Duke University's Weekend Hate Fest
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 15, 2004
Below is Lee Kaplan's report for FrontPage on Duke's hate-fest this weekend. -- The Editors
Duke University, under the leadership of its president, Richard Brodhead, and most notably its Vice President for Governmental Affairs, John Burness, continues to whitewash the anti-Semitic and anti-American event still scheduled for this weekend on the Durham campus despite misrepresentation by the organizers over the event’s real purpose. The Palestine Solidarity’s conference, far from being an academic exercise in freedom of speech and academic freedom, will be a training session for anti-Semites and those seeking to support the Insurgents in Iraq who kill U.S. soldiers. It will be an event where attendees will learn how to conduct civil disobedience that can include the destruction of campus property and to support terrorists overseas while the organizers train others to recruit more of their same ilk on campuses all over the United States and Canada.
What is amazing is that Duke’s administrators seem so intent the event go forward they are practically telling outright lies to the public. On the Duke University official website and advertising for the event, whatever the organizers want the public to believe is posted or whitewashed to look good, courtesy of the University.
For example, Duke ran a statement that “Kill the Jews!” was not shouted at one of the previous conferences at the University of Michigan. After Front Page furnished John Burness with a signed legal affidavit, plus one eyewitness account by a Michigan attendee and proof that two newspapers had verified such epithets occurred, Burness altered Duke’s website to say only that “some other people have claimed such statements were made in Arabic ” and only after citing some unnamed faculty sources at Michigan who allegedly said it never happened. The fact those faculty sources may have had a part in bringing the event to the Wolverines’ campus was completely ignored.
Even worse, Burness cites an alleged endorsement by the American Jewish Committee that the Michigan event was an example of educational discourse and civility. This tale was no doubt given to Burness by Fayyad Sbaihat, the current head organizer of the Duke Hate Fest who I exposed in my article on last year’s Conference. Despite the American Jewish Committee sending a letter to Burness stating that such an endorsement by their organization never occurred, Burness at this writing has failed to correct the lie on the Duke website that whitewashes the event.
Scuttlebutt has it that Duke is spending upwards of $50,000 in added security costs to make sure the event happens on campus, including metal detectors to keep out recorders and cameras at this “open dialog” event. When I queried Burness by email if Saudi money was helping Duke to foot the bill, he wrote back saying he was unaware of ANY Saudi funding at all going to Duke University. Sending him proof of Saudi donations and funding for Duke in the past elicited no response at all. Such donations are too numerous to all be cited in this article.
Originally Front Page Magazine did not ask that Duke cancel this event, just merely allow tape recorders and cameras inside. Censorship is de rigueur for the organizers at all their events because they hold sessions where lawbreaking methods -- to be used to support terrorism overseas -- are discussed.
Burness left the banning of recorders and cameras open to the organizers as he insisted this event was open to all points of view. However, a recent Duke University Chronicle article reports that the press will also not be allowed to record quotes inside the workshops at all, even without cameras and recorders. What is the excuse given by the organizers? “To ensure free speech,” according to one leader, who fails to explain how reporting to the public hinders free speech.
Duke’s administrators, like a broken record, continue to cite the event as a model of open dialog and freedom of speech. The question is, “Open dialog and free speech for whom?” Duke states the event has no speech codes as long as things remain civil. But the organizers openly talk of ejecting people who do not talk in “consensus building” speech, no matter how civilly. How can one build “consensus” when the event’s Guiding Principles are full of doublespeak endorsements of terrorism and the destruction of Israel, they refusal to condemn terrorism, and call for civil disobedience?
In short, there will be no real dialog or discussion at this event and Duke’s administrators, in the most Orwellian fashion of doublespeak, are working hard to keep things that way.
The event's list of workshop speakers scheduled on the Palestine Solidarity organizers’ website reveals a collection of anti-Semites and non-academic “experts,” who are given academic credibility by Duke’s previous reputation (something this event should diminish for years to come). Duke’s conduct should make it the laughing stock of universities.
For example, one workshop is led by Abe Greenhouse, a former student at Rutgers University, whose greatest academic achievement there was to smash a pie in the face of Israeli Minister of the Diaspora Natan Sharansky during a campus visit. Greenhouse is a felon. He will be conducting and lecturing at a workshop titled “Anatomy of the Organized Zionist Community in the United States.” Greenhouse is no expert on Zionism. He has never written any scholarly books subject to academic scrutiny on the subject. Sharansky spent many years in a Soviet Union gulag as part of the Soviet Jewry movement and endured daily torture to finally earn the right to emigrate to Israel. Want to become famous and a speaker at Duke? Just commit a felony assault on campus against a champion of democracy and freedom.
But Greenhouse isn’t just an isolated example from the Conference.
