Cynthia McKinney- The nakba at UC San Diego
This past week, the Muslim Student Association at UC San Diego had their annual gloom and doom week of Israel-bashing. JJ Surbeck of T.E.A.M. San Diego was in attendance and has sent me this report.
______________________________________________________________________________
This past week UCSD went through the perennial, wasteful and hateful event known (depending on the year) as "Israel Apartheid Week" or, as was the case this year "Justice in Palestine Week". The same predictable pro-Palestinian "wall" was there on Library Walk. I'll send a separate message analyzing them later.
Further down the walk, the Tritons for Israel had set up a good combination of panels used the last two years and a new great set of banners created by StandWithUs.
  Additionally, the Tritons for Israel had come up with a great idea: a banner and booth that said "Come talk to a real Israeli soldier", a place manned by several young Israelis who - by definition - just went through their military service. .jpeg)
Worth nothing also, because to my knowledge that was a first: the Young Republicans had a booth in the "free speech area" closer to the Geisel Library with a big panel displaying two great quotes, one from Bill Clinton and the other from Condoleeza Rice, both blaming the Palestinians for the absence of peace. Way to go, Young Republicans!
This year, there were no activities at noon on the Palestinian side, which was surprising, while the Jewish students met to discuss the situation of Israel.
The pro-Palestinians also had their usual roster of speakers (more on that below), while the pro-Israel students had none, having decided (rightly or wrongly) that there was no point inviting speakers whose lectures were attended only by a handful of pro-Israel students (just as the pro-Palestinian speakers never garnered audiences of more than 40 people as far as I could see).
As I had done in previous years, I wanted to tape the pro-Palestinian speakers, but once again the UCSD administration bowed to the demands of the MSA (Muslim Students Association) and banned all taping, distribution of flyers or sign display. In the heart of academe where all you hear year round are clamors demanding free speech and academic freedom, it is particularly bizarre, if not shocking, to see the administration of a UC system college prevent anyone from exercising their first amendment rights to film or tape an event taking place in a publicly funded institution of higher learning. I had a long discussion with Gary Radcliff, who represented UCSD to explain (and enforce) this policy, and his position was that the MSA being a student organization, they are considered as separate from UCSD (try to figure that one out since it is UCSD that approves them and gives them the coveted "student group" status) and therefore as a "separate" body that rents space on the campus, they are entitled to determine whether the events they organize are going to be open or closed. This is a general problem within the entire UC system and it needs to be addressed globally. From another perspective, one is entitled to ask what it is that all these pro-Palestinian groups (who do the same thing on every campus where they use similar tactics) have to hide. What are they so afraid of showing? After listening to (too many) of their lectures, I find that there is nothing particularly enlightening, brilliant, sophisticated or constructive in there. What you have are lots of slogans, tired clichés, angry outbursts, demands, demands and more demands, but nothing in terms of dialogue or expression of willingness to compromise. What they're probably concerned about is that their raw hate is so blatant that the risks are high that they slip into legally actionable language.Their message is always the same: we have been wronged, we are entitled to everything we demand, Israel is an illegal occupier and we will eventually get our land back. Simplistic and misleading as it is, repeated with enough conviction and passion, ignorant students fall easily for their theatrics. After all these years, it is still a zero-sum game in their mind: Israel will disappear and Palestine will replace it. Really?
After arguing with Mr. Radcliff over the silliness of their no-taping policy, I said fine, but I didn't want to abandon my camera, so I asked if it would be ok if I took it with me and not use it, since the security service hired by the AS for the MSA (yep, student money paid for this) kept an eye on me (and everybody else), ready to pounce on anyone even appearing to want to tape or take a picture. He said fine. But not even five minutes after I had sat down in the auditorium, the security staff and Mr. Radcliff converged on me, all of them telling me that I needed to surrender my camera. What happened (most likely since I saw the same thing happen two days later) was that the MSA leader, a certain Amal, had a fit when he heard that I had been allowed in with a videocam and demanded that it be seized. The security personnel took it and promised to give it back to me on the way out (which they did when I left). I tried to ask Mr. Radcliff on what legal ground they had demanded that I surrender my camera, but he refused to answer, which could mean that the administration is on shaky legal ground in this respect.
