews has been one that’s anti-Israel. The pedestrian thinking is that the United States and Micronesia are the only two friends that Israel has. The United States is the staunch ally of the Jewish state and whenever a vote comes in the UN, with a number of very notable exceptions, the US is the one that ensures that Israel is not condemned, does not get in, so and so forth. The US is Israel’s friend. It gives it over $3 billion a year in aid. Every President, even the bad ones, the worst ones like Jimmy Carter, has declared openly that, you know, America is a fried of Israel, blah blah. How is America an enemy of the Jewish state? How has American foreign policy been deleterious to Israel?

GIL-WHITE: Well, I invite you to read our book, published on www.hirhome.com. It’s called Is the US an Ally of Israel? And you will see a thorough refutation of the view that the US has had a pro-Israel foreign policy. But let me just point out a few events in that history that will challenge the common view that the US favors Israel. (I want to emphasize: I’m speaking about the behavior of the US ruling elite which controls US foreign policy; I’m not speaking about ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans are one of the least antisemitic peoples in the world: there’s a great many friends of Israel among the common US citizenry. And, in fact, common US citizens believe the same thing that a lot of Jews believe, which is that US foreign policy is pro-Israel.) But let me give you just a few examples.

In 1982, the Menachem Begin government invaded Lebanon because the PLO had established bases in the south of Lebanon and from those bases it was attacking Jewish farmers in the Galilee. Now, the invasion of Lebanon was very successful at first: the PLO was defeated and what remained of it was surrounded in Beirut. The PLO could have been destroyed right there and then, except for the fact that the US then intervened to stop the Israeli military from doing so. And then they provided a military escort to the PLO so that they could have safe passage to Tunis, where they made their home in exile. Now, that does not suggest a pro-Israeli US foreign policy. At the time there wasn’t even a so-called ‘peace process.’ Nobody thought of the PLO as anything other than one of the worst terrorist organizations in the world. And yet, here was the US stepping in to prevent the destruction of the PLO, and moreover providing a military safe passage for the PLO to go to Tunis! Now what that’s consistent with is that the US has a pro-PLO foreign policy. Also consistent with that view is the fact that, before this, the US diplomats in Beirut had their security provided by the PLO terrorists.

And also consistent with this view is how the Oslo process got started. You see, once the PLO was in Tunis they were having lots of trouble killing Israelis -- it was difficult for them because Tunis is far away from Israel. Lebanon has a border with Israel, so it was much easier to do it from Lebanon. Once they were in Tunis they were a little desperate for... for ways of killing Israelis, and this is why in 1985 there was this circus of the hijacking of the [Mediterranean passenger ship] Achille Lauro, in 1985, when they killed US citizen Leon Klinghoffer -- this poor man, who was in a wheel chair... And they shot him and then threw him overboard. Now, this was a sign of desperation: they were running out of ways to kill Israelis because they were just too far. So what does the US do? In 1991, president Bush Senior and his Secretary of State James Baker III threatened the Israeli government for 8 months with the removal of all US economic aid if Yitzhak Shamir, who was the prime minister at the time, didn’t go to the so-called Madrid ‘peace’ talks. Moreover, the US said they would get together with the Arab states and decide the future of the Middle East without Israel if Shamir didn’t go. Now, this was a time when Israel needed an enormous amount of help because hundreds of thousands of immigrants were coming in from the Soviet Union and they needed to be resettled. So this is the juncture at which the US said, “Look, no more money unless you go to the Madrid peace talks.” And they were threatening them for 8 months. After 8 months of this, they broke Shamir down. Shamir went to the Madrid peace talks, and the Madrid peace talks were the platform for what became the Oslo so-called ‘peace’ process.

What was the purpose of the Oslo process? The whole purpose of the Oslo process was to enable this terrorist organization -- which was created by a leader of the Nazi Final Solution to continue the extermination of the Jewish people into the Jewish state -- to become the government of the Arab people in Gaza and in the West Bank. The consequence of this policy has been that over the last twelve years the PLO has been indoctrinating Arabs into the worst forms of antisemitism, educating little children to think that the best thing they can do when they grow up is become murderers of Jews and work for the destruction of Israel. This insanity has been going on thanks to the fact that the US pressured the Israeli government and threatened the Israeli government until it participated in the Oslo process. That is not consistent with a pro-Israeli US foreign policy.

