Jerry Gordon, writing in the New English Review, has been following the misadventures of the Olive Tree Initiative at UC Irvine. He has added his own comments to the recent arrest of Hamas member Aziz Dweik by Israeli authorities.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/40138#CurDomainURL#/blog.cfm
Gordon raises the issue of the letter from the Jewish Federation of Orange County to the university regarding the infamous meeting between Dweik and the participants of the OTI. As I have pointed out, we still don't know how and by whom this meeting was arranged. (Nobody will tell us.) What I still find interesting about the letter is that we have yet to see a response letter to the Federation from the university. We are unaware whether anyone was admonished or punished for bringing together UC students with a member of Hamas-a terrorist organization. Could it be that the Federation letter was merely an exercise in CYA, in other words, something for the files, with no response expected?
We also have an idea how much the Federation/Rose Project has contributed to OTI-not counting personal donations from certain Jewish figures who should know better. Yet, what a California public records request has mysteriously failed to obtain are the expenditures of the OTI. The requester has been told that they can't be located, and that it will take a year to find them. At one point, the requester was reportedly told that if the ledger request were dropped, everything else could be supplied expeditiously.
Another key question hanging out there is whether Dweik was paid any OTI funds for his "services" in 2009. If so, that could be a violation of US law.
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