UCI MSU again violates UCI code #102.02 by furnishing false information

The UCI Campus Policies include the following:

102.00 GROUNDS FOR DISCIPLINE

Chancellors may impose discipline for the commission or attempted commission (including aiding or abetting in the commission or attempted commission) of the following types of violations by students, as well as such other violations as may be specified in campus regulations:

102.01 All forms of academic misconduct including but not limited to cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, or facilitating academic dishonesty.

102.02 Other forms of dishonesty including but not limited to fabricating information, furnishing false information, or reporting a false emergency to the University.

To summarize, if you spread false information, whether as part of your classwork, or even outside the classroom in the public sphere, UCI will punish you, and could expel you.

Keep that in the back of your head as you continue reading this post:

The MSU today posted to their website the following two flyers for their upcoming annual anti-Israel week - click either to open it to full size in another browser window:

Front:

(original is available here: http://www.msu-uci.com/static/azfront.jpg)

Back:

(original is available here: http://www.msu-uci.com/static/azback.jpg)

The back flyer has the following quotation, attribution, and citation:

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not just an issue of military occupation and Israel is not a country that was established 'normally' and happened to occupy another country in 1967. Palestinians are not struggling for a 'state' but for freedom, liberation and equality, just like we were struggling for freedom in South Africa.

Nelson Mandela - Former President of South Africa in a letter to a New York Times columnist March 30, 2001

Now I've covered the MSU's use of falsified quotations and citations as part of their literature and events in a previous post. So when I saw this, I wondered if they were once again using false scholarship, which as I've shown is grounds for discipline.

I dug around a bit and found the referenced letter. It includes the text of the quotation, and is a memo from Mandela to Thomas Friedman, a New York Times Columnist. Click here to see it on Media Monitors Network as well as on the memo author's own blog.

Yes, MEMO'S AUTHOR - namely, Arjan El Fassed of Electronic Intifada and other groups.

It's a hoax - and in the Fassed's own words, it was "a clearly labelled [sic] spoof". He elaborates in depth at this link on his blog as to the scandal surrounding this hoax memo.

Apparently, the moment Fassed published his hoax memo, it was picked up - minus the byline - by a bunch of people around the world just looking for anything that will make Israel look bad, and didn't care if it was inaccurate. To those people - and I lump the MSU leaders and membership within this group - Israel is to be loudly and publicly demonized by any means necessary. The truth be damned!

Fassed published his hoax memo in March 2001. A month later, Fassed felt the need to publish a clarification aptly titled "Spreading Like Wildfire" explaining to the world that the memo was made up.

That information is readily available on the internet via a quick search - I found all of the above links within five minutes of Googling the quotation's text and "mandela thomas friedman".

Yet the MSU felt the need to publish this quotation as true fact. If they had spent 5 minutes checking sources, we wouldn't be in this mess.

But instead of doing their required duty under UCI code #102.02 by making sure they do not furnish false information, at minimum the MSU's leadership and possibly their membership chose to clearly ignore the prohibition once again.

And remember, they've done this before - the MSU has a history of false scholarship.

In addition, I should bring up the MSU's motive:

The MSU's goal year after year has been and continues to be to incite hatred and violence against Jews on campus. The MSU and their membership say they are "anti-Zionist", but many leading figures from the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Vatican itself have stated that anti-Zionism is just another form of anti-Jewish hatred.

The MSU membership's hatred of Jews has appeared in their New University articles, letters, and opinion pieces.

You can read the support for violent Jew-haters and their organizations in their own magazine, Alkalima.

You can hear the calls to indiscriminate violence against Jews in their guest speakers' speeches.

And the MSU has planned more of this anti-Jewish hatred and calls to indiscriminate violence in this coming week's anti-Israel week.

This is not civil speech. This is hate speech, anti-Jewish hatred a.k.a. anti-Semitism, and moreover, this is outright intimidation.

No, it's worse than that - the MSU is attempting to dehumanize and debase Jews. Any real Holocaust scholar will tell you that dehumanization and debasement of a group is the first step towards genocide because it makes it easier to harm and kill the target group. After all, then the target group isn't human.

This is why a hostile environment against Jews has pervaded the campus for years, and why UCI has been under investigation by the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights for now two-and-a-half years.

These actions of intimidation by the MSU clearly violate the UCI Principles of Community, a document that not only every UCI student - MSU members included - agrees to follow when they enroll, but that every student organization's leadership - including the MSU - must acknowledge in an annually signed statement that "on behalf of my organization, I have received and read the Principles of Community."

In addition, given the definitions under UCI's Appendix M, I would find it hard to believe that these actions would not be classified as hate crimes and/or bias-related incidents.

I think the US Commission on Civil Rights would agree with these statements given its report a year ago on campus anti-Semitism as well as the information currently provided on their educational campaign website.

Hillel has even finally recognized that there is significant anti-Semitism on campus and has formed an task force to investigate the campus environment.

Students pay about $10,000 per year for the privilege to go to one of the top public universities in the US.

When students are thrust into a school environment where their kind is threatened with violence month after month with speeches that echo from the public campus squares through to the classrooms themselves, where people leave no doubt about their wish for someone to put a bullet not only in their head but those of their kind, it can and will do nothing but hurt those students' ability to study, which in turn hurts their GPA, which in turn reduces the ability to find the best job and salary levels, which in turn affects all kinds of things in those students' future lives.

The time has come for the UCI administration to revoke the MSU's registration with the Dean of Students once and for all and to not let them re-register for several years under any name.

The time has come for the UCI administration and the local authorities to investigate, prosecute, and throw out of school - and possibly in jail - the MSU's leadership, their active membership, and their guest speakers.

I await to see the UCI administration's response. This time, it had better be good and swift - and trust me, my standards, high as they may seem, are appropriate.

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A copy of this is being sent to the US Commission on Civil Rights. If you or anyone you know experiences anti-Semitism at UCI or any US college campus, at minimum contact the USCCR immediately via one of the following methods:

Toll free phone: 1-800-552-6843
TDD/TTY: 1-800-877-8339
Email: referrals@usccr.gov


I would also recommend contacting Susan Tuchman, Director of the Center for Law and Justice at the Zionist Organization of America.

The US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights initiated its civil rights now two-and-a-half year long investigation of anti-Semitism at UCI only after Ms. Tuchman filed a complaint on the behalf of the Jewish students of UCI.

Ms. Tuchman wants to hear from you if you have experienced or someone you know has experienced anti-Semitism at UCI or any other US college campus. She continually updates the Office for Civil Rights as she hears about new incidents.

You may reach Ms. Tuchman by phone at: 1-212-481-1500
(Note this is in New York, so their hours are three hours ahead of ours)