Be that as it may, after all these exciting preliminaries, I was eager to hear the speakers. First came Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian-American activist who kept repeating "I'm a poet". And indeed he recited over a long hour four fiery "poems" that sounded more like angry political statements, interspersed with long rants using all the usual terminology. Some of his comments would probably hurt the feelings of J Street, which he dismissed as useless, and made fun openly of the "dialoguers" since in his opinion there is nothing to dialogue about. The titles of his four "poems" were "This poem will not end apartheid", "Nakba", "Before the machetes are raised", "Normalize this". I'll admit to not knowing much about poetry, but that was either very bad poetry, or hateful prose masquerading as poetry.
Next came an old Nemesis, local Palestinian activist Nasser Barghouti, who launched into a long attack on drones and how Israel plays an important role in the development of these flying machines. The rest was his usual explanation of why the BDS movement is so important and how it is winning hears and minds all over the world (the fact that this boasting was largely fictional did not seem to bother him too much).
I was not able to attend the lecture that took place the next day with Gary Fields and Rosauria Sanchez, so if anyone went, please let me know what you got out of it. I'll just mention that I saw Gary Fields the next day, and he seemed very pleased with himself, telling me that it had been a great evening (the topic was a comparison between the security fence built by Israel to protect itself from Palestinian suicide bombers, and the US-Mexico fence, built by the US to prevent illegal immigrants to infiltrate in the country). Sorry I missed that one...
Finally, on Thursday, Prof. Hatem Bazian from UC Berkeley and former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney gave the most bizarre duo performance I've seen in a long time. Bazian started by stating that it was "investigations against the SJP at UCSB and UCI that caused divisions on campuses" (right, it could not have been the divisive activities of these groups themselves, could it?), that all the money Israel receives from the US is not just $ 3B but 7B (!!!), and that the grand total from 1949 to 2010 has been $114B (he cited unspecified congressional sources). Another clever twist: he acknowledged that critics of Hawking who pointed out that his elaborate electronic chair that allows him to function and communicate despite his severe physical limitations was based on Intel chips, but he quickly added that the real question was how Intel came to set up shop in Israel in the first place. That was rather pathetic. He concluded by acknowledging that Arab countries receive also loads of money from the US, but he was opposed to that because it prevented them from developing themselves on their own (go tell that to Egypt right now, on the brink of massive famine.) One last interesting wrinkle: he claimed that the reason Jonathan Pollard is still in jail is because he gave information not only to the Israelis, but in fact to the Russians VIA the Israelis. Never heard that one before.
Finally, the apotheosis was Cynthia McKinney. The best and shortest description of her performance was is that she made absolutely no sense. Long-winded sentences interrupted by long blanks and awkward silent moments, she lost track of whatever she wanted to say (assuming she was trying to say something) so often that the embarrassment became palpable. Then she fumbled with her laptop so badly that an MSA student had to run from the back of the room to come to her rescue. She showed a couple of YouTube clips, one of which showed ex-NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark report that someone at the Pentagon had told him that the US was planning to invade and destroy 7 Middle Eastern countries in 5 years. She concluded with a shot of The Forward, a left-leaning Jewish journal, with the headline "New Congress has a record number of Jews". She didn't comment on it, but the implied anti-semitism was obvious. At any rate, that is one speaker that the MSA is certain to never invite again. She ruined their show. Since I didn't see anyone that I know from the pro-Israel side in the room, I don't know if others enjoyed this debacle, but I certainly did. Maybe that's why they're so secretive about their lectures and they don't want anyone to tape anything: their speakers are so bad or lie so much that they would prove embarrassing if it became public. Well, this one became public anyway, which proves that their no-taping policy is pointless, and the UCSD administration is wrong to allow it. Let's hope that this ridiculous attitude will be changed for the better and all lectures on campus will be open and transparent. Student groups must be notified that no ban will be allowed any more.
J.J. Surbeck
Executive Director  Training and Education About the Middle East ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kudos to JJ and T.E.A.M. San Diego. Kudos as well go out to Tritons for Israel, Stand With Us, and the Young Republicans of UCSD. As for the university, they need to hire some new legal counsel if they think they can collude with the MSA to deny people their rights to film. They are probably going to need it. As for that wall, if it's the same wall used at UC Irvine the previous week, they'd better check it for termites. |
No comments:
Post a Comment