We write to you because our voices have been silenced.
Tuesday night former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney spoke at Binghamton University at an event sponsored by the Binghamton Political Initiative, the Walter Rodney Committee and other campus groups. While we expected her speech to be biased against Israel, based on her well-documented record of past presentations of this nature, we were utterly unprepared for our opposing points of view to be so forcefully suppressed.
As executive board members of Hillel at Binghamton and members of an academic community, we felt that it was our responsibility to educate our peers on all angles of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Therefore, we had spent the week leading up to the event preparing handouts with information representing various points of view that we believed would not be shared by Ms. McKinney.
To our shock, at the beginning of last night’s event, student coordinators were forcibly taking this information away from people. The moderator publicly announced that anyone who received handouts should pass them to the aisle for immediate confiscation. These actions are unacceptable. As students at an institution that promotes academic honesty, integrity, and truth, we are angered that our right to free speech was so clearly denied. Once we distributed the sheets, those who held them had the choice to read the information or disregard it, but it was in no way the coordinators’ or moderator’s right to aggressively take away that choice.
Throughout the evening, student coordinators threatened to remove anyone who offered a dissenting opinion, and during the question and answer period anyone who even hinted at a different point of view was either intimidated or embarrassed into silence. An extreme lack of respect was shown to anyone in attendance who did not wholeheartedly endorse Ms. McKinney’s presentation.
As representatives of the Jewish community on campus, we are outraged that our fellow students chose to bring a speaker to campus who has such a clear record of bigotry. Ms McKinney is strongly tied to the New Black Panther Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “black racist” group and is decidedly anti-white and anti-semitic. In 2006, McKinney lost her seat in congress. “Following McKinney’s concession speech, a reporter attempted to ask the Congresswoman why she thought she lost. The New Black Panther member (part of McKinney’s security detail) interrupted, shouting, “Why do you think she lost? You wanna know what led to the loss? Israel. The Zionists. You. Put on your yarmulke and celebrate.” (Anti Defamation League Press Release, August 9, 2006)
We are deeply saddened by the fact that our peers who planned this event clearly had no desire for any real discourse other than the hate speech that was delivered to the audience. While we do not have to agree with one another, we do have a responsibility to respect one another and allow for the open exchange of opinions. Ms. McKinney’s visit to Binghamton was an affront to any multicultural efforts on campus. Furthermore, it insults the significant struggles that African-Americans went through to gain civil rights in the United States and the Jewish community’s support for those civil rights. Jewish leaders marched in Montgomery and Selma. Fifty percent of white civil rights workers were Jewish and fifty percent of civil rights attorneys in the south were Jewish. Jews helped to found the NAACP. Historically Black Colleges welcomed professors who were Holocaust survivors to teach on their campuses. Ms. McKinney wants us to throw away this glorious shared history and begin a new relationship of bitterness and misunderstanding.
We sincerely disagree with this approach and hope that the leaders of all multicultural groups at Binghamton University share our desire to work together to combat hate and intolerance by creating opportunities for real dialogue. We look forward to a day when we can truly partner with our fellow students and learn to understand and respect one another’s backgrounds.
Hillel E-Board
