Bard College Pres. Leon Botstein has struck an entirely different note in his relationship with Al Quds University by reaffirming his institution’s ongoing collaboration in the aftermath of a controversial student rally at the Palestinian school. The two schools have a far more ambitious academic program awarding joint degrees in numerous categories. Though I don’t know this for sure, I would imagine there are also contractual obligations between the two that might preclude one severing ties as quickly as Brandeis and Syracuse. One of the reasons it was so easy for them is that they both had relatively little financially invested in the relationship.
The Jerusalem Post, whose reporting was designed to pressure American schools to sever their ties with Al Quds, seems to have come up short with Bard. Pres. Botstein released a resolute statement of support:
“Suggestions that the university administration condoned the actions of a very small group of students within a university of 12,000 are simply inaccurate,” Botstein wrote in his statement, noting that “the incident and the ensuing controversy demonstrate that it is more important than ever to maintain our educational partnership with Al-Quds.”
There is a point worth emphasizing here. From the looks of the pictures I’ve seen, there may’ve been 30 students at this rally. As Pres. Botstein noted, there are 12,000 in the entire Al Quds student body. Does Brandeis really want to claim that there haven’t been 30 students on its campus who have done or will do something deeply offensive and hateful of a similar nature? And does Brandeis want to be judged in its entirety as an academic institution based on such activity?
The Post also quotes a Brandeis professor who had been dispatched by Pres. Lawrence to the Palestinian university to investigate the charges:
Dan Terris, a Brandeis professor closely involved with the partnership, had a scheduled trip to Al-Quds in the days following the protest, and was asked by Lawrence to investigate the circumstances of the protest.
In a blog post about his observations, Terris stopped short of explicitly criticizing Brandeis’s decision, nevertheless saying that “nothing that we have learned during this period has changed our conviction – built over many years of experience – that Sari Nusseibeh and the Al-Quds University leadership are genuinely committed to peace and mutual respect.”
So instead of trusting the faculty most invested and knowledgeable about Brandeis’ relationship with Al Quds, Lawrence chose to trust the pro-Israel fearmongers at Breitbart, Israel Matzav and his board of trustees. Thus, a supposed legal scholar specializing in free speech, betrayed those principles and the notion of due process in a rush to judgment. He has damaged Brandeis’ reputation for academic integrity. While Pres. Botstein has reaffirmed Bard’s reputation as an institution willing to stand for principle and against academic and political bullies.
I note that the Post finally was forced to concede (partially) what was obvious to anyone who bothered to investigate the charge, that students were not aping Nazi tradition in their straight-armed salute. The Post and every hasbara outlet has falsely portrayed the demonstration as “Nazi-like:”
The protesters held up their right hands in a Nazi-style salute, but observers have pointed out that such a salute does not necessarily connote Nazi allegiance…
In an open letter posted to the American Studies Facebook page, [Al Quds Prof.] Daoudi said that when he sees students demonstrating, he sees “disappointment, frustration, despair, anger, all combined together in a militaristic march protesting the dire present Palestinian political and economic conditions.”
He added that “I did not see anything Nazi about that salute.”
I wanted to return to a point I raised yesterday regarding Brandeis Pres. Lawrence’s claim that the rally by Al Quds students was “hate speech.” I noted then that no one, from Bibi Netanyahu to Frederick Lawrence, has offered any specific proof that any statement made by any of the marchers was hate speech. It appears that the fact that students displayed pictures of shaheeds who’d martyred themselves in acts of terror against Israel constituted hate speech. That arguments sounds plausible until you consider that some Israelis similarly martyred themselves in the period before 1948 while engaged in acts that were called terrorism. In fact, Yair Stern, killed by the British in a shootout, was one such terrorist who is revered by Israeli right-wing nationalists who are the country’s government today. Is attributing heroism to Stern hate speech? If so, why does Brandeis have any relationship to Israeli state institutions or agencies?
Again, I return to the point I made in my earlier post about this incident. It requires a quality sorely lacking in the response by Brandeis and Syracuse: context. If Israel has national heroes who were terrorists in their day and considered so by some even today, why should we expect different from the Palestinians? In doing so, aren’t we engaging in an act of hubris and hypocrisy?
Further, Israeli security forces regularly invade the campus to harrass students and faculty and break up the academic environment (links to such activity were offered in an earlier post). If that Islamic Jihad rally constituted hate speech, why didn’t Israel arrest those who organized it? Why didn’t they charge them with a crime? If Israel declined to do this, why is Fred Lawrence expected to act on Israel’s behalf in the capacity of a security official?
I am urging American and Israeli university professors to band together to stand for academic freedom and free speech and defend Al Quds from this vicious attack by the Israeli government and its hasbara brigade. I have written to every faculty member I know to suggest such a project. No one has taken me up on the idea. If you are interested, please let me know.
