"Zionists: Hands off our
San Francisco State University Students!"
Support AMED and GUPS
against a Zionist smear campaign/charges of Anti-Semitism
Dear Friends of AMED and
GUPS:
This is an urgent message
to make you aware of and call upon you to support the Arab and Muslim
Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and the General Union of Palestine
Students (GUPS) at San Francisco State University. We have been subjected to a
smear campaign by Tammi Benjamin and AMCHA Initiative.
In an email to SFSU
President that was copied to members of the California legislature, San
Francisco Board of Supervisors, and countless others (please see below),
Benjamin claimed that the November 7th event commemorating the 6th anniversary
of the Palestinian Cultural Mural honoring the late Professor Edward Said, We
Speak for Ourselves: Honoring our Forbearers, was “an anti-Semitic on-campus
activity that encourages students to glorify the murder of Jews.” To support her
unfounded claims, Benjamin refers to two stencils on a table in the Malcolm X
Plaza during the afternoon of the event one is of Leila Khaled and the other
inscribed with the statement, MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COLONIZERS.
Aiming at invoking
xenophobia and enlisting the “war on terror” in order to portray Palestinian
campus activism as dangerous, illegal and outside the bounds of acceptable
discourse, Benjamin refers to Leila Khaled as “a member of the U.S. State
Department-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP)…. responsible for several plane hijackings, suicide bombings
that killed several Jews, and the assassination of a Jewish member of the
Israeli Knesset.” Had she done a quick search as academics usually do, Benjamin
would have found that Leila Khaled’s image is a popular icon frequently used by
Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike to symbolize Palestinian women’s roles
in anti-colonial resistance and to counter Orientalist and racist portrayals of
Arab (and Muslim) women as docile, oppressed and unable to speak for
themselves.
As a matter of fact, a
few years ago, following the meeting of the SFSU Curriculum Review and Approval
Committee (CRAC) that discussed and approved the Minor in Race and Resistance
Studies (RRS), students and faculty of RRS gathered outside the meeting room to
take a group photo to be posted on our website. RRS students unfurled a banner
that they had made a long time ago on which Leila Khaled’s picture was
stenciled. I asked the students then to put away the banner lest an impression
is formed that I was behind it, being mindful of exactly the sort of smearing
campaigns Benjamin has now undertaken. I recall that both RRS students and
faculty laughed it away, probably thinking that I was exaggerating the effect of
holding up such a banner and insisted on keeping it in the group photo. The
Benjamin attack is yet another proof that we (people who support justice for/in
Palestine) will continue to be targeted for our political stands.
As for the second stencil
MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COLONIZERS, contrary to Benjamin’s claim,
Palestinian students were not calling for the murder of Jews or Israelis. In
fact, the implication of Benjamin’s argument --that all Jews have the same
political stands vis-à-vis Israel or that all Jews are colonizing Palestinian
lands, lends itself to anti-Semitism. And notwithstanding her simplistic linkage
of Said’s anti-colonial intellectual work, the Palestinian Mural anniversary,
Palestinian students, and AMED, the stencil was not originally created to
specifically target Israel. It was more inclusive of the plight of Indigenous
people and their historical resistance everywhere.
‘My HEROES Have Always
Killed Colonizers: Stories of Global Indigenous REZistance’, the event aimed at
countering the depiction of the “Indigenous warrior who has been labeled a
terrorist, unpatriotic, and/or savage while defending the land, the people, and
our traditional ways.”
The announcement of the
event was also reproduced on the website of the Global Exchange
. Silk screening was only
a part of the event that included:
[A] night of song, words,
and resistance, a celebration of every global indigenous warrior who's been
labeled a terrorist, unpatriotic, and/or savage while defending the land, the
people, and our traditional ways. Through storytelling, spoken word and
performance we will collectively Re-Indigenize our heroes, such as Leila Khaled,
Boukman, Lapu-Lapu, Toy Purina and Geromino so that they may claim their true
role in history.
Finally, the November 7th
Palestinian Mural Anniversary was not solely sponsored by GUPS and AMED, as
Benjamin implies in order to isolate and target Palestinian activists. All the
Murals on the walls of the Cesar Chavez Student Center http://www.sfsustudentcenter.com/about/murals.php belong
to the student center, including the murals of Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, the
Indian, Filipino and Native American struggles, and they all reflect student
commitment to and activism on questions of justice relevant to struggles in
their communities.
