As a followup to my articles this week on Omar Barghouti's appearance at UC Riverside, I have added a comment to an online article in that campus' newspaper, The Highlander. I copied it and am posting it here in the event it is not published.
This week, the UC Riverside Humanities Dept and Ethnic Studies sponsored a speech by one of the leaders of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti. This man travels the world advocating for the cultural, economic and academic boycott of Israel. Yet Barghouti, who was born in Qatar and raised in Egypt, received his masters degree at Tel Aviv University, which makes him a hypocrite. In the past, Barghouti has refused to discuss this contradiction calling it a "personal matter".
Last February, when Barghouti spoke at UC Irvine, he refused to answer a question from me as to where he was born and grew up calling it "irrelevant". Now he has a new answer. This week during the q and a at UCR, when I raised the same issue, he said that as a Palestinian he chose to study "at home" meaning Israel.
If Barghouti was born in Qatar and raised in Egypt as his bio indicates, he has a strange idea of what constitutes home. The fact is that Israel gave him his post graduate education and now he advocates an academic boycott.
I hope that every student who attended that event will seriously evaluate this man's credibility.
Gary Fouse
Adj teacher
UCI Ext
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