Keep monitoring Reut Cohen's Blog

Reut Cohen is doing a stellar job of reporting on the anti-Semitism at UC Irvine. Make sure to check her blog daily for the latest videos and articles at http://reutrcohen.blogspot.com

(photo is from StandWithUs)

Al-Awda Conference Relocated After UC Riverside Stated Discriminiation Was Not Permitted

Hat Tip: A friend who will for now remain nameless

I have trouble agreeing with Lee Kaplan of Stop The ISM on a lot of things, but I do have to congratulate him for his efforts in making sure discrimination did not happen on a US college campus - especially a public campus like UC Riverside.

The Al-Awda Conference Website statement:

WHY VENUE CHANGE

The host committee decided to move the convention from the University of California at Riverside to the Embassy Suites Hotel - Anaheim South when new unacceptable conditions were demanded by certain UCR administrators well after they had approved the venue. For example, the administrators levied new administrative, security and other fees in the thousands of dollars which the hosts of the convention at UCR viz. the Students for Justice in Palestine would be expected to pay. Such prohibitive fees are highly unusual and have almost certainly never before been levied at UCR on any other student group. Additionally, the university administrators insisted that Zionists be allowed to attend the convention, and that they film the convention and its participants, a remarkable attempt at intimidation.

All these new conditions and unreasonable demands were considered by the host committee as an attempt to shut down the Fifth Annual International Al-Awda Convention. Hence, the committee decided to move the convention to the Embassy Suites Hotel - Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard, Garden Grove, CA 92840 - The committee felt that this private venue would provide a safer and more secure environment for our community and convention attendees.

Lee Kaplan of Stop The ISM wrote:

After considerable prodding by Stop the ISM, Assistant Vice Chancellor Sandoval set up three restrictions on the event that Al Awda obviously could not abide by. First, was an objection to a disclaimer posted on the Al Awda website that “the convention host committee reserves the right to decline any reservation at its sole discretion for any reason.” A similar disclaimer on the Al Awda website last year for the same conference at San Francisco State University was removed after Stop the ISM called attention to it with the SFSU administration. Public taxpayer-supported universities are not places where people can be barred because of their ethnicity or point of view as long as they behave in a lawful manner. At SFSU some Jews who support the existence of a Jewish state found their reservation requests ignored by the organizers. When notified the same thing was happening at UC Riverside, Sandoval intervened and insisted that the conference be open to anyone who could pay the entrance fee and attend in the spirit of an open university. He made Al Awda remove the restriction from their website.

Next came the issue of security. At the previous SFSU Al Awda Conference, the organizers had goons from their organization follow anyone around who they deemed as reporting what was really going on inside the event. The press was intimidated. This reporter was accosted more than once and even followed into the men’s room. Sandoval agreed such conduct should not be allowable at a public university and assured Stop the ISM that only UC police officers, some brought in from other campuses, would have sole authority for security. At the previous SFSU event some people were harassed even for taking notes or asking questions.

Of most importance was a decision made by Sandoval that cameras and recorders would not be banned at the UC Riverside event. In all other Al Awda and ISM events [cUCIs note: and at UCI indoor events], cameras and recorders are banned to prevent outsiders from seeing the anti-Semitism and outright support for terrorist groups overseas that goes on. Sandoval advised the organizers that UC Riverside was not to be used for secret meetings that the public could not scrutinize for legitimacy.

I highly recommend you follow this suggestion by Lee Kaplan:
Write Vice Chancellor James Sandoval ( james.sandoval@ucr.edu ) and Chancellor France Cordova ( france.cordova@ucr.edu ) and praise UC Riverside for doing the right thing once the truth emerged. Perhaps other universities will now finally catch on to the ISM and its affiliates like Al Awda [cUCIs note: and the UC Irvine MSU and SAS].

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.

----

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)

US Commission on Civil Rights wants to hear more about the anti-Semitism on college campuses

The anti-Semites who visit UCI and other college campuses say they're against "Zionists", "Zionism", "Israel", "the Apartheid State", but they're not against Judaism. Trust me, they're just using code words. The Jews (if you can call them that) of Neturei Karta who come at the MSU's invitation are just as guilty - they've embraced people who call for genocide and who deny the Holocaust. The goal of their speeches, articles, letters to the editor, and newspaper columns is to incite hatred and violence against Jews and real Judaism.

Those same speakers call for violence targeting Jews simply because they are Jews. They say they support groups like HAMAS and Hezbollah. There's a word for that: INTIMIDATION

From what I've heard, some professors on campus are no better - they're teaching blatantly biased courses, and if you speak up, you risk getting a bad grade. There's a word for that: COERCION

The situation for you, your fellow students, and those students who will come after you will not get better - and probably will get worse - unless people continue to take a stand against these attacks against our kind.

The US Commission on Civil Rights, who issued findings and recommendations a year ago, now has a new educational initiative regarding anti-Semitism on college campuses: http://www.eusccr.com/

Click the link to find out:

• HOW to recognize anti-Semitism,
  
• THE PROTECTIONS and LEGAL OPTIONS you have available to you should you experience it,
  
• HOW to file a complaint with the USCCR,
  
• WHY you should file a complaint,
  
• WHY students need to speak up.
  

Ken Marcus, the Chief of Staff at the USCCR, stated during his visit to UCI last week that if you see anti-Semitism at UCI or any other college campus, HE WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU AS SOON AS POSSIBLE:

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

If you have a camera on your cell phone or have a digital camera at the time, try to take a picture or film it. If you receive emails or messages on your Facebook / Myspace, etc., forward those messages.

Don't say "it's not worth reporting" or "it's nothing". It is worth reporting - anti-Semitism is not something to be ignored! It was ignored for far too long at UCI, and that only encouraged the anti-Semites to turn up the heat.

Don't let your friends or classmates downplay anti-Semitic incidents that happen to them. Tell them to speak up for their right to go to school without fear for themselves, and without attacks on their ethnic and religious background!

It is imperative that you report each and every incident that you experience.

The USCCR poster is right: Silence Is An Ally of Hate!

All It Takes For Evil To Succeed Is For Good People To Do Nothing - don't be one of those "good people".

All it takes is one call. One email.

DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE SITUATION ON CAMPUS. FIGHT FOR YOUR CIVIL RIGHTS.

Jimmy Carter's speech and Q&A at UCI

Part 1 of 2 (Introductions and Carter's speech):


RIGHT CLICK HERE to download the mp3 (part 1 of 2)

Part 2 of 2 (Q&A):


RIGHT CLICK HERE to download the mp3 (part 2 of 2)