Fadi Kiblawi, at the Michigan conference, spoke of his desire to strap on a belt and become a suicide bomber in an article titled “A Perspective on Palestine while High on Vicodin." (Muslim journal Al-Risalah, University of Michigan, Spring Edition II, June 24, 2001). He also lectured at the Ohio State conference on how to take over campus newspapers across the country. Kiblawi will also be speaking and running a workshop. A law student now at George Washington University, Kiblawi’s articles in the campus newspaper at GWU are monitored by pro-Israel groups on that campus who frequently have to write in to correct his false statements. He was arrested in Israel for trying to bring down the Security Fence, and Kiblawi also condemned the shut down of the Global Relief Foundation and the arrest of its head manager, Rabih Haddad, for funding al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups overseas.
Howie Machtinger will lead a workshop on “An American-Jewish Anti-Occupation Perspective.” Like Greenhouse, Machtinger uses his Jewish ancestry solely as a weapon to advance his radical agenda to destroy American capitalism (while living here) along with Israel. Machtinger is a stereotype come to life; a comedy writer’s image of the aging activist. If he wasn’t real, his career would be too amazing to believe. Machtinger was on the barricades at Columbia University in 1968 and was one of the founders of the Weather Underground. He co-authored a tome that stated, “At the right moment, revolutionaries within the United States were to wage a ‘people’s war’ and attack from within. The government would fall and ‘world Communism’ would eventually be instituted.” He also spoke about “how the black liberation movement is so far advanced at this point that the only thing left for white revolutionaries is to support blacks by fighting cops as a diversionary tactic.” Machtinger has been a radical for so long he appears at radical retrospectives and he claims that H. Rap Brown is innocent of killing a black policeman during a traffic stop. Calling for the destruction of Israel is the cause of the millennium. This is another speaker Duke is hosting at this “educational conference.”
But the most telling speaker at this event who shows it is an anti-Semitic hate fest is Charles E. Carlson, whose hatred for Jews borders on psychosis. Carlson is an overt supporter of suicide bombers. He has written articles glorifying suicide bombers:
“Imagine taking the risk of being caught and beaten to death while trying to sneak out of Gaza, a fenced prison; then to travel alone overland to some populated area carrying a homemade pipe bomb that you know can only be detonated within a few feet of an enemy if it is not to be wasted. Imagine knowing that if you detonate the bomb too soon or in the wrong place you will kill only yourself and your friends....”
Carlson goes on to argue that the fact that so many Israeli soldiers are killed by suicide bombers “proves” that the bombers are targeting soldiers, not civilians. Soldiers are killed when they apprehend suicide bombers at check points. The bombers are, of course, en route to civilian targets.
Carlson is a hardcore anti-Semite, repeating long-discredited conspiracy theories claiming Jews run the money supply and are not, in fact, Jewish. For example:
“Are There any Zionist Judeo ‘Christians’ in your Town? Do they Act in Good Faith? Does the Truth have a place in their ‘Religion/Beliefs’? Or do they Serve the ‘Alleged Authorities’? The Rulers of Romans 13. You Know the Ashkenazim/Khazar Edomite ‘Jews.’ The Class A Stockholders of the Federal Reserve: [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm] - Share the Light of the Truth with the neo-conned ‘Judeo-Christians’ and lead them into the paths of righteousness.”
Carlson is also a publisher of al-Jazeera and will be joined by other virulent anti-Semites like Alison Weir from Sausalito, California. Weir has called the Hebron Massacre of 1929 an “Arab Uprising” and pushes the propaganda that the Nazis and Jews worked hand-in-hand during the Holocaust, among other ludicrous accusations.
The PLO, the Saudis and the Arab League have targeted American universities as the next outlet to spread the anti-Israeli, anti-American propaganda they already teach in their own schools. It’s a pity that Duke’s administration is so willing to aid them.
Duke President Richard Brodhead was inaugurated only weeks ago and has lowered Duke’s reputation by making Duke a training base to spread pro-terrorist hatred.
President Brodhead has told Duke’s trustees, “[T]he next few weeks promise to test our university in many ways. I am confident this current controversy will eventually be seen as a moment when Duke demonstrated leadership and preserved a principle at the core of what universities must be about.”
“Demonstrated leadership” is precisely what Duke is lacking. The purpose of a university should be to enable a free society to remain free through the exercise of scholarship, research and real dialogue. Brodhead and Burness are perfectly willing to let the organizers ban the press from strategy-and-training sessions. That has nothing to do with education.
Want to know more about what goes on inside the Palestine Solidarity Conference at Duke? Write President Brodhead and demand the press be allowed inside ALL workshops and events during the event.The American public has a right to know. You can e-mail President Richard Brodhead at: president@duke.edu. While you're at it, write the trustees of Duke University, as well. |
