by Ludwig Watzal
As a former Graduate student of International Relations at the U of Penn I’m appalled by the disinvitation of Chris Hedges, a renowned newspaper correspondent and highly awarded writer, because of his courage to speak out against Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine. Hedges was supposed to speak at a conference in April on prospects of peace in the Middle East on campus.
Usually, a university forum is supposed to be the best place in an open society to discuss theses that don’t make headlines in the mainstream media, especially, when they allude to Israel’s destructive role in the Middle East. In a good article on „truthdig“ , Hedges compared ISIS to Israel. „ISIS, ironically, is perhaps the only example of successful nation-building in the contemporary Middle East, despite the billions of dollars we have squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948. Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, to create Israel. Antagonistic ISIS and Israeli states, infected by religious fundamentalism, would be irreconcilable neighbors. This is a recipe for apocalyptic warfare. We provided the ingredients.“