SPME responds to the University of California Committee on Academic Freedom (UCAF)

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PHILADELPHIA, October 10, 2013 — Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) expresses deep concern about how the University of California Committee on Academic Freedom (UCAF) views Palestinian advocacy and anti-Israelism on their campuses.

In a letter to the chair of the University of California’s Academic Senate, Mr. Cameron Gundersen, who chairs the Committee, said that “It has been brought the attention of UCAF that organizations outside the University of California have been making a concerted effort to pressure the University to enact restrictions on the free speech rights of campus organizations and individuals advocating for the interests of Palestinians. Their efforts include filing both lawsuits and claims with the US Department of Education under Title VI.”

“These organizations,” Gunderson continued, “seem to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and with intimidation of Jewish students, and to suggest that the University has an obligation to muzzle the expression of views critical of Israel or in support of Palestine on campus.”

Far from wishing “to enact restrictions on the free speech rights of campus organizations and individuals advocating for the interests of Palestinians,” the organizations (including SPME) that have been concerned with pro-Palestinian activism are not interested in suppressing the free speech and opinions of anyone on California campuses, or campuses anywhere.

What SPME and other groups have been concerned with is not “the expression of views critical of Israel,” but the regular and chronic instances when what is purported to be mere criticism of Israel or Zionism morphs into speech, accusations, libels, and demonization of the Jewish state—and by extension, Jews—as part of an ongoing campaign to delegitimize and weaken Israel as part of Palestinian self-determination.

Regardless of how one feels about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if the dialogue over that issue devolves into what is regularly defined as either implied or blatant anti-Semitism, then it is completely appropriate to point out expression that, according to the U.S. State Department’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, for example, crosses the line into what is no longer mere “critique” of Israel, but a dialogue of hatred, prejudice, demonization, and libel—all potentially contributing to a hostile campus climate for Jewish students and other supporters of Israel. 

SPME has no interest in “stifling” or suppressing academic free speech. But we are very concerned about those who, in advocating for the Palestinian cause, have expressed themselves in ways that are ahistorical, counter-factual, biased, and, as mentioned, often crossing the line into what would, if it were expressed about another group, be considered hate speech.

Specifically, those campus advocates for the Palestinian cause have frequently, and regularly, invoked tropes, statements, accusations, and libels against Israel and pro-Israel individuals consistent with some tropes and language of classic anti-Semitism. These have included:

  1. That supporters of Israel on campus are themselves racists, impede social justice for the Palestinians, and continue to ignore Israel’s contempt for human rights, international law, and the lives and rights of the Arab people living under its oppressive occupation. As a result, if anti-Semitism exists at all, it is the fault of the existence of Israel and its immoral political behavior, the inverted notion that Jews themselves are responsible for anti-Semitism. At a vigil for Holocaust Remembrance Day at San Francisco State University, for example, Jewish students were reciting the Mourners’ Kaddish — the Jewish prayer for the dead —and  were shouted down by Muslim protesters who countered with grisly prayers in memory of Palestinian suicide bombers. The pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators, armed with whistles and bull horns, physically assaulted the Jewish students, spat on them, and screamed such charming epithets as “Too bad Hitler didn’t finish the job,” “Get out or we will kill you,” “F**k the Jews,” “Die racist pigs,” and “Go back to Russia, Jews.” The violence escalated to the extent that San Francisco police officers finally had to usher the Jewish students to safety off campus.
  2. The notion, suggested in UCAF’s own complaint, that pro-Israel organizations and individuals control the narrative about the Israeli/Palestinian debate and furtively work to stifle criticism of Israel. This accusation parallels the long-expressed, classic anti-Semitic view that Jews work behind the scenes to control opinion, manipulate the press and governments, and have a divided loyalty—now toward Israel over the United States’ own interests, as controlled by the Israel Lobby supposedly revealed in Walt and Mearsheimer’s notorious screed, The Israel Lobby, in which they accuse Jewish powers of creating a stranglehold on Congress and American foreign policy, to the advantage of Israel.
  3. The repeated, factually-incorrect allegation that Israel is a racist, apartheid regime, and that Zionism is a type of racist enterprise itself that must be destroyed. Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, for instance, former Nation of Islam member, convert to Islam, and cheerleader for Hamas and Hezbollah, has been a ubiquitous, poisonous presence on California campuses. At a 2008 event, dubbed “Never Again? The Palestinian Holocaust,” Malik-Ali stood behind a banner that read “Death to Apartheid” while he wildly contended that “The Islamic revival should only be feared by those who support imperialism, colonialism, racism, occupation … Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah” are not the real terrorists at all, he proclaimed. No, the actual “terrorists are the United States; the terrorists are Israel!”
  4. The ahistorical claim that Israel was created immorally and illegally by “stealing” Arab land and continues to practice ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, not to mention genocidal practices and the random killing of Arab civilians, including children. Most notorious, for example, was the Muslim student-sponsored, pro-Palestinian April 2002 demonstration at San Francisco State University (SFSU) that included odious flyers and posters depicting a dead Palestinian baby on a soup-can label imprinted with the words “Palestinian Children Meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,” echoing the centuries-old blood libel of European anti-Semitism that accused Jews of murdering Gentile children and using their blood to bake matzos.
  5. That the behavior of Israel—and by extension Jews—towards the Palestinians is reminiscent of the behavior that Jews experienced under the Nazis, that Israelis have become the “new” Nazis, and that Zionism is equivalent in its inherent racism and practices to Nazism. Israelis are accused of currently perpetrating a new Holocaust against the Palestinian Arabs. This is exactly the type of expressed attitudes and accusations regularly seen in the events, speech, and publications of Muslim student groups and other pro-Palestinian activists, prevalent in such events as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” not to mention the yearly Israel Apartheid Weeks that have sprouted up on campuses world-wide.
  6. That terrorism against Israelis is an acceptable and justifiable tactic against the so-called illegal occupation, and that Jews die as a result of suicide bombings and jihadist tactics not because of the savagery of the terrorists, but because of Israel’s own transgressions. In a November 2013 rally sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine from Northeastern University in Boston, for example, protestors chanted repeatedly: “When people are occupied, resistance is justified,” “resistance” being a euphemism for terrorism, that is, the murder of Jewish civilians in Israel.
  7. That the Middle East’s only democracy, with more human and civil rights for both its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens than is available to citizens of any of the surrounding Arab states, is the main impediment to world peace, a pariah nation, a racist, apartheid state, and worthy of being dismantled, boycotted, or eliminated altogether in the pursuit of Palestinian self-determination. Referring to Israel’s separation barrier with the hideous imagery of Holocaust work camps, for example, UCLA professor Saree Makdisi, for instance, said that “the wall represents Israel’s desire to fulfill Zionism’s greatest dream and, finally, do away with the Palestinians, if not by outright massacre or explicit transfer then by bludgeoning them into a subhuman, animal-like irrelevance—precisely what has happened to the hapless inhabitants of Gaza, whose lives are now wasting away in the gigantic concentration camp the Israelis have built for them.”
  8. That the occupation itself is the result, not of Arab continued aggression against Israel, but Israel’s own militaristic, expansionist character and unending thirst for more land at the expense of Palestinian statehood. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” Columbia University’s Joseph Massad said after Operation Cast Lead in January of 2009, when Israel was defending itself against continued rockets attacks from Gaza, “world powers are cheering on . . , and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.” Perversely likening the barbaric aggression of Hamas from within Gaza to the efforts of Warsaw Jews to repel imminent extermination by the Nazis, Massad suggested, with sentiments echoed on campuses everywhere, that “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”

