Week of January 26, 2009

A group of extremist professors, all from California and all opposed to Israeli foreign policy, have launched a new organization devoted to bringing about an academic boycott of Israel.

Asked by Ha'aretz about the membership's position on U.S. foreign policy, group spokesperson David Lloyd confirmed that all signatories opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This revelation prompted an unintentionally hilarious exchange:

Asked if logic wouldn't dictate that he and his colleagues boycott themselves, he responded,"Self-boycott is a difficult concept to realize. But speaking for myself, I would have supported and honored such a boycott had it been proposed by my colleagues overseas."

I hope that Lloyd, et al., more fully explore the merits of a"self-boycott." Such an outcome would, perhaps, represent a perfect outcome for the organization's effort.

What do Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt have in common?

I would have voted against every one of them. As a conservative Federalist-Whig-Republican, given the opportunity to cast a vote, I am fairly confident I would have selected John Adams over TJ in 1800, John Quincy Adams over Old Hickory in 1828, Henry Clay over Jackson in 1832, William Howard Taft over Wilson (and Teddy) in 1912, Charles Evans Hughes over Wilson in 1916, Hoover over FDR in 1932, and Landon, Wilke, and Dewey in 1936, 1940, and 1944.

Want to hear something crazy? Even knowing everything I know now, I would still vote the same way given the chance.

Of the many parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, one has eluded all coverage: Both attended Catholic school as children. In fact, while JFK may have been the Irish Catholic from Boston, he spent less time at the Canterbury School in Connecticut than did young Barry (as he was then called) at St. Francis of Assisi in Indonesia.

I have been thrown out of organizations and even a whole country for refusing to toe a party line. Baathist Syria censored my news articles when I was working for a newspaper in Beirut. Theocratic Iran, where you have to follow the khatt-i Imami, the line of the Supreme Leader, once had me blackballed from an academic conference they helped fund. I object to party lines. I am not interested in being a court poet who spouts panegyrics. I am interested in being the academic equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson.

Barack Obama is the son of a Black African father from Kenya and a White Irish-English mother from Kansas. Under American eugenic principles, which prevailed during the first six decades of the 20th Century, Barack Obama would have never been born. Had his family settled in Virginia, as opposed to Hawaii, the marriage would have been invalidated. Had his family lived in California, where about half of all coerced sterilizations occurred, he or his mother would have been either incarcerated and/or sterilized. Had he lived in the South, he would have been barred from the best schools on the basis of the one-drop rule that defined him as Negro even though he was half-white and half-African.