The Palestinian Cultural
Mural honoring the late Professor Edward Said http://www.sfsustudentcenter.com/about/murals.php#palestinianmural,
inaugurated on November 2, 2007, the birthday of Edward Said, was the direct
result of a long and difficult but successful campaign by a broad coalition of
students, faculty, and staff at SFSU, working hand in hand with community
members and organizations. Led by the General Union of Palestinian Students
(GUPS), the coalition included other student groups, such as the Student Kouncil
for Intertribal Nations (SKINS) that was founded by Richard Oakes, the
Indigenous student who in 1968 led the take-over of Alcatraz; Black Student
Union (BSU) that, along with the 3rd World Liberation Front (TWLF), led the
successful 1968 Student Strike for a College for 3rd World Studies at SFSU; as
well as other student groups that have been part of the rich history of San
Francisco State University, such as the League of Filipino Students (LFS), La
Raza Student Organization, and Movemento Estadiantil Chicano De Aztlan (MeCHA).
The Deans of the College of Ethnic Studies, Ken Monteiro, and the College of
Education, Jake Perea were instrumental in the success of the mural. Activists
and organizations in the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities, Indigenous
communities and communities of color, as well as anti-Zionist Jewish
organizations, civil liberties, trade unions and feminist and queer groups,
united around the principle of justice for Palestine as an integral and an
organic part of justice for all, came together to insist that the mural see the
light after a battle that lasted several years during which a strong campaign
was unsuccessfully waged by the Jewish Community Relations Council and other SF
Bay Area Zionist organizations against the mural and for that matter any campus
presence of Palestine.
The history of the
Palestinian mural at SFSU with its broad based coalition of communal and campus
alliances, on one hand, and the multiple sites that clearly show that that the
stencil originated with Native American activism and spoke about colonized
people everywhere, on the other, debunk the most recent slander campaign of
Benjamin and Company. Why would Benjamin and AMCHA then ignore all these facts
and insist on smearing Palestinian activism?
As the movement for
justice in/for Palestine gains grounds and grows broader beyond the Palestinian,
Arab and Muslim communities, Benjamin and Company have escalated their campaign.
Their goals are to arrive at an official position that equates criticism of
Israel with anti-Semitism in order to discredit us and prevent us from speaking
up. When they fail to do so, as the HR 35 affair shows, they try to manipulate
the truth and exact statements of condemnation from university officials by
making a lot of noise and mobilizing their list-serves to create the impression
that lack of statements amounts to acceptance of anti-Semitism. When all else
fails, their last resort is to make enough noise to keep us occupied so we won’t
have the time or energy to speak up for the truth.
Benjamin and her group
are not looking for constructive discussion. All they seek to do is silence
speech on justice for/in Palestine. What we need to do is to be firm on academic
freedom and against smearing institutions, programs and faculty who support the
right of students to organize ourselves, speak our minds and pursue justice
wherever injustice occurs and irrespective of the powerful groups that seek to
silence us.
What you can do to
support GUPS and AMED:
1. Attend an emergency
meeting called for by GUPS and its allies tonight, Tuesday, November 19th, at
6pm, in the conference room of the College of Ethnic Studies, 116 Ethnic Studies
and Psychology Building, SFSU http://www.sfsu.edu/edu/~sfsumap
2. Write or call the
office of SFSU President, Dr. Leslie E. Wong presidnt@sfsu.edu to
counter the campaign waged by Benjamin and AMCHA Initiative.
3. Support GUPS statement
by signing the petition ……
4. Organize events on
your campus to educate and publicize the struggle for justice in/for Palestine
as an indivisible part of justice for all and insist on our right to academic
freedom and campus activism.
For more information,
please call or email AMED at (415) 505-2668 or amedstaf@sfsugups415@gmail.com or
GUPS at (415) 338-1908 or sfsugups415@gmail.com.
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Here, from Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers, is a letter to Wong from AMED: Note the revolutionary, victocrat terminology.
http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/
Leila Khaled was a Palestinian hijacker. Great role model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled
It is pretty clear that SFSU/ AMED is a nest of radicals yearning for the next big revolution. Someone should explain to them and Professor Abdulhadi that we have enough "revolutions" on our hands, thank you. We don't need any imported from the Middle East.
http://www.sfsu.edu/~amed/
This is education at work at SFSU. | 
This isn't a tempest in a teapot, its a squabble in a sandbox.