SINGER: Let me ask you this question professor... (If you’re just tuning in, my guest Professor Gil-White, University of Pennsylvania.) Could we...? We have to obviously take apart what it means... what America’s policy is. Obviously, there’s the State Department. I’m thinking, in the early 80’s, you had Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, who just... who just dropped dead; you had [George] Shultz, who was Secretary of State; those are Bechtel Corporation people; you had James Baker III, who was a country club Republican, along with George Bush Sr., who was never a friend of Israel. But you have also pro-Israel forces in America, like Congress, the Senate... Clearly, both Houses overwhelmingly are pro-Israel. They might be misled and misguided by prime ministers like Ehud Olmert, but it’s clear that the House of Representatives cares a great deal about the Jewish state. The CIA is clearly anti-Israel. The American army is probably more pro-Israel. We could divide this up -- it’s not just as simple as saying all of America has anti-Israel foreign policy. Do you agree with that?

GIL-WHITE: Well, I mean, its true. For example, what you say about the Senate and Congress is true: much more pro-Israel than the administrations have been, that’s true. But US foreign policy is not made in the Senate. US foreign policy is the province of the Office of the President. And the bodies that make foreign policy are the State Department and US Intelligence. And you just told me that the State Department and US intelligence are anti-Israeli. Well, those are the organs that produce US foreign policy, and I just gave you a dramatic example. It’s an important example because the Oslo process is the most important US foreign policy towards Israel of the last two decades. By far. The consequences of the Oslo process are gigantic. So if the Oslo process is anti-Israel, and if the US went passionately out of its way to make sure the PLO was taken out of exile and put into the Jewish state to govern all those Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza, then... the US has a policy to destroy the Jewish state. I’m not making any of this up. The US did this. So, ... It’s just one example...

SINGER: Professor, just for one second, let me just say... There’s a breaking news piece that’s coming out right now (I'm going to keep you updated on this), but ah...rocketfire has just landed in the Sderot. One house was directly hit, as we are speaking. We will update you, obviously, on what is happening in Sderot, but there is an attack on Sderot coming from Gaza. What else is knew? A house was hit. Our initial reports from Israel National News is that there are no injuries. But we will keep you updated on this. And you now, professor, here we are, we are discussing the foreign policy of the United States and the damage that Israel has done in Gaza... And isn’t it interesting that everything that we predicted -- that if you take the Jewish population, 80,000 Jews, and throw them out of their homes, the terrorists would use these communities (21 of them in Gush Katif), as terrorists dens, as launching pads for terrorism against the Negev Sderot just northwest... northeast of Gaza, the Mediterranean coastal communities, like Ashkelon... -- I mean, none of this is a surprise. All of this was predicted before the so-called disengagement.

GIL-WHITE: Yes, we did predict that, but I don’t think it’s a very ah... I don't think it's a very smart prediction at all. It’s just an obvious prediction, and it’s a prediction that anybody who was a Jewish patriot and was running the Israeli government should have taken seriously; and therefore, the interpretation of what the Israeli government has done in turning Gaza over to the PLO terrorists is treason. I don’t think that there’s any other reasonable interpretation of what they did.

SINGER: Let me ask you this professor, we only have about 6 minutes left. Would you be willing to take callers, or questions for you in the few minutes that we have left here...?

GIL-WHITE: I'd be very happy to.

SINGER: Let me just say this to the folks (because we have been given a lot of requests to speak to you). We only have a few minutes. If you want to call in and have a question for my guest Francisco Gil-White -- his website www.hirhome.com -- call now. The number to dial throughout Israel and the United States and Canada 1-800-270-4288. That's the number to dial, anywhere around the world. We have to do this quickly because time is running short. Just a question: What happens...? You find out... I mean: How do you find out that you’re in trouble at the university of Pennsylvania? What happens? Do they call you into the office? What happens there?

GIL-WHITE: Oh well, initially, they would have meetings with me to tell me to stop doing this. Then they would send me e-mails threatening me, eventually with the loss of my job. And when I got an e-mail that I thought was clear enough, then I decided to confront the situation directly and I took the evidence of the threats to the chairman, the Psychology Department Chairman Robert DeRubeis, who promised that he would make sure that the reappointment process for my second contract (which was already rolling, at the time) would be fair, and that none of these political issues would have anything to do with the consideration of my reappointment. Those are promises that he didn’t keep. And I have the evidence to show this and I published it on the website.

SINGER: Professor, we have a caller, Tom. He’s in Washington D.C., America's capital. Tom, I am going to ask you to keep your question for my guest to one minute because we’re really running tight on time. Tom, welcome to Israel National Radio. Speak loud. What is your question for the good professor?

TOM: Thank you, Tovia. Professor Gil-White, did the British and the US use the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the Shah of Iran in 1979? And in your humble opinion is it a possible interpretation that the UK and the US have been supporting or at least not doing anything to depose the crazy mullahs ever since that time?

