More Letters to the UC Riverside Campus Paper

This week's UC Riverside paper, The Highlander, has a letter to the editor by Students for Justice in Palestine, on the American Studies Association (ASA)  resolution to boycott Israel, which I felt deserved a response. It may or may not be published so here it is:

http://www.highlandernews.org/11722/letter-to-the-editor-asa-endorese-resolution-to-boycott-israeli-institutions/

Isn't it interesting how the Israeli-Palestinian issue has become the number one issue of contention on American university campuses? Why is that? It is because a well-financed and well-orchestrated international drive by the Palestinian forces and their leftist allies in the West have made it so. This past week, UCR's Departments of Humanities and Ethnic Studies brought BDS propagandist Omar Barghouti to campus to argue for an academic boycott of the country that allowed him to get his masters degree at Tel Aviv University. Yet this man, who was born in Qatar and raised in Egypt, responded to charges of hypocrisy by claiming he chose to study "at home" (because he is a Palestinian). At the same event, Barghouti and his sponsors told us that it was about time that the Palestinian narrative was told on university campuses as opposed to that of Israel which supposedly gets all the attention.

Really? In reality, anti-Israel speakers like Barghouti are a dime a dozen on US campuses while the few pro-Israel speakers (like ex-ambassador Michael Oren) have to come under guard and are routinely disrupted as Oren was at UC Irvine in 2010.

Ask yourselves also why all these professors are so eager to push their own personal political agendas down your throats-to the point of giving students class credit to show up and listen to only one side of a complex issue. This is not education; it is indoctrination.

Most importantly, this asinine drive on college campuses has created a tense and hostile atmosphere for so many Jewish students, which has resulted in several Title VI complaints with the US Dept of Education Office of Civil, Rights, which after years of dragging its heels, has dismissed them all -much to the satisfaction of cowardly UC administrators who have refused to confront the growing problem of anti-Semitism on campus.

Gary Fouse
Adj teacher
UC Irvine Ext