About ten days ago, 11 students at the University of California, Irvine were arrested after repeatedly interrupting Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren’s speech at their campus. The students face potential disciplinary action from their school for the protest.
Now, the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is calling on potential students and donors to boycott the university by not applying or giving money to UC Irvine. The ZOA’s statement alleges that UC Irvine has “for years enabled bigotry, discrimination and the violation of civil rights by failing to condemn longstanding anti-Semitic and Israel-bashing speech.”
The ZOA statement reads in part:
For years, UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union has been promoting hateful falsehoods about Jews, Zionism and Israel. As just one among many examples, one Muslim Student Union-sponsored speaker last May compared Jews to Satan, and characterized them as slick, sneaky and conspiratorial.
[…]
UC Irvine has also failed to respond to the Muslim Student Union’s solicitation of funds on campus for a group called Viva Palestina, which may have furnished material support and resources to the terrorist group Hamas. This would be a violation of federal law.
In 2007 the federal Department of Education investigated similar complaints filed by the ZOA on behalf of UC-Irvine students and “found ‘insufficient evidence’ that the university failed to respond appropriately to complaints by Jewish students,” reported the Orange County Register. The federal report also states that speakers on campus “distinguished opposition to Zionism from opposition to Jews.”
Another group, B’nai B’rith International, has sent a letter to the school’s chancellor saying that the demonstration against Oren was the most recent example of “the anti-Semitic animus that has resulted in the intimidation of the school’s Jewish population for many years.”
It’s fair, I think, to debate whether the students interrupting Oren did the right thing or if a better protest tactic would have generated the same amount of attention to Israel’s alleged war crimes without getting bogged down in a debate over free speech.
I also wonder if the students would have had a chance to ask Oren some tough questions about Gaza and the Goldstone report, which makes all the difference to me in determining whether Oren should have been interrupted.
And I can’t comment honestly on allegations of persistent anti-Semitism at the UC Irvine campus because, while I don’t take at face value what the ZOA says, I also haven’t been following events at UC Irvine for a long time. The Anti-Defamation League has a “chronology of anti-Semitism at UC Irvine” page on their website that does cite one disturbing speech.
But what should be clear to anyone who watched the video of the interruptions or read press coverage is that the heckling was not, in any way, anti-Semitic. Yelling out “how many Palestinians did you kill?” and “killer” doesn’t come close to anti-Semitism.
Instead, the ZOA and B’nai B’rith are conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism in an attempt to shut down debate over the Israeli occupation and the Gaza onslaught on campuses.
It won’t work though—people of conscience are too outraged over Gaza to be shut up in the face of the tiresome anti-Semitic card.