SINGER: [Clarifying the question because it was inaudible to Gil-White.] The fall of the Shah in Iran back in 1979: the overthrow that led to the Revolution in Iran. And that's the trouble we're dealing with the... with the trouble right now with the president of Iran. Was the United States, the CIA, were they behind the fall of the Shah’s government?

GIL-WHITE: Considering hypotheses about what the real aims of US foreign policy might be, we have to be very careful to not be too quickly carried away by what the official statements are. Because, of course, governments don’t necessarily say in public what they really intend to do. Right? We hear all the time US officials -- whenever they grab the microphone or find themselves in front of the TV camera -- US officials will invariable say that they love Israel, that they want to defend Israel, that they’ll do everything for Israel etc., etc. But in fact US foreign policy is designed to destroy the Jewish State. Otherwise US foreign policy would not have been this passionate series of efforts to empower the PLO inside the Jewish state. Now, if there is no connection between official statements of support for Israel and actual support for Israel.... (I know you mentioned the economic aid, but when you subtract that from that the aid that the enemies of Israel get, it isn’t really impressive.) So, when we talk about official statements of enmity toward Iran, we should approach that with the same type of skepticism that I suggest we bring forward to the official claims of support for Israel. So, let us not worry about whether US officials say that they hate Iran or not. Let us face what the facts are.

Immediately after the Ayatollah [Khomeini] came to power, one of the first things he did was to absorb SAVAK. Now SAVAK was the late Shah’s security service. It was a mammoth security service -- the biggest in the world after the Soviet Union’s. Now, that’s saying a lot because the Soviet Union was an enormous totalitarian state, and Iran was this tiny little fifth rate power. So to say that SAVAK was the second biggest security service in the world gives you a taste for just how repressive the Shah of Iran -- the great US ally -- was. And SAVAK was created by the CIA. And it was essentially run by the CIA -- SAVAK had very close ties to the CIA throughout the Shah’s reign. And Iran behaved as a feudal property of the US throughout the Shah’s reign. So the fact that the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been complaining about SAVAK when he was in the opposition, and railing against SAVAK, and promising to disband it and so on and so forth... Well, when he took power he absorbed it wholesale. SAVAK became SAVAMA, the new Iranian security service. That’s point one.

Point two is that the Ayatollah Khomeini, immediately after consolidating his power, provoked a war with Iraq. Now, the Ayatollah Khomeini could not afford to provoke a war with Iraq unless he knew that the US was gonna provide him with weapons. Why? Because the Iranian Revolution depleted the Iranian arsenal -- so he was without guns, in other words. And the Iranian arsenal was entirely, or almost entirely US-made. So unless the Ayatollah Khomeini knew in advance that, if he went to war with Iraq, then the US would provide him with weapons and spare parts, he couldn’t afford to provoke a war with Iraq. And yet that is immediately what he did!

Well, what happened? The US sent billions of dollars in US armament every year of the Iran-Iraq War to Iran. When this was discovered, in the mid 80’s, it was called the Iran-gate scandal, or the Iran-Contra scandal -- and despite the scandal, the arms shipments went on! Now, when caught red-handed, the Reagan administration said the reason for those arms shipments was that -- this is so funny -- that the reason for the arms shipments was that Hezbollah, a tiny terrorist group in Lebanon, a third country, had taken a handful of American citizens hostage, and because the Iranians had some influence on Hezbollah, they wanted the Iranians to beg the Hezbollah to release that handful of US citizens. And that was the supposed reason that billions of US dollars in armaments went to the Iranians every year for the duration of the Iran-Iraq War. Now, this absurd explanation could not be true even in principle because the arms shipments to Iran -- as we now know, thanks to a congressional investigation that was done years later -- that the arms shipments began in 1981. The first hostage in Lebanon was taken in 1982. So obviously the policy of sending billions of dollars in armament to Iran every year couldn’t have anything to do with those hostages. And in fact the arms shipments continued after the last hostage was released.

In addition to this there’s also the fact that the Iran-Iraq war, towards the end, went badly for Iran. So Iran asked for a cease-fire in 1988. Now, immediately after that cease fire, Zalmay Khalilzad, a protégé of Zbigniew Brzezinski who was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and the man who invented the policy of creating Islamist terrorism in Afghanistan by sponsoring the mujahideen (whom Osama bin-Laden, by the way, was training for the CIA)... This Zalmay Khalizad, a direct ideological descendant of Zbigniew Brzezinski, complained out loud (I believe it was in the Washington Post... I forget which newspaper now...) but he complained out loud that the outcome of the Iran-Iraq War was very bad because Iran was very weak, and that the US should have a policy to strengthen Iran and contain Iraq. What happened immediately afterwards? The Gulf War of 1991 that destroyed Iraq and left Iran as the big regional power. This war was launched while Zalmay Khalilzad was a policy planner at the Pentagon. Now Zalmay Khalizad, obviously, is the viceroy of the United States in Iraq. He has been responsible for crafting US policy in that area ever since.

