The academy has a well-known disdain for the state of Israel. Whenever Israel is in the news, you can rest assured that some league of professional academicians is working on a petition condemning the “oppressive” regime of what happens to be the freest state in the Middle East. Yet despite the self-righteous reproach of disgruntled paleontologists at third rate American universities, reasonable people seem to have traditionally been able to recognize just how morally praiseworthy Israel’s conduct has been. As Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard rightly points out, no state facing the existential threats on par with those facing the state of Israel has ever demonstrated the level of respect for human dignity and worth as has the government in Jerusalem (and yes, President Obama: Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, is the capital of Israel).