Hate Week Returns to UC-Irvine

Norman Finklestein-"Independent Scholar"


The Muslim Student Union at UC-Irvine has released its schedule of events for the week of May 10 plus a couple of warm-up events for the week of May 3. Yes, folks, it's the same group that is supposedly under investigation by the university for its George Galloway event of last May, when money was collected to deliver to Gaza. The MSU is also still under investigation by the university for its role in disrupting the speech of the Israeli ambassador on February 8th. Nevertheless, the show must go on. So here comes "Israel Apartheid Week-A Call to Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel."

This coming week, the MSU in concert with several other unhappy student groups*, will host a couple of events under the title:

Roots of Pain: Oppression-Spreading Awareness for Issues of Injustice and Oppression. You get the message. On Monday (May 3) some former gang member will talk about the gang situation in Los Angeles. (I wonder who he will blame that on.) On Wednesday evening, there will be some sort of round table discussion of oppression under the guidance of a poet and rap artist named Amir Sulaiman.

The purpose of these two events is to draw in as many other "victim groups" as possible to establish a theme of various groups united in opposition to "oppression in Amerika". Hopefully (to the MSU), they will then all come together with the MSU during the week of May 10 when Israel, the US and those "Zionist Jews" will be singled out for blame for all the world's ills.

On Monday, May 10 at 2 pm, a Holocaust survivor named Hedy Epstein, an anti-Israel activist associated with the International Solidarity Movement, will come in and talk about how bad Israel is. At seven that evening, Hatem Bazian will speak. Bazian teaches at UC Berkeley and has a number of interesting quotes attributed to him including the infamous hadith of hate-you know, the one about Jews hiding behind rocks and trees (which he denies). He also reportedly told a cheering crowd in San Francisco that it was time we had an intifada in this country (according to Steven Emerson in his book, American Jihad).

Then on Tuesday at noon (in front of the flagpoles), it's the incomparable Norman Finklestein, now an "independent scholar" since he was canned by DePaul University. Finklestein is a grumpy man who hates everything and everyone who disagrees with him. Yet, academics swoon when he comes to speak (at least at UC-Irvine). They love to listen as Finklestein throws in insults at someone every two or three sentences. They laugh at his sarcasm directed towards his opponents. Finklestein is guaranteed to go over his allotted time because he loves to listen to himself talk as he bashes Israel and America. Then at 5 pm, after resting his vocal cords, the esteemed "independent scholar" will do it all over again.

Der Fink has a number of interesting conspiracy theories including the idea that the Jews have exploited the Holocaust to blackmail the world, Israel attacked Hamas last year because they (Hamas) had become too moderate and represented a reliable partner for peace-and in answer to a question by me on January 31, 2009 at UCI that all those pro-Palestinian protesters in Ft Lauderdale, LA, and San Francisco yelling "Jews back to the ovens", "long live Hitler and "Hitler rest in peace" (videos can be seen on Fousesquawk) either didn't exist, were greatly exaggerated, or were Zionists masquerading as Arabs.

This is a really smart guy, folks.

On Wednesday at 12 and again at 2, film maker Alison Weir ("If They Only Knew") will bash Israel. Ms Weir is just one of so many who are absorbed with so-called human rights abuses in Israel but don't have a lot to say about human rights abuses in all those nations that surround Israel as well as the Palestinian territories.

In the evening (7:30), it's UC Santa Barbara sociology professor and indoctrinator William Robinson, the one who was involved in sending e-mails to his students comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. The topic of his talk will be "UC Israel", whatever that means.

On Thursday at noon, it's none other than old stand-by Amir Abdel Malik Ali on "Death to Apartheid". To Ali, that means wiping out Israel, one Palestinian state, and whatever it takes-including suicide bombers who blow up Israeli buses and pizza parlors-"heroes" and martyrs" according to him. No doubt, he'll identify a few more "Zionist Jews" for our benefit as he has in the past, folks like "David Axelrod, Rahm Israel Emanuel and Rupert Murdoch".

At 5 pm, it will be Omar Shakir, a young "scholar" in Middle East Studies at Georgetown and anti-Israel activist. As a student at Stanford, he led an attempt to get a divestment from Israel resolution passed.

So there it is, folks. While the entire UC system is turned upside down over recent hateful incidents on several of its campuses, trying to devise ways of patching up ethnic and religious divisions, and UCI is trying to figure out what to do about the aforementioned events involving George Galloway and the Israeli ambassador's disrupted speech, get ready for another round of bashing of Israel, the US and those "Zionist Jews". And for all those folks who have been denying there is a problem at UCI, come out and see it for yourselves.

BTW, where is George Galloway?

Ah, there he is (in red).

* Groups supporting May 3 week events:

American Indian Student Association
Black Student Union
Hip Hop Congress
Pakistani Students Ass.
Radical Student Union
Society of Arab Students
Uncultivated Rabbitts
UCI Cross Cultural Center ( I may be wrong, but isn't that a UCI entity?)