While we were still in the shadow cast by Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial
Day, the Norwegian Academy was raging against renowned sociologist Johan
Galtung, who declared that “Jews own 96% of the world’s media,” and that the
American media are biased in favor of Israel. During an interview published in
The Humanist, Galtung also recommended that people read The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. The Protocols, he stated, offer a persuasive explanation of
Jewish control of the world, and should be read to get at the truth.
The
storm in Oslo revealed that this was not the first time Galtung expressed
himself this way, and that for some time he has discussed the Protocols and
Jewish control of the world in his lectures and on TV appearances. Galtung, in
fact, based some of his claims on articles that appeared in The National
Vanguard, a neo-Nazi website that had been used by the mass-murderers Anders
Breivik and Timothy McVeigh to justify their terrorist acts. I opened this
website, and what immediately came up was, “That’s correct, the Jews had killed
millions of Slavic people,” and an article criticizing the Nobel Prize Committee
for awarding too many Nobel prizes to Jews (“Jewish bias and the Nobel
Prize”).
SO WHO is this Galtung, you may ask, and why is it so surprising
that there is another anti-Semite in the world? Here’s the reason for the
surprise: Professor Johan Galtung is the consummate Man of Peace.
As a
youth, he sat in jail on behalf of peace; following his math and sociology
studies, he was the founding father of the academic discipline “peace and
conflict studies.”
Galtung was the first incumbent of a chair in peace
studies, the first editor of a research journal about peace, headed a university
peace institute, and ultimately established Transcend University, specializing
in peacemaking and conflict resolution. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy
for Arts and Sciences, the darling of the Green Party, a laureate of the
Alternative Nobel Prize for human rights and recipient of numerous prizes and
honorary degrees from universities around the world.
A glance at
Galtung’s CV also reveals seemingly one of the most productive scholars in the
social sciences, with more than a thousand publications to his name and 25,000
citations of his work (on closer look most of those “publications” are not real
scientific publications).
Based on any public or academic criterion,
Prof. Galtung had until now been a worthy and respected individual, and
justifiably so. If there was one reliable man of peace in this world, it would
be the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung.
This background explains the
astonishment that gripped the Norwegian Academy to hear Galtung’s words. It was
the same astonishment evoked by the murderer Breivik in Oslo – a symbolic city
of peace for many in the world – when he massacred dozens of innocent children
less than a year ago. How could it be, members of the Norwegian Academy are now
asking, that this lover of peace bases his words on neo-Nazi publications, and
spreads his ideas in lectures, interviews and writing? How come he claims that
the Mossad is behind the Oslo massacre? Does he, too, like Breivik, greet others
with a “Sieg Heil”? But is this surprise warranted? A deeper examination reveals
that Galtung’s seemingly neo-Nazi approach is not new. In a 2010 lecture at the
Institute for Peace and Justice in San Diego, Galtung declared – in a more
reasoned presentation than Gunther Grass – that “this bond between Judaism and
Christianity in the United States is the key problem today,” as Israel threatens
to expose the United States’ treatment of Native Americans. Because of Israeli
extortion, these two empires together control the world, with the big empire
under the thumb of the little one.
In fact, his words suggest – without
clever sophistry – that the Zionist movement seeks to dominate the world on
behalf of the 13 million Jews in it, and is accomplishing this by extortion of
the United States. President Barack Obama, at least, is in Israel’s
palm.
Israel and the USA are thus responsible for terror and massacres in
the Arab Spring, they sent the people to kill their
brothers.
Unbelievable? Look at his public interviews! When the editor of
The Humanist was asked why he agreed to publish Galtung’s words, he responded
that it was important to know that such dangerous ideas exist in
Norway.
Indeed, the importance of this event is not what Eli Yishai plans
to do about Galtung (following his decision to ban Gunther Grass from entering
Israel). The larger questions are: What does Europe allow itself to utter these
days? Has Europe again expanded the range of legitimate ideas, and does it view
anti-Semitic texts such as the Protocols part of an enlightened, truth-seeking
discourse? Will these ideas – as happened in France – start to gather crusaders,
supporters and a party? And will Galtung, the seeker of peace with Mein Kampf
ideas, again don armor and take up the police cudgel? And how come the academic
world failed to see through Galtung’s conspiracy theories and ban them? So what
is Galtung, they are asking in Norway: An enlightened sociologist who wants
peace or a Viking Quisling who incites hatred? What is crystal clear, says the
Israeli, is that another seeker of peace like this and we’re goners.
The
writer is director of the NCJW Research Institute for Innovation in Education
and a professor in the department of sociology at The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem.
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