In addition... The last point I would mention is -- as Jared Israel of Emperor’s Clothes has documented -- that the Iranians helped the US in the latest US invasion of Iraq. So, ...

Oh, and I forgot one point. During the civil wars in Yugoslavia, the Pentagon teamed up with the Iranians -- this is also documented on Emperor’s Clothes -- to send tens of thousands of mujahideen soldiers (these are the same soldiers that Brzezinski had created staring in 1979, and then throughout the 80’s)... to send tens of thousands of mujahideen to Bosnia to fight for Alija Izetbegovic, and to go on killing rampages against Serbs. That importation of mujahideen soldiers was coordinated between the Iranian government and the Pentagon.

So, if you look at the entire history of US-Iranian relations, yes, on the surface they exchange lots of insults, but the facts of US foreign policy do not reveal an anti-Iranian policy. On the contrary. And in fact, I have an article on www.hirhome.com where I predict that the US will not attack Iran, as a lot of people think it will. And I explain why: I give the whole history of the US/Iran relationship to support my case.

SINGER: Ultimately... We have to do this very very quick because we have so many callers waiting. Ultimately you feel -- because Iran is very important right now -- that Israel is going to have to bomb Iran?

GIL-WHITE: The problem with the Israeli government is that it doesn’t defend Israel. So whatever we think is necessary to protect Israel I can guarantee you the Israeli government will not do it. It will do just the opposite. That would be my prediction too. But the problem is indeed a severe one, because the consequence of the US invasion of Iraq is that Iraq is becoming the westernmost province of Iran, and Iran, as the president of Iran has said, wants to exterminate the Jews in Israel. So now the only thing separating the state of Israel from Iraq is tiny Jordan, and Jordan can’t stop anything. So, the situation is indeed very dangerous for Israel, and all of this is a consequence of US foreign policy.

SINGER: Well, I can tell you this: my listeners are going to go into a state of depression, and probably send me the bill...

GIL-WHITE: Well but that’s the beginning of Enlightenment. Unless Israelis realize the danger they are in, and the danger to their state in US foreign policy, then they have no way of defending themselves. If you haven’t recognized your enemy you cannot defend yourself. What I would advise all the Jews of the world who want to defend the Jewish state is to appeal to ordinary US citizens, because ordinary US citizens have an excellent ideology, and there are lots and lots and lots of allies of the Jewish people among ordinary Americans. So if ordinary Americans pressure their government to change its foreign policy, which is attacking the state of Israel, then... something can be done about the danger to the Jewish state.

SINGER: We have Stewart joining us, also from the United States, Stanford Connecticut. Stewart, welcome to Israel National Radio. You have a question for our guest. What’s on your mind?

STEWART: Professor, I’m a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, 1983, and I really haven’t heard you say anything tonight that connects your views on history with why you say you were fired. So, while I was listening I did a little checking on the internet and I found an article from you in the Daily Pennsylvanian dated February 2nd 2004. Here’s what you say in the first paragraph: I’m an assistant professor of psychology and I believe I'm about to be fired for investigating US crimes of war in Yugoslavia. Well, that was in 2004, we’re all passed two years from that. Which is it, were you fired because of Yugoslavia, or Israel? Were you on a tenure track? Were you dismissed at the end of your contract period, or before your contract? I want to understand the academics of it, because these things work in a certain way. And as you probably know, there was a professor at Yale named Mary Hayback, who also wasn't tenured, and also lost her position although she was a fantastic scholar. So I’m just wondering how you got fired.

GIL-WHITE: Okay, well the threats against me did begin with my work on Yugoslavia. This is true. I didn’t delve into it here because we’re on Israel National News. But the tipping point, in other words, the thing that finally caused them to threaten me that I would lose my job was my article on the PLO. They were not happy with my work on Yugoslavia, but what really made them angry was my work on the Arab-Israeli conflict. That’s point one.