Brandeis Faculty Members’ Visit to Al Quds University
A must read, the extended reply by Sari Nusseibeh:
I wonder if Brandeis or Syracuse have any collaboration with
Haifa University. Dancing Israeli students chant “Death to the
Arabs” at rally backing Gaza slaughter:
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/dancing-israeli-students-chant-death-arabs-rally-backing-gaza-slaughter
AN IMPORTANT LINGUISTIC NOTE
“It appears that the fact that students displayed pictures of shaheeds who’d martyred themselves in acts of terror against Israel…”
I don’t know anything about this particular rally and the pictures but “shaheed” (plur: shuhadaa’) does not necessarrily have anything to do with people who ‘martyred themselves’. Its original meaning is ‘witness’ and it originally meant someone who died while defending his faith or land. In a Palestinian context, a kid killed during a bombing or an old man killed in his bed while sleeping is a ‘shaheed’ too.
I know the Islamophobes/Hasbaristas have managed to impose their own translation of this word: when Mohamed Assaf won Arab Idol, he dedicated his victory to the Palestinian people, the political prisoners and the shaheeds (shuhadaa’) in a very beautiful speech, and in an article on Daily Beast written by some Itay Hod it was described as “contentious”: “Moments after his triumph, Assaf dedicated his win to the “shahids”, a term which mean martyr and is used to describe suicide bombers who were killed while struggling”.
Isn’t that fantastic: of Assaf’s whole speech this Itay-guy only paid attention to the “shahids” and he managed to turn Assaf’s speech into a hate speech by manipulating this one word.
@Deir Yassin: Thanks very much for that note. I too was guilty of misunderstanding the correct meaning of the word.
It’s okay, Richard, it’s such a common mistake even among the best :-))
Recently Ahlam Shibli, a young Palestinian photographer from the Galilee had an exposition in one of the major museums in Paris and the local AIPAC was out because she has “shahids” in the exposition: they asked the Ministry of Culture to close down the exposition because it was a ‘hymn to suicide-bombers’, but the object of the expostion was the absence of a close family member, and the shahids were mostly young men being killed by the Israelis during the incursion in Nablus 2002.
In Algeria, scatted around the countryside are hundreds of cemeteries of shuhadaa’ (shahids)/martyrs: those were people who died while fighting the French colonialists. Franz Fanon the great anti-colonialist intellectual from the Martinique is buried in one of them, though he died of a cancer in the US.
So the word had a variety of meanings. But I’ve noticed that even when you explain the meaning, the hasbara continues with the ‘suicide-bombers’ just as Bar_Kochba insists on the “Nazi-style”….
[portions of this commment which were off-topic and in violation of comment rules have been deleted]
…You quoted:
—————————————————————————————————————————————————–
The protesters held up their right hands in a Nazi-style salute, but observers have pointed out that such a salute does not necessarily connote Nazi allegiance…
In an open letter posted to the American Studies Facebook page, [Al Quds Prof.] Daoudi said that when he sees students demonstrating, he sees “disappointment, frustration, despair, anger, all combined together in a militaristic march protesting the dire present Palestinian political and economic conditions.”
He added that “I did not see anything Nazi about that salute.”
————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Saying “it is not necessarily connote a Nazi salute” does NOT mean that it is NOT an Nazi salute. It leaves open the possibility that it IS a Nazi salute”…
Recalling that you said it is in realiity NOT a Nazi salute, I can therefore conclude that should a group of people in Seattle go marching around making such a salute, you wouldn’t mind…
Finally, could be please enlighten us as to whom this Daoudi fellow is and why you assume he, of all people, is the final authority on whether it is indeed a Nazi salute. As a suggestion, why don’t you show a picture of Palestinians, HIZBULLAH and other Arab groups using this salute to various groups in the US and Europe and see what what impression it makes on them. See if it makes them more or less supportive of their varous causes…
@ Bar Kochba:
In fact, it was NOT a Nazi salute. Here is Pres. Nusseibeh quoting a member of his faculty investigating committee:
Further, Islamic Jihad itself released a public statement which I quoted in an earlier post completely rejecting there was any connection to Nazism in the salute. And readers with far more knowledge about Palestinian resistance movements than you (or even I) have pointed out that many political movements around the world which are not fascist or Nazi have used & continue to use such salutes.
Don’t you just love it when Israeli Jewish settlers tell you what the “Arab point of view” is?? How would they know? What gets me about Bar Kochba is that I continually point out the idiocy and blatant contradictions of his claims, and it never seems to have any impact. He makes the same bloopers that reflect so poorly on his ideology time after time. There’s no learning curve at all.
As for who Daoudi is, if you’d bothered to read the article to which I linked you’d know who he is. But you didn’t because you’re lazy.
I have repeatedly told commenters like you in the past that Husseini is absolutely off topic (just as claims that Israel is a Nazi state or that its leaders are or were Nazis, are off topic). I’ve also repeatedly told you that YOU were on the verge of being banned. If you violate the comment rules in any way in future I will ban you.
Snark too, especially atttempting to be witty or sarcastic is a comment rule violation.
I have deleted the portion of your comment that was off-topic and violation of the comment rules.
How come this vitriol is published in The Boston Globe by long-time columnist Jeff Jacoby? Perhaps you should offer a LTE.