I am cross-posting an op-ed in the UCLA Daily Bruin newspaper written by a student and DB cartoon director named Firyal Bawab. The title is: UCLA Must Stop Repressing Pro-Palestinian Narratives.
The fact is that UCLA does not repress pro-Palestinian narratives. The thesis is absurd on its face. The fact of the matter is that it is the pro-Palestinian lobby that rules the roost in academia across the country, and that includes UCLA in a place of prominence. Throughout the year, as in other universities, UCLA is treated with numerous anti-Israel speakers who come and say their piece without interference. That includes the odious San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi, who is mentioned in the article. Abdulhadi is only repressed when she attempts to give a platform to a convicted Palestinian terrorist and skyjacker (Leila Khaled), which ZOOM recently decided properly that they did not want to be associated with.
It is not pro-Palestinian events and speakers who are routinely disrupted on college campuses; it is pro-Israel speakers and events, as I can personally testify from my years teaching at UC Irvine. It is not pro-Palestinian students who are bullied and intimidated on college campuses. It is pro-Israel Jewish students.
UCLA is the home of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, a rabidly anti-Israel department full of activists devoted to demonizing Israel and calling it scholarship. I have written several postings about them. If UCLA were repressing pro-Palestinian narratives, the CNES would not exist at UCLA.
This is a campus where Jewish students aspiring to work in student government have been given the third degree as to whether their Jewishness might cause them to be biased against the poor Palestinians. As if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had anything to do with student government or student life in general on any US university campuses.
One thing the pro-Palestinian movement has done masterfully is in PR, painting themselves as victims and Israel as oppressors. They have succeeded in making the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict a hot-button issue on American college campuses with all this nonsense about "intersectionality" which blames Israel for all problems here in the US.
The student-journalist makes reference to an op-ed by UCLA Chancellor Gene Block in the LA Times, in which he takes issue with the demand of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for a boycott of Israel. Block was too kind vis-a-vis SJP. This bunch uses tactics of disruption and intimidation against Jewish, pro-Israel students and their invited speakers, something I repeatedly witnessed when I was teaching at UC Irvine. If anything, Block has been unable or unwilling to provide a safe atmosphere for Jewish students.
I have no wish to be hard on this student-journalist, who, after all, is a young student. Bawab is entitled to her point of view and the right to have it published in the Daily Bruin. But to paint pro-Palestinian activists as being repressed at UCLA or any other campus is an absurdity that must be responded to.
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