The latest outrage: Muslim joins University of California board

The search for the latest outrage ended on Thursday when it emerged that a Muslim woman – Sadia Saifuddin – had been awarded a seat on the University of California’s governing board. Sensible, humane “Jewish groups” decried the appointment in light of Ms. Saifuddin’s activism around divestment from apartheid.

According to YNet News:

Jewish groups including the prominent Simon Wiesenthal Center strongly objected to her nomination, citing her involvement in a campaign to divest university funds from companies with business connections to the Israeli military.

They also objected to her sponsoring a student senate resolution that condemned a lecturer at the system’s Santa Cruz campus for what the resolution said was Islamophobic rhetoric. The groups said it was Saifuddin who showed intolerance toward opposing viewpoints.

“In a year where campus climate issues have been the dominant theme of the UC system, a vote to appoint somebody who has served to polarize thousands and thousands of people in the campus community and beyond is shocking,” said Rabbi Aron Hier of the Wiesenthal Center, which petitioned the regents to deny Saifuddin a seat on the board. 

On a serious note, this case represents the nefarious role that Zionism has played and continues to play in American life. A group of prominent Zionists have banded together to alienate a talented young American from civic engagement here
because of her opposition to the occupation – or more accurately, to “companies with business connections to the Israeli military.”

It’s encouraging that every member of the board who voted voted in favor of confirmation (with one abstention who “cited concerns about Saifuddin’s divestment efforts”). That’s evidence of the fact that increasingly American Zionists are being ignored by people who actually believe in building a meritocracy and equality among citizens. It’s evidence that this band of segregationists is going the way of the white segregationists who preceded them.

Finally, if you’re wondering about the UC Santa Cruz lecturer whom Saifuddin condemned in a petition, well, it’s more of the same: 

“And who are the primary sources of this?” she asks in the video. “Primarily the MSA [Muslim Student Association] and the SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] students … they are generally motivated by very strong religious and political convictions, they have a fire in their belly, they come to the university, many of them are foreign students who come from countries and cultures where anti-Semitism is how they think about the world … These are not your ordinary student groups like College Republicans or Young Democrats. These are students who come with a serious agenda, who have ties to terrorist organizations.”