The Big Lie

By Francis A. Boyle

I am not Arab. I am not Jewish. I am not Palestinian. I am not Israeli. I am Irish American. Our People have no proverbial "horse in this race." What follows is to the best of my immediate recollection:

The Big Lie

Growing up in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s while strongly supporting the just struggle of African Americans for civil rights, I was brainwashed at school as well as by the mainstream news media and popular culture to be just as pro-Israel as everyone else in America. Then came the 1967 Middle East War. At that time, my assessment of the situation was that Israel had attacked these Arab countries first, stolen their lands, and then driven out their respective peoples from their homes. I then realized that everything I had been told about Israel was "The Big Lie." Israel was Goliath, not David.

I resolved to study the Middle East in more detail in order to figure out what the Truth really was.

Of course by then I had already figured out that everything I was being told about the Vietnam War also constituted The Big Lie. The same was true for U.S. military intervention into Latin America after the Johnson administrations gratuitous invasion of the Dominican Republic. The same for the pie-in-the-sky "Camelot" peddled by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs invasion/fiasco and its self-induced Cuban Missile Crisis that was a near-miss for nuclear Armageddon. So I just added the Middle East to the list of international subjects that I needed to pay more attention to in my life.

Chicago

... By the end of Professor Binders course in the Winter of 1970, I had become convinced of three basic propositions: (1) that the world had inflicted a terrible injustice upon the Palestinian People in 1947-1948; (2) that there will be no peace in the Middle East until this injustice was somehow rectified; and (3) that the Palestinian People were entitled to an independent nation state of their own. I have publicly maintained these positions for the past three decades at great cost to myself.

In particular, I have been accused of being everything but a child molester because of my public support for the Palestinian People. I have seen every known principle of Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom violated in order to suppress the basic rights of the Palestinian People. In fact, there is no such thing as Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom in the United States of America when it comes to asserting the rights of the Palestinian People under international law.

... By comparison, Harvards Center for Middle East Studies was then basically operating as a front organization for the . and probably the Mossad as well. No point anyone wasting their time studying Middle East Politics at Harvard.

Nevertheless, I entered Harvard in September of 1971 in order to pursue a J.D. at the Harvard Law School and a . in Political Science at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government. The latter was the same doctoral program that had produced Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and numerous other Machiavellian war-mongers trained by Harvard to "manage" the U.S. global empire. In other words, Harvard trained me to be one of these American Imperial Managers: "There but for the Grace of God go I!"

For the next seven years at Harvard I was quite vocal in my support for the Palestinian People, including and especially their basic human rights, their right to self-determination, and their right to an independent nation state of their own. ...

While in residence as an Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA) from 1976-1978, I also came into contact with Walid Khalidi. I was present for the dramatic off-the-record confrontation between him and Shimon Peres at the standing CFIA Seminar on "American Foreign Policy" then conducted by Stanley Hoffmann at their old headquarters on 6 Divinity Avenue. Peres refused to budge even one inch no matter how flexible Khalidi was. A harbinger for the Middle East Peace Negotiations over a decade later.

As a most loyal and grateful Harvard alumnus (J.D. magna cum laude, A.M., Ph.D.), I must nevertheless state that it is shameful and shameless that Harvard never granted a tenured full professorship to Walid Khalidi because he is a Palestinian despite the fact that he is universally recognized as one of the worlds foremost experts on the Middle East. This gets back to my previous observation that there is no point studying Middle East Politics at Harvard. ...

more here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/boylebiglie.html