Pro-Palestinian (Stanford) Campus Disruptors Charged

                                

On June 5, 2024, several pro-Palestinian demonstrators broke into the office of the Stanford University president and occupied the building. Reportedly, they committed considerable damage while inside the building. Now, 12 demonstrators have been charged by the Santa Clara DA's Office with felonies for trespass and vandalism. All 12 are reportedly undergraduate and graduate students.

The Stanford Daily, (campus newspaper) has a report here.

Also appearing in the Stanford Daily in the Opinion section is a letter "from the Community", or more specifically, a group of Stanford faculty and alumni objecting to a letter sent to some 60 universities, including Stanford, from the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, warning them of potential enforcement actions and loss of federal funding if they fail to protect their Jewish students under Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act. I am only familiar with two of the signees, Joel Beinin and David Palumbo-Liu, both noted anti-Israel activists. The letter can be accessed here.

Sorry, all you Learned Professors, but no university, even a private university, is exempt from federal civil rights laws, especially when they have allowed their campuses to be taken over by anti-Israel mobs who engage in trespass, occupations, vandalism and other disruptions to the operations of the university, not to mention bullying of Jewish students and disruption of their events. None of that is covered by free speech.

The time for the Department of Education/OCR to get involved is long overdue. For over 2 decades, Jewish students on one campus after another, including Stanford, have been complaining about having to attend school in a hostile environment. Given the charges announced this week, the letter is laughable.

"Rather than protecting Jewish students, the federal government redefines anti-Semitism to include any criticism of Zionism. This is dangerous. Criticism of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and what human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch consider a genocide against the Palestinian people is not antisemitic. Punishing those who criticize Israel is not just illegal according to the principles of free speech and academic freedom — it is immoral and complicit in genocide denial. Considering Zionism a protected identity, rather than the political project it is, removes it from any scrutiny or questioning."

I don't know how many of the signees are Jewish, but before pontificating on what protects Jewish students and what does not, perhaps, the signees should talk to some of the Jewish students who have been victimized on campus as part of the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and yes, in my view, anti-Jewish wave of incidents.  

Instead, they continue to prattle on about "ethnic cleansing", genocide, and the false claim that the federal government (under Trump) is defining anti-Semitism to include any criticism of Israel. That is a canard. The Trump administration's position is in line with the definition set out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Here is their definition. It sets out where and how the state of Israel figures into anti-Semitism. 

 "Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."

In January of 2016, Palumbo-Liu participated in a panel on free speech at UC Irvine, which I attended. At that time, he said that the US State Department's definition of anti-Semitism (which was similar to that of the IHRA) defined any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. Here is the DOS definition adopted in 2010 that Palumbo-Liu was referring to. In May of 2016, the DOS adopted the IHRA definition. (Note that in the above link to the January 2016 panel, there is a link to the State Department's definition, which erroneously goes to a different DOS report.)

It comes down to this: No university has a God-given right to federal funding, particularly when they are failing to protect the rights of all their students and protect them from discrimination or violence on campus. As the DOE letter to the universities states:

"The Department’s OCR sent these letters under its authority to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964), which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes shared (Jewish) ancestry."