Another campus walkout, this one at Wayne State speech on Palestinian child suicide bombers

Brooke Goldstein, target of walkout

Nick Meyer reports in the Arab American News on another campus walkout, this one at Wayne State University in Detroit two days ago. The speaker was Brooke Goldstein, an Israel lobbyist.

About 70 people conducted the walk-out with the support of the Arab Student Union and Students for Justice in Palestine on campus along with Jewish Voice for Peace in Detroit, speaker Brooke Goldstein, who was brought to campus by the Jewish Law Students Association. Goldstein is the founder and director of the Children’s Rights Institute, which says it was created to protect the rights of children throughout the globe. 

The groups took issue with the speaker in large part because the organization makes no mention the vastly disproportional deaths of Palestinian children and those in the Arab world compared to Israelis, and seems to focus on isolated, dramatized stories of alleged child suicide bombers.

“They fail to mention that Israel has a regimented child soldier program of their own and that they also have teenagers manning checkpoints with assault rifles, for instance,” said attendee Jimmy Johnson. 

A Jewish American student named Matthew said that the decision to walk out was the right one. He said that fellow Jews against the Zionist occupation have faced difficulties finding jobs and wanted to withhold his last name.

From Goldstein’s site:

Filming the documentary Martyr, Brooke ventured into the West Bank and at great risk personally interviewed active and armed members of the Al-Aqsa, Fatah and Hamas terrorist groups [and]…  families of suicide bombers, members of the Palestinian Authority, children’s television programmers at PA TV… and children imprisoned for attempting suicide missions or otherwise participating in armed activity against the IDF. Brooke has a fresh, on-the-ground perspective of why youth become suicide bombers, how those close to them react to these decisions, how communities encourage this kind of violent extremism, and what we can do to prevent this phenomenon from spreading.

Notice how she slides from violent extremism into children’s television programmers. I would remind American readers that when John Brown undertook violent resistance to slavery, he was funded by many upstanding New Englanders, including the transcendentalists Ralph Emerson and H.D. Thoreau, who came to believe that violence was necessary to break the slave power. As Brown told them, someone who is pushing slavery has “the perfect right to be shot.” I am not endorsing violence to end the occupation. But I am stressing that as Norman Finkelstein does in his Haaretz interview, violence against military targets in such circumstances is understood to be a legal response. And given our own history, we can understand why.

Writes Barbara Harvey of JVP who helped to organize the walkout: “The silent walk-out is a very powerful tactic.  I’m not gonna dis mic-checking, but this tactic effectively shows contempt for the speaker without interrupting the presentation or the right of those still sitting in the room (usually almost none!) to hear it.  It’s pure expressive conduct, totally protected by the First Amendment, that poses no risk of criminal prosecution.  The silent walk-out has been used very powerfully at U of M and WSU, again and again, and it’s driving the other side nuts!”