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Steven Plaut

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Steven Plaut (born in 1951) is a Professor on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Haifa and a writer. His editorials are often published in The Jewish Press, Front Page Magazine and other periodicals. In 2002 he authored the book The Scout. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum think tank.

Steven Plaut was born in Philadelphia into a Jewish family. In the 1930s, his father had been in Hachshara training camp set up in Europe for young Jews who intended to make aliyah, but the British White Paper of 1939 foreclosed his plans. He managed to escape from Nazi Germany to the United States and during World War II served under General Patton.

Steven Plaut grew up in a religiously Conservative Zionist home. In 1981, the Plaut family (including his parents) immigrated to Israel.

Plaut received his undergraduate degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, his MA from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his Ph.D in economics from Princeton University, specializing in international and urban economics and later in finance and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank. Before his professorship at the Haifa University, he taught at Oberlin College, the Technion, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Central European University, Tel Aviv University, University of Nantes, and Athens Laboratory for Business Administration.

Writing career

In his 2002 book The Scout Steven Plaut describes his near-death experience as a kidney cancer patient at an intensive care ward (he has recovered from the illness). The historical novel is a series of life stories exchanged between him and his neighbor at the ward, an Israeli bedouin scout.

Political views

Steven Plaut has been one of the most persistent and outspoken Israeli critics of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and of Israel's unilateral withdrawal policy. Ever since the Oslo Accords were signed, he has argued that Palestinian and other Arab leaders would continue to seek the destruction of Israel through violence and terrorism. For much of the 1990s, he was an isolated voice in Israeli opinion, but he believes that his views have been vindicated by outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the campaign of suicide bombing.

In addition, Plaut has strongly attacked Israeli and Jewish leftists such as Neve Gordon, Michael Lerner and Norman Finkelstein. He claims that such figures are self-hating Jews and apologists for terrorism who promote the destruction of Israel ; he calls them "Israel's Academic Fifth Column". Plaut is particularly opposed to what he sees as left-wing extremism in Israeli universities, and is actively involved in Israel Academia Monitor, a website monitoring such alleged extremism.

Neve Gordon Civil Suit

Steven Plaut lost a civil suit in which he was accused of libeling the former academic, and is now appealing this decision. He had been ordered to pay the plaintiff Neve Gordon, a faculty member at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Department of Politics and Government, about $18,600 in compensation plus $3,500 in legal fees.

Emphasizing that the court's role was not to adjudicate opposing political views, Judge Rim Naddaf ruled that Plaut did cross a line between legitimate criticism and unlawful defamation of character. Judge Naddaf came to this decision after reading several articles written by Plaut where he described Neve Gordon as a "fanatic anti-Semite" and a "Judenrat wannabe." Other cases of defamation against Gordon included a message forwarded by Plaut and reproduced by a far-right pro-Meir Kahane website urging readers to write an “Israeli Leftist” a mock-condolence letter for the death of a Hamas member (a targeted assassination by the IDF). Neve Gordon's e-mail address was included in this request.

Commenting on the verdict, Plaut said: "Because it will go to appeal, I prefer not to go into detail about it. I will just say that the judgment amounts to selective protection of freedom of speech in Israel, under which the most outrageous and even illegal behavior and statements made by anti-Israel extremists is always protected speech while denunciation of the public political activities and behavior of such people is deemed 'libel.'" While Plaut in fact never claimed Gordon himself was a Holocaust Denier, merely a fan of Holocaust Deniers, quite a few other writers and newspapers have claimed that Gordon himself is indeed a Holocaust Denier, such as the Jewish Voice and Opinion]. This charge has no basis in fact. Harvard professors Alan Dershowitz defended Plaut and denounced Gordon as a neo-nazi and an anti-Semite, and also denounced Gordon's Arab judge and her biased verdict , adding "if Finkelstein and Gordon aren't themselves explicitly neo-Nazi, they're at least very highly regarded by those who are - and for good reason."

Besides Dershowitz, conservative publicists heavily criticized the decision. Caroline Glick argued that this was one of a growing number of attempts by anti-democratic judges in Israel to suppress freedom of speech . The Jerusalem Post sharply criticized the verdict as a politicized, biased, and anti-democratic ruling. The charges raised by Dershowitz against Gordon were decisively refuted by Gordon in an article titled "Anti-Semitism? Mr. Dershowitz You Just Don't Like What I Say" http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon11082006.html. In the article, Gordon attributes Dershowitz's venomous attack on him to Gordon's critical but supportive review of Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah, in which Dershowitz was criticized as a plagiarist and a liar. Gordon asserts that Dershowitz was embarrassed by this criticism and was attacking Gordon - in connection with the Plaut case - with the use of lies and distortions.

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