William I Robinson, a tenured professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, teaches a Sociology of Globalization class. Robinson is Jewish—apparently in the tradition of Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk. He sees similarities in what the Israelis are doing in the Gaza Strip and what the Nazis did in the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. The chances are he has read Mila 18 by Leon Uris or he wouldn’t be teaching the class. Mila 18 might not be the best starting point for a study of globalization, but it is essential to an understanding of the Warsaw Ghetto. One would certainly expect Robinson’s credentials to be better than those of Ward Churchill. UC Santa Barbara is not the University of Colorado. As far as is known, Robinson is not an honorary member of any of the Palestinian tribes—Hamas, al-Fatah.

Robinson got into trouble when he sent e-mails to his students depicting man’s inhumanity to man—he compared the Israelis to Nazis and the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip to the denizens of the Warsaw Ghetto though he insists no comparison was intended. The e-mails contained photographs of dead Jews in the Ghetto and dead Palestinians in the Strip.

Two Jewish students were offended and lodged a protest with the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rebecca Joseph, 22, said she was shocked. “He overstepped his boundaries as a professor,” she said. “He has his own freedom of speech, but he doesn’t have the freedom to send his students his own opinion that is so strong.”

Robinson insists he is not an anti-Semite. “Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw,” he says, “a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide.”

Genocide? That would certainly seem to be a strong opinion. Is a slow-motion holocaust taking place in the Gaza Strip?

Not exactly…

What are the statistics, if any? How about birthrates? Yes, how about birthrates? An interesting story! Birthrates do not support Robinson unless he fears it is the Israelis who are on the way to extinction and not the Palestinians.

The birthrate in Israel is 20 per 1,000 inhabitants with a sizeable Muslim minority that has a higher birthrate than the Israelis. The birthrate in the Gaza Strip is 39 per 1,000—almost double that of Israel! By comparison, the birthrate in the United States is 14 per 1,000! It is Potsy and Ralph Malph who are on the way to extinction not Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour!

UC Santa Barbara faculty members are supporting Robinson. No surprise there. Harold Marcuse, a history professor who is also Jewish, said, “I think criticism of Israel is OK.”

Yes, fine, okay and to be expected. How about criticism of the Palestinians? That is another matter. There is more criticism of Israel in the average Middle East Studies Department of any UC University than there is of the Palestinians—Hamas, al-Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade—in the entire California school system..

Movements are on foot on campuses across America to divest from Israel—at Harvard, at Hampshire College, at Berkeley. At Harvard 64 professors signed a divestment protocol. Sixty-four! Except for then President Larry Summers, no one voiced an objection.

Spurred on by Muslim Student groups, anti-Semitism is alive and well and festering in what was once a repository of knowledge and free speech. There is no movement on the college campus to end the unceasing flow of taxpayer dollars to the Palestinians. It is one continuous Marshall Plan. The per capita expense has been enormous—enough to provide each resident of the Gaza Strip with a three-bedroom house, a car and a Swiss bank account.

How much money Yasser Arafat stole will never be known, cannot be guessed at. Unlike Al Capone who had to dig deep into his personal savings to hire out-of-town thugs for his Valentine’s Day celebrations, Yasser had a never-ending supply of brainwashed kids and psychopathic adults to do his dirty work for him—to throw the stones or detonate the bombs that would bring on the retribution professors like Robinson deplore. There may come a day when Israel surrenders to its fate, gives up, is overwhelmed, disappears from the map of the Middle East, then the radical college professor may find something nice to say about them.

There was a time when the University took the position of honor in the fight against anti-Semitism in the United States. It was the college professor versus Father Coughlan, Archie Bunker and the Grand Kleagle. It was the man of letters versus the religious right and the redneck. Times have changed. The religious right is now amongst the strongest supporters of Israel and the old rednecks are dead, replaced by a much more liberal working class that admires the Israelis for their heroic stand against overwhelming odds. And it was not the Jews that brought down the World Trade Center. No one is buying the Kevin Barrett-Amiri Baraka nonsense. There has been a sea change—a thermal inversion. Those who were once Israel’s friends are now its enemies and vice versa.

When Israel traded land for peace and pulled out of the Gaza Strip, Hamas responded by firing 6,000 missiles into Israel from where else—the Gaza Strip! Robinson must be aware of this.

If the Strip is one vast concentration camp as Robinson says, it is not because of anything Israel has done. It is the result of what the Palestinians—aided by their ‘friends’ in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Muslim world—have done to themselves. Creating a modern stable ‘Palestinian’ society, especially where one never existed, will be hard work and coupled with a mindless religious bigotry it may well be impossible. The alternative is to subsist forever on Western charity.