Point two is: I was not up for tenure -- not even. This was the reappointment process to my second contract as an Assistant Professor -- what is sometimes called the ‘third-year review.’ People often confuse this with tenure but it's not. What happens is that an Assistant Professor first gets hired, and at the university of Pennsylvania psychology department it is initially a four-year contract. In the third year of that first four-year contract the Assistant Professor is considered for reappointment to a second contract for three years, at the end of which the professor will then be considered for tenure. So I was not even up for tenure. I was up for reappointment for my second contract. This reappointment is something of a formality; people are very rarely fired at reappointment time and when they are fired it is because their performance is really dismal. There is no way you can make a case that my performance was anywhere near dismal. It wasn’t even bad. It wasn’t even good -- it was very good. My teaching evaluations from my students were extremely high, and some of them said in the comments that my course was the best course they had taken in the entire school. And my research was going very well. I have a very high publication rate, I publish in very good journals, I have won a couple of prizes, and so on and so forth. So you couldn’t really make the case that I was some sort of problem teacher or problem researcher that they had to get rid of. On the contrary…

SINGER: You know professor... (and Stewart, thank you for joining us here on Israel National Radio). You know, I listen to you describe American foreign policy, and none of this is a mystery. What comes to mind immediately is that American foreign policy has been blunder after blunder. The United States has suffered so deeply as a result of these unimaginable decisions that were made by the CIA and by the State Department. And that's all I hear. And I find myself... I feel this intense anger... and such... it's so self destructive to American foreign policy. Here we are, standing at the precipice of what might be a military attack by US and Israel, hopefully one of them will get involved against Iran. But it’s failed policy after failed policy, one after another, and that’s without any question why the world is in such bad shape right now: the support of terrorism. Let’s move on, we have Ariel joining us here. She’s also an American from Vero Beach, Florida. Ariel, welcome to Israel National Radio. What is on your mind?

ARIEL: Professor, you’re truly an inspiration, and I just wanted to point that out. So what do you plan to do now that you lost your job? I hope [inaudible] guides you to strengthen the people’s knowledge in truth. In other words, wake 'em up! Don't let it end here, and be a very very strong voice. We need you. Hashem bless you and your family. Also, you’re on the same track I am, in how to get my voice heard throughout America, and the world. And I am sitting here, and Tovia can tell you I have been racking my brains in how I can... I am a pauper, I am a citizen, and I worry about how my voice gets heard too, to get the truth out. Mike open. Shalom.

SINGER: The first question is very interesting: Are you planning to sue the University of Pennsylvania. Essentially to get your job back, or to be compensated?

GIL-WHITE: I am planning to sue the university of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, that requires funds and I haven’t been able to put them together yet. But yes, I am planning to sue the University of Pennsylvania.

SINGER: She is an American citizen living in the state of Florida. She’s very very concerned about the direction American foreign policy is taking, especially vis-a-vis Israel, going along with Ehud Olmert. I mean, that whole speech he made to Congress -- it’s frightening. You see these congressmen and senators applauding him. Eighteen standing ovations in this speech. And you know that these congressmen and senators don’t mean bad, they're not trying to... -- with the exception of a few like Hyde and others -- but essentially, the vast majority of them only have good will for the Jewish state. What could she do as an ordinary American citizen to make a difference? I mean, really.

GIL-WHITE: There are a number of things she can do...

I’d like to just comment a little bit on the premise of what you said. I’m not sure that it makes a whole lot of sense to naively impute good will to people. I think you should judge them by their deeds and if the people in the US Senate and the US Congress really were so passionately pro-Israel and so full of good will, then they could do something to counter the awful anti-Israeli policies of the US administration. So, I think you should be a little more skeptical than I think you are about the people...

SINGER: Let me ask you this. We only have about two minutes left. Literally. But let me ask you... What do you think of people like senator Orrin Hatch or Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania who by the way…?

GIL-WHITE: I think the behavior of the US Congress has not been -- in any way -- effective at countering or even informing US citizens about the dangers of US foreign policy. To translate their official statements of good will towards Israel into an imputation of an actual good will is, I think, very naïve. People always say things that they don’t mean, and politicians almost invariably do so. So, it is I think a mistake to go from public statements to imputations of intentions, especially when we’re talking about the survival of the Jewish state. We have to judge politicians by their effects on the Jewish state, not by their...happy statements of support or good will.

SINGER: Professor Francisco Gil-White... I want to give you the website address again: it’s www.hirhome.com. Professor, this has been an enlightening interview. And I wish you God shall only give you strength and you should continue to spread the word, get the information out, and get your job back at the University of Pennsylvania, or find another pulpit so that your voice can be heard. Thank you so much for joining us here on Israel National News...

GIL-WHITE: On the contrary, thank you very much for having me and I hope we can do this again.

[INTERVIEW ENDS HERE]
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Footnotes and Further Reading
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