The Intifada Goes to Duke University and the otherwise free-speech censors, book-burners and anti-semitic Jews do not like it one little bit.
commentarymagazine.com
BY ERIC ADLER AND JACK LANGER
Wednesday, January 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
A new ritual on the American academic scene is the
annual conference of the Palestine Solidarity
Movement. The PSM is an umbrella organization that
connects various U.S. and Canadian groups; its yearly
gathering offers an opportunity for the constituent
elements to establish a visible presence on a
prestigious university campus and plan strategy and
tactics for a movement dedicated to delegitimizing the
state of Israel. Over the past several years, the
convocation has been held at Ohio State, the
University of Michigan and the University of
California at Berkeley. In October, it was the turn of
Duke University.
Duke's president, Richard Brodhead, had only just
assumed office last summer when the university
announced that it would be hosting the PSM conference
in the fall. Because the organizers had followed the
proper procedures for mounting such an event, Mr.
Brodhead explained, the decision to grant approval was
an "easy one." After all, the university was only
reaffirming "the importance of the principle of free
expression."
Easy or not, the decision immediately provoked
criticism. Some of it came from Duke alumni and others
off campus, and some of it came from a student group,
the Duke Conservative Union. Altogether, some 90,000
signatures were gathered for an online petition
denouncing the university's move.
Among the targets of protest was the PSM's fifth
official "guiding principle," which decrees the
group's refusal to denounce any terrorist act
committed by Palestinians. Condemnation was also
directed at the PSM's amply documented history of
anti-Semitism and incitement to violence. One
scheduled speaker, Charles Carlson, had openly called
for lethal attacks against Israeli youth, declaring
that "every young Israeli is military--they are all
proper war targets," and that "each wedding, Passover
celebration, or bar mitzvah [in Israel] is a potential
military target."
Another scheduled participant, Abe Greenhouse, had
been arrested in 2003 after smashing a pie in the face
of Israeli minister Natan Sharansky as he was about to
give a lecture at Rutgers. An organizer of the 2002
PSM gathering, Fadi Kiblawi, had written that the
Palestinian plight made him "want to strap a bomb to
[his] chest and kill those [Zionist] racists," while
an erstwhile PSM speaker, Hatem Bazian, had called for
"an intifada in this country" (i.e., the U.S.) and
asserted that the sacred texts of Islam require its
adherents to "fight the Jews." Prominently active in
the movement was Sami al-Arian, who in 2003 was
indicted on racketeering and terrorism charges and is
currently awaiting trial in Florida.
These and other unequivocal statements and deeds of
PSM activists were detailed in letters to the editor
and in advertisements that the Duke Conservative Union
placed in the Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper. In
response, the university administration was largely
silent. But Mr. Brodhead himself, moving beyond his
previous stance of avowed neutrality in the name of
free expression, issued what amounted to an outright
endorsement of the conference. Declining to criticize
any aspect of the PSM, he asserted only that a great
deal of inaccurate information was circulating on the
Internet and that the "deepest principle involved [in
hosting the conference] is not even the principle of
free speech. It's the principle of education through
dialogue." How this "dialogue" would proceed under the
PSM's practice of prohibiting recording devices and
reporters from many of its sessions was never made
clear.
Following a month or so of debate on and around the
Duke campus, the conference itself opened on Oct. 15.
Its hundreds of participants were treated to a series
of lectures, panel discussions and workshops. There
were also a variety of "cultural events," including a
"sing-in" and a reading of pro-Palestinian and
anti-Israel poetry. Affiliated groups like the
International Solidarity Movement and Jews for a Just
Peace set up tables at which they distributed leaflets
and sold such wares as "Free Palestine" T-shirts.
