"Catastrophe Week" Returns to UC Irvine

It's that time of year again at UC Irvine. The week of April 30-May 4 has been proclaimed Nakba week by the Students for Justice in Palestine and Muslim Student Union. Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe, which for Palestinians is when Israel became a state in 1948, and the Arab world joined together to wage war on the nascent Jewish country. The Arabs, as we all know, lost and some Palestinians who chose to leave Israel to clear the way for the Arab armies wound up in refugee camps in neighboring Arab lands.

And there they have sat since. Palestinians have become the world's longest-standing refugees. Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were driven out of Arab lands with little to nothing picked up their lives and became productive citizens of Israel or other countries while the Palestinians and their descendants have wallowed in self pity and unspeakable violence against innocent civilians.

But back to the present where Arab and Muslim students in the US have perpetuated the myth of Palestinian victimhood with their obnoxious, loud, and never-ceasing anti-Israel campus events. Over the years at UCI,  I have witnessed more than my share of oddball, radical, hateful speakers, many of whom are nothing but loud mouth Jew haters. And that is not to mention the Jewish misfits like Norman Finkelstein, Judith Butler, Matan Cohen, Jewish Voice for Peace and others.

In recent years, the annual anti-Israel weeks have been fizzling. No more screaming imams at the outdoor flagpoles at noon. The mock apartheid wall is still there. In recent years, there have been a series of boring figures appearing at night. My own attendance at these events has decreased as well. This is partly because I no longer teach at UCI and I pick and choose the events more carefully.

So who is coming to speak at UCI this year? As far as we know, SJP has only been able to line up one speaker, a guy named Anis Zubi, who is described as a "Nakba survivor".

Mr Nakba survivor is slated to speak the evening of May 2.

But hey! Let's get into the spirit of things. To celebrate the return of Nakba week to UCI, I will now play (again) my own composition of the Palestinian National Anthem, as performed by Ace Frehley (without his knowledge).