It is legitimate, and in fact one of the principal purposes of the university, to encourage vigorous debate about different issues and to hear from all points of view.

We believe that a vigorous debate on campus and criticism of Israel is, of course, acceptable; the concern, however, is that in promoting the pro-Palestinian narrative, faculty and students on campus regularly and chronically use terms that include classic anti-Semitic tropes to define Israel, Zionism, and Jews. As a result, Jewish students have felt intimidated and uncomfortable because of the implied or explicit anti-Semitism, not the critique of Israel that provides the framework for these so-called “dialogues.”

The issue is that just as the pro-Palestinian activists the UCAF wishes to speak for have the right under the umbrella of academic free speech to express their views—no matter how factually inaccurate, vitriolic, or repellant they may be—those on campus with opposing views also have the right under the same precepts of free expression to question the activists’ views, and to call them anti-Semitic, or racist, or genocidal, or merely historically inaccurate or incorrect if, in fact, that is the case.

If white supremacists were on campuses as activists who through a long, organized campaign of events and “scholarly debate” wanted to deport black people back to Africa because they were, in the minds of these activists, prone to be criminals, welfare cheats, and culturally malignant—assuming that such a movement would even be tolerated for a single day on campuses anywhere—and, as a result of this activism, the NAACP and other “outside groups” claimed this movement’s behavior was racist and intimidating for African-American students on respective campuses, can anyone imagine that the UCAF would be protesting the actions of these outside groups and claiming that their actions were unfairly inhibiting white supremacist activism? Or that the right to engage in that activism was more important to upholding academic free speech than the attempts of the outside groups and others to combat and question the racist speech, behavior, and expression? Of course not.

And the UCAF’s original accusation is also troubling because it does not seem to even acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism at all, insuring that once the victims of anti- Semitism attempt to reveal the sources and nature of that animus, they themselves are not only disingenuously accused of using the accusation of anti-Semitism as a cover for Israeli transgressions, but are further vilified for having brought up the topic in the first place as part of conspiratorial attempt to suppress others’ free speech.

If actual victims of anti-Semitism are never allowed to point to instances when this hatred occurs, if whenever someone is victimized and seeks redress they are accused of playing the “anti-Semitism card” to deflect criticism of Israel, actual anti-Semites will be immune from criticism or censure and the victim will be blamed once again.

 

SPME responds to the University of California Committee on Academic Freedom (UCAF)

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SPME

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) is not-for-profit [501 (C) (3)], grass-roots community of scholars who have united to promote honest, fact-based, and civil discourse, especially in regard to Middle East issues. We believe that ethnic, national, and religious hatreds, including anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, have no place in our institutions, disciplines, and communities. We employ academic means to address these issues.

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