One keynote speech of the PSM's exercise in "education
through dialogue" was delivered by Mazin Qumsiyeh, a
Yale professor of genetics, who presented a short
history of what he portrayed as the virulent Zionist
"disease." There was also a lecture by the PLO legal
adviser Diana Buttu, a polished speaker whose theme
was that Palestinians under Israeli occupation have
suffered a fate worse than blacks under apartheid in
South Africa, and that Israel is today "the greatest
abuser of human rights" in the world. Nasser Abufarha,
a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the
University of Wisconsin, spoke of Israel's "racist
ambitions" and defended the terrorist activities of
Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine in combating Zionist "aggression." Brian
Avery, an activist for ISM, explained that both George
W. Bush and John Kerry were "on auction to the Jewish
lobby."
Although the Duke administration stoutly maintained
both before and during the conference that the PSM and
ISM were "distinct and separate" organizations, at
least a dozen ISM activists led conference workshops.
The ISM specializes in sending European and American
students to the West Bank and Gaza to work on behalf
of the radical Palestinian cause. The group's
co-founder George Rishmawi has candidly explained its
purpose in recruiting these foreign students: "When
Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is
interested anymore. But if some of these foreign
volunteers get shot or even killed, then the
international media will sit up and take notice." That
was certainly the case with the ISM activist Rachel
Corrie, a 23-year-old student at Evergreen State
College who was accidentally killed in 2003 while
attempting to block Israeli bulldozers from uncovering
terrorist smuggling tunnels in Gaza.
One of the two ISM-led workshops at the Duke
conference was "Volunteering in Palestine: Role and
Value of International Activists." A last-minute
addition to the schedule, the workshop was conducted
by ISM co-founder Huweida Arraf. Acknowledging during
her talk that the ISM cooperates with the terror
organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Ms. Arraf
encouraged students to join the group and instructed
them on how to enter Israel surreptitiously and how to
deal with possible arrest and deportation. The Duke
administration never commented publicly on the
inclusion in the PSM's program of a workshop
recruiting for a group with self-professed ties to
terrorists and an openly avowed interest in generating
casualties.
Another, less practical workshop--"Segregation,
Apartheid and Zionism Are Crimes Against
Humanity!"--was led by Bob Brown, a veteran of the
Black Power movement of the 1960s. Mr. Brown's
theoretical discourse consisted mostly of
unsubstantiated personal anecdotes and random
invective. Thus, he reminisced about meeting Saddam
Hussein's spokesman Tariq Aziz in Baghdad in 1974;
alleged that Condoleezza Rice's father had tried to
force him to marry her some years back; and referred
to the Six Day war, in which Israel fought off the
armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, as "the Jew war of
'67."
Still other sessions were devoted to such subjects as
"Jewish dissent" and the ethics of suicide bombing and
kindred forms of "resistance." Charles Carlson's
workshop, "The Cause of the Conflict: How
Judaized-Christians Enable War," was inexplicably
canceled.
After three days of meetings, the conference came to a
close. "It's a good thing we did here," announced the
university's vice president for public affairs, John
Burness, setting the tone for a chorus of
self-applause. In its own post-mortem roundup, the
student-run Chronicle, which had endorsed the PSM's
official refusal to denounce Palestinian terrorism,
lauded the university administration for "masterfully"
handling the affair and reported with great
satisfaction that the "overall tone of the weekend was
one of discussion and learning." Looking to the
future, the paper urged upon Duke a positive
responsibility "to continue the dialogue the Palestine
Solidarity Movement conference initiated."
And indeed the close of the conference did not mark
the end of Duke's experiment in "discussion and
learning." To appreciate what happened next, it helps
to know that, unlike the Duke Conservative Union, the
university's two Jewish organizations, the campus
Hillel (known as the Freeman Center) and a student
group called Duke Friends of Israel, had opted from
the beginning to refrain from criticizing the
university for agreeing to host the conference. In
fact, in a demonstration of their own commitment to
free expression, the groups publicly praised the
decision. At the same time, and in the same spirit,
they formulated a "Joint Israel Initiative." This was
a resolution pledging that both they and the PSM would
conduct a civil dialogue, would together condemn the
murder of innocent civilians, and would work toward a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. On the eve of the conference, the Jewish
groups also staged a "rally against terror."