ReplyDeleteGood grief! It is painful to read the letter written for the GUPS. Not only is the internal logic inconsistent, irrelevant, and false, but the words don't fit together.
ReplyDeleteDiaspora means any group that has been dispersed outside its traditional homeland, especially involuntarily, as Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It is usually applied to the Jewish Diaspora because they were driven and had to live in so many areas. The Muslims were not driven out of their homeland to live here. If they were driven out of anywhere, it was typically by other Muslims.
Then I got to "Through storytelling, spoken word and performance we will collectively Re-Indigenize our heroes, such as Leila Khaled,...." Since when was Leila Khaled indigenous to the the US? If the Muslim writer is attempting to make common cause with the American Indians, he has a hard case to make.
Practically every single country in the world including the Muslim ones and with perhaps the exception of China, have people living there now that were not the original people living there.
The writer need a new ESL Professor and a course in logic.... better yet he should go back to the country where he is comfortable with the people who have give him (or his parents) sanctuary, freedom, and the ability to get an education.
Pretty ridiculous, isn't it? They might as well have a dept of armed revolution at SFSU.
ReplyDeleteBenjamin refers to Leila Khaled as “a member of the U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)…. responsible for several plane hijackings, suicide bombings that killed several Jews, and the assassination of a Jewish member of the Israeli Knesset.” Had she done a quick search as academics usually do, Benjamin would have found that Leila Khaled’s image is a popular icon frequently used by Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike to symbolize Palestinian women’s roles in anti-colonial resistance...
ReplyDeleteIt is worth noting that these two assertions are not mutually exclusive.
Its also worth noting, once again, that the leader of PFLP, Dr. George Habash, was an Orthodox Christian. That almost makes one nostalgiac for the days when Islam was not the point of Palestinian mobilization.
and to counter Orientalist and racist portrayals of Arab (and Muslim) women as docile, oppressed and unable to speak for themselves.
Well, some women Arab and Muslim women are not docile, but many are oppressed and unable to speak for themselves. I guess its not genetic, at any rate.
In the end, this all has the significance of Gay Denim Day. (Don't ask).
Israelis are colonizers in the same sense that every European-descended person in the Americas is a colonizer.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me, the origin of this trite and overdone slogan lies in a Willie Nelson song, "My heroes have always been cowboys." Innocent enough, but it drew the repartee from some Native Americans "My heroes have always killed cowboys."
That's a "funny once" as Manuel O'Kelly Davis used to say to Mycroft HOLMES, the super computer running the Federated Nations lunar penal colony.
Its also a little strained, since, contrary to the Hollywood movie scenario, most cow punchers moved into empty lands after fur traders and the Seventh Cavalry had cleared the natives out. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for cowboys to fight running battles with Indians.
Anyway, by the time it morphs into "My heroes have always killed colonizers..." its so attenuated that it lacks any humor at all.
It is possible to construct reasonable, logical, and plausible arguments why large numbers of Jews should not have been allowed to begin settling in the Ottoman territories that were once Israel, or in the British Mandate of Palestine. Its water under the bridge now. They are there, and have no homes to return to anywhere else. Three hundred million North Americans aren't going to move wholesale back to Europe and Africa, latinized Japanese have found themselves unwelcome in the land of their grandfathers and returned to Brazil. Wholesale slaughter doesn't cut it.
My sister's children had a babysitter who moved from Puerto Rico to New York at the age of 18. I asked her once what she thought about Puerto Rican independence. She said it should have been independent, but its too late now. Too many Puerto Ricans are rooted several generations on the mainland, too many economic ties to the U.S. that couldn't be untangled.
Life goes on. The Palestinians will have to get used to it. But the resolution creating the state of Israel called for two states, not one. A lot of effete monarchies derailed that and dumped thousands into permanent refugee camps, but its time to get it back on track. Its still the only way, long term, that Israel can obtain peace or insure its own survival.
P.S. A dept of armed revolution at SFSU? Those loudmouths couldn't hit a target often enough to qualify for a riflery merit badge. (Neither could I when I was in Boy Scouts. I did better in archery.)