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The Burlington Free Press , January 7, 2003

Not anti-Semitic

By James Marc Leas

"If there is one thing Paulin clearly abhors about Israel, it is the Brooklyn-born Jewish settlers. 'They should be shot dead,' he says forcefully. 'I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.'"

So says the interview with Tom Paulin in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram Weekly. Because of these remarks, the acclaimed poet and lecturer at Oxford University, Tom Paulin, currently a visiting professor at Columbia University, was dis-invited from speaking at Harvard. As critics charged "anti-Semitism," the professor who invited him to read his poetry at UVM called Paulin Nov. 19 to discourage his visit here, according to Sam Hemingway's column of Nov. 20. Hemingway asks, "free speech or hate speech?" However, on Nov. 19, Harvard's English Department voted to renew the invitation to Paulin because banning Paulin sets a dangerous precedent against academic freedom.

Paulin's words were not directed against Jews as a people. They were directed against armed Jewish settlers creating illegal ethnically pure Jewish settlements on land belonging to Palestinians. Calling the settlers names, expressing harsh feelings, and calling for their death is absurd, impolitic, and reprehensible, but it is anti-settlerism, not anti-Semitism.

James Marc Leas
South Burlington, VT