But whatever hopes the Jewish campus organizations
held out for civil dialogue were rapidly dashed.
Representatives of the PSM refused to sign the Joint
Israel Initiative, objecting in particular to its
condemnation of violence. Not only that, but in the
aftermath of the conference, even as the open
anti-Semitism on display there was going entirely
without censure, Duke's Jewish organizations
themselves--and Jews in general--became the object of
furious attack.
The first salvo was an article in the Chronicle by one
of its columnists, a Duke senior named Philip Kurian.
Headlined "The Jews," it denounced Jews as "the most
privileged 'minority' group" in the United States and
in particular bemoaned the "shocking
overrepresentation" of Jews in academia. Replete with
references to the "powerful Jewish establishment" and
"exorbitant Jewish privilege in the United States,"
the article went on to characterize Jews as a phony
minority that can "renounce their difference by taking
off the yarmulke."
Mr. Kurian's column was followed by an even more
intense anti-Semitic outpouring on the Chronicle's
electronic discussion boards. "I am glad you have the
courage to stand up to the Jews," wrote one
correspondent. Another said he "was thrilled to read
Mr. Kurian's belligerent critique of that long-nosed
creature sitting squarely in the middle of the room
that nobody is allowed to talk about. Yes--that
elephant Mr. Sharon . . . and his treasonous cousins
in America."
One posting, beside providing a link to an online
article blaming the Jews for the outbreak of World War
II, called for "an investigation into the Jewish
community's practices and leadership during the past
150 years." "Whenever anyone says anything negative
about the Jews," expostulated still another writer,
"they go after them with Mafia-style ruthlessness. . .
. This is the reason Jews are the most hated people on
earth and why they have always been kicked out of
every country."
Having welcomed known anti-Semitic agitators onto its
campus, how did the Duke administration react when the
aftereffects of the agitation began to play themselves
out before its eyes? Responding to Mr. Kurian's
article in a letter to the Chronicle, President
Brodhead first condemned the "virulence" of some of
the PSM's critics. He then pronounced himself "deeply
troubled" by Kurian's sentiments, while offering
assurances that Mr. Kurian "probably did not mean to .
. . [revive] stereotypical images that have played a
long-running role in the history of anti-Semitism."
Reverting to his by now standard mantra, Mr. Brodhead
stressed again that the central issue was the
importance of "education through dialogue." "I am
grateful," he wrote, "to the many individuals and
groups who helped turn last week's Palestine
Solidarity Movement conference into a peaceful and
constructive event" and "proud to be at a school where
difficult matters are dealt with in such a mature and
constructive way."
It is all but impossible to imagine the president of
Duke offering a similar encomium to, say, a conference
of neo-Nazi rabble-rousers on his campus, or defending
a parade of speakers dilating on the "diseased"
history of, say, black Americans. It is in fact
impossible to imagine Duke agreeing to host such
debased goings-on in the first place. In that sense,
the administration's appeals to free expression and
dialogue were the purest disingenuousness.
Moreover, and whether or not a university has a duty
to license the unfettered expression on its campus of
every venomous notion under the sun, the real issue at
Duke was always the refusal of the licensing
authorities to call such notions by their proper
names--in this case, bald anti-Semitism and incitement
to the murder of innocents. That refusal on the part
of the university and its president, a mark not of
"constructive" liberality but of cowardice and
complicity, is what led infallibly to the
postconference outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Once
the guardians of the citadel granted permission to
open the gates, is it any surprise that the marauding
hordes came storming through?
Mr. Adler is a Ph.D. candidate in classical studies,
and Mr. Langer is a Ph.D. candidate in history, at
Duke University. This article appears in the January
issue of Commentary. |
