Protesting an Israeli ambassador is a “bias” incident; Muslim student group should be banned. Wait.. what? On the other hand, don’t be stupid and heckle people with whom you disagree, that’s foolish. But it’s easy to see why people would feel that kind of frustration when you get responses like these. I’m truly surprised how many news agencies reported the incident as a “hate” or “bias” crime, as if the remarks were anti-Semitic (attacking a religious/ethnic group) and not anti-Zionist (attacking a political strategy). Why aren’t educated people able to make this distinction? (note: I understand that some people blur the line btwn Zionism and Judaism, Zionists to gain ground by claiming religious authority, bigots doing the reverse in a hateful way; this is not one of those times).
Idiotic from the AP:
Recent bias incidents at University of California campuses:
_Feb. 8, UC Irvine: 11 students arrested for aggressively heckling Israeli ambassador.
(and then so on about incidents involving swastika, KKK and nooses… hello.. not similar).
Disgusting from Republican assemblyman Chuck DeVore, via KPCC:
IRVINE — Assemblyman Chuck DeVore sent a letter to UC Irvine's chancellor asking him to ban the Muslim Student Union from campus following several of the group members' arrests while disrupting a speech by Israel's ambassador to the United States. DeVore, R-Irvine, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., also accused the Muslim Student Union of “passing the hat’ for Hamas at a fundraiser for the “terrorist organization” last year.
“It’s time to ban this organization from campus,'' DeVore said. “It’s not contributing anything of value to the campus.”
Wait, were the students arrested even IN the Muslim student group? Oh, “some” of them were. Yeah, we better ban the whole thing.
That said, any student group should know better than to do this kind of thing, and Palestinian rights groups don’t need to support these students beyond reason — point being we don’t have to be on ‘teams’ and support/hate everything done by people on our side of the line. We can still be reasonable and not ban student groups because some people who may be members of it acted like dumbasses (but didn’t, apparently, commit serious/dangerous crimes, etc), and we can still support Palestinian rights without supporting being a dumbass. Just like the Tikvah students disrupting the Palestinian event last week – it’s just not necessary to try to disrupt/silence/harass/attack others. And journalists really should get a grip on this issue.
What a UC Irvine prof wrote about a year ago for Campus Watch:
On January 31, 2009, a conference took place at UC Irvine (UCI) titled, “Whither the Levant? The Crisis of the Nation State: Lebanon, Israel, Palestine.” Organized by the Levantine Cultural Center of Los Angeles and the Middle East Studies Student Initiative, the conference featured two documentaries about the 2006 war in southern Lebanon, three panel discussions, and a number of Middle East studies academics. In spite of the neutral sounding title, the conference was a one-sided exercise in bashing Israel and America.
The general theme was that Israel is an oppressor and deliberately murders innocent Palestinians, aided and abetted by an imperialistic America. California State University-Stanislaus political science professor As’ad Abu Khalil, for example, claimed that civilian casualties by Israel are “never accidental.” UCLA history professor Gabriel Piterberg made a macabre remark about Israelis “dancing on the blood of Palestinian children” and called for the prosecution of Israeli “war criminals.” David Theo Goldberg, director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, referred to Jews, and particularly Ashkenazi Jews, as racists. Nubar Hovsepian, associate professor of political science and international studies at Chapman University, described Israeli soldiers as “Israeli terrorist soldiers” and accused the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of warning civilians to evacuate and then bombing the evacuation routes. - Read on
