Since college professors are known for their biased approaches, it is curious that the ultra-leftist chair of the Jewish History department at UCLA busily is promoting an “objective” perspective in history.
Squishy David Myers is advocating a “dual narrative”– or side-by-side — method of teaching history to the unwashed.
In the vacant space where a man’s brain-box normally would be, Prof. Myers takes pride in being non-committal, open-minded, lib-style in relating past events to gullible, manipulable students.
Let each side tell its story.
Since liberals believe there is no right, no wrong, just feelings, the naïve student will decide for himself whether the Nazis or their victims were in the wrong.
Sounds like the ultimate liberal dream. Fasten at least two seatbelts.
Say you were born 40 years after World War II. You had no family connections to, or interest in, the war. In middle school, your history textbook is one of those new-fangled dueling narratives – half of the book is the German version of World War II, the other half is the American record of the war.
You, schlemiel, can make up your own poorly informed mind which side was morally right.
Under the Jewish Journal headline “The Importance of Learning the Other’s Past,” Prof. Myers, 57 years old, recently assumed a peculiar stance for a Jew – especially for someone laughably characterized as “an observant of Jew and lover of Israel.”
Yeah, sure.
Here is the back-story to the professor’s case.
Terrified Jews fled the Holocaust at war’s end. They dashed to the land G-d awarded the Jewish People 3,000 years before, historically known as Palestine.
In November 1947, the United Nations officially approved establishment of the Jewish State. On the day Israel formally opened in May 1948, Arab terrorists, as they have done throughout history, invaded. The animals killed 6,373 Jews, more than in any of the many wars Arabs have mounted against Israel since 1947.
They have warred against Israel every day since 1947. Lazy, angry and remarkably dishonest, they have spent 70 years casting themselves as victims of Jews instead of working to birth their own state.
This is where Prof. Myers goes daffier than usual.
Looking over his left shoulder at the 69-year history of the Jewish State, Mr. Myers gets a headache. “The difficulty in assessing these two perspectives on history,” he writes, “is that they both contain a great deal of truth. It would be easy if we could assert that one of these narratives meets the standards of historical veracity and the other does not.”
But, says G-d, I mean Mr. Myers, they do not.
Jews? Arabs? All alike, contends the rad left professor.
Therefore, Mr. Myers suggests that innocent Jewish boys and girls and Arabs immerse themselves a volume of history called “Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine,” plus a curriculum available in English, Hebrew and Arabic, “Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative.”
Speaking for the softest dimension of leftists, Prof. Myers reaches this conclusion:
“Scholars and activists (activists?) have come to understand that in post-conflict situations (such as Northern Ireland and the Balkans), it is highly desirable to undo opposing groups’ negative views of the other by revising the way they present history.”
In setting up his argument, Prof. Myers, an allegedly committed Jew,