Oh, and Plantagenet, please stop truncating my sentences to change their over all meaning. That is misquoting and is not acceptable. Perhaps you only read part of the sentence before you leapt for your keyboard? if so, please be more careful.

JOM

Good post from you. Your premise that the left academics hate Israel because it sided with the USA in the Cold war is valid, but I think there is a lot more to it than that.

There was once a time when the Left were enthusiastically pro Israel. You were not really fashionable unless you had gone to Israel and worked on a kibbutz. Socialists were lauding the successful kibbutz system as true socialist communes which displayed how a truly socialised and socially cohesive people could work together as a group for the common good.

Trendies think the primary reasons for war are racism and the oppression of minorities. In those days, the Jews were seen as world's most oppressed people because of European racism. And since Israel was a country of only two million people that was surrounded by 500 million hostile Arabs bent on their destruction, there was no question about who was the oppressed, and who was the oppressor.

The 1967 Six Day War which the Arabs started when Nasser used the Egyption Navy to blockade the Israeli port of Eilat, was a war the Israelis were expected to lose. But amazingly, they won it. And they kept on winning every other fight they were in against the Arabs. The rule of thumb for trendies is, that winners are always oppressors, and losers are always the oppressed.

Suddenly Israel lost it's "oppressed" certification from the trendies and became the "oppressors". This was also because it was the hated USA which had given military aid to Israel to prevent it's people being exterminated, raped, and sold into slavery like the Yazidis. The academic Left hate the USA, because it is the leading power against socialism, it believes in freedom of speech, and it's people are armed to prevent their own government from becoming tyrannical.

Your drooling LEGO ;)