Link to Research Page (Contents provided below for Reference):

Academics for Protecting Palestinians and Pluralism

⏩2023Oct19- Letter from academics urging President of Ben Gurion University in Negev to condemn incitement to riot by Prof. Barali

Prof Barali’s Opinion 2023oct15: Arab society's responsibility for the Hamas phenomenon [aka Kill them all!]

⏩13Nov2023 Report about the state of war and persecution of academic freedom and political speech in academia

⏩2023Nov10- University of Haifa Faculty Letter of Protest against suspension of lecturers

⏩Israeli fascist Students in favor of Censorship

2023Nov15 Pro-Censorship- Stop the incitement in the academy

Against the U.S. Zionist backed Pro-Apartheid IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism

⏩Israel’s Academia for Equality supports the Declaration on Antisemitism and the Question of Palestine

⏩Israel’s Academia Palestinian rights and the IHRA definition of antisemitism

Israeli Hayom Opinions: Prof. Avi Barali voice of Bibi’s government 

the Historian Butcher of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev

⏩Opinion 2023oct15: Arab society's responsibility for the Hamas phenomenon [aka Kill them all!]

⏩Opinion 2023oct10: The face of evil in American academia

⏩Opinion 2023Oct09: The demographic attack of the High Court

⏩Opinion 2023nov05: What is non-existent in this war?

2023nov12 NYT The New York Times Responds to an Open Letter from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Government Press Office

12 November 2023

NYTimes responds to Letter

The New York Times Responds to an Open Letter from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Government Press Office

 Lior Haiat

Consul General of Israel, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Puerto Rico

Mr. Lior Haiat assumed the post of Consul General to Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Puerto Rico in February 2016. He comes to Miami with a wealth of experience in Hispanic, cultural and media affairs. 

Prior to his arrival in Miami, he served as the Department Director of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean Islands at the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem for two years. From 2009-2013, Mr. Haiat served as the Spokesperson and Public Diplomacy Officer at the Embassy of Israel to Spain. From 2007-2009, Mr. Haiat served as the Deputy Spokesperson of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem. Previous to this role, Mr. Haiat served as the spokesperson and Cultural Attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Argentina from 2002 -2007. From 1999-2000, Mr. Haiat served as the Political Adviser and Spokesperson to MK David Tal, Chairman of the Labor, Welfare and Health Committee Israeli Parliament (Knesset).

Additionally, Mr. Haiat served as a Captain and Artillery Coordinator in the infantry unit with the Israeli Defense Forces.Mr. Haiat has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Hebrew University and his Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Communications from Tel Aviv University. Mr. Haiat was born and raised in Petah Tikva, Israel and is married to Hani with three children. Mr. Haiat speaks Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, and English.  

https://www.israeliamerican.org/iac-national-conference/team-member/lior-haiat  

2021may19 Zionist Groups in US Operate Campaigns to Quash Palestine Solidarity on Campus

Surveillance of and smear campaigns against student activists are common features of pro-Israel lobbying operations.

By  Caren Holmes , Truthout

Published May 19, 2021

From <Zionist Groups in US Operate Campaigns to Quash Palestine Solidarity on Campus | Truthout>

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

As the world bears witness to the violent dispossession of Palestinians at the hands of Israel’s apartheid regime, this very same regime is conducting a parallel project of suppression, censorship and surveillance in the United States. An extensive network of U.S.-based pro-Israel lobbying groups, working hand in hand with Israeli intelligence agencies, continue to fund multimillion-dollar campaigns to destroy Palestinian liberation struggles and ensure professional, legal and financial consequences for Americans who dare to speak out against Israeli apartheid.

College campuses have become a central battleground of the lobby’s suppression efforts. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) pose a major threat to long-term bipartisan support for Israel as their campaigns unsettle pro-Israel political narratives and introduce young people to the violent realities of the occupation.

While pro-Israel organizations that intervene in campus activism often try to do so under the radar, their counterinsurgency strategies and patterns are being exposed. Truthout spoke with three SJP chapters across the country about their efforts to advocate for Palestinian liberation and the challenges of organizing grassroots campaigns in opposition to a multimillion-dollar lobbying and surveillance regime.

Surveillance and Smear Campaigns

In 2016, Al Jazeera sent an undercover journalist to intern and network within the Washington, D.C.-based Israel lobby. His reporting confirmed what many advocates for Palestine already suspected: The lobby is funding complex surveillance operations to undermine Palestine activists, particularly those on college campuses.

Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), was caught on undercover footage boasting about the organization’s multimillion-dollar surveillance technologies and smear campaign tactics. The group’s strategy, he revealed, is fabricating allegations of antisemitism against activists in order to create a sense of crisis. The ICC conducts “oppositional research,” defames activists using anonymous websites and promotes these defamations using targeted Facebook promotions. Baime’s associate, Noah Pollak, admits that defamation is a major feature of the lobby’s strategy to suppress criticism of Israel, noting, “you discredit the messenger as a way of discrediting the message.”

Organizers in all of the SJP chapters Truthout spoke with emphasized the personal risks they shoulder in publicly condemning apartheid. Organizers cited these risks in their requests to participate in this article anonymously. Many activists end up with profiles on Canary Mission, a blacklisting website that publishes the private information of anti-apartheid student activists and academics. When this occurs, their names are publicly associated with allegations of antisemitism and “terrorist” affiliations. The website’s explicit aim is to prevent critics of Israel from accessing professional opportunities. Al Jazeera’s investigation revealed the Canary Mission website is operated by Baime and financed by convicted American-Israeli real-estate mogul Adam Milstein. Milstein is the founder is the Israel-American Council and sits on the board of prominent pro-Israel lobbying organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), StandWithUs, Birthright Israel and the Israel on Campus Coalition.

For Palestinian students, the risk is even greater. A member of SJP at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explains, “Many of us are ourselves Palestinian and of course run the additional risk of being banned from Palestine by the Israeli government when we are vocal about the atrocities in Palestine.”

Running surveillance and smear campaigns against student activists is a common feature of pro-Israel lobbying operations. Last year, SJP members at Tufts University were nonconsensually recorded and subsequently doxxed by Israel lobbyists attending a private, virtual event. Tufts SJP — which was campaigning to end a university program that sent Tufts University police officers on training trips to Israel — was targeted by pro-Israel lobbying groups with a barrage of attacks and accusations of antisemitism. Some of these organizations included StandWithUs, the Anti-Defamation League, the Louis D. Brandeis Center and a variety of pro-Israel news sources.

A member of Tufts SJP says that the organization is being targeted because of how effective it has been at changing the narrative about Palestine on campus. She explains, “We [SJP members] now have to be very careful to conceal our identities and have become adapted to dissociating our names from our work.” But by building a broad coalition of social justice organizations at Tufts, “we have been able to connect Palestinian struggles for freedom to the struggles of others working towards collective liberation.”

“Lawfare”

Coordinated media attacks play a particularly important role for the pro-Israel lobby. By accusing SJP’s student activists of antisemitism, these organizations legitimize the lobby’s assertion that advocacy for Palestinian rights on college campuses creates an unsafe learning environment for Jewish students. The lobby is leveraging this narrative to accomplish something much more consequential — to redefine civil rights legislation and anti-discrimination policies to include criticism of Israel as a form of antisemitism.

“Lawfare,” or legislative warfare, is a key aspect of pro-Israel lobby strategies. Organizations like the Brandeis Center lobby university administrators and tech companies, as well as local, state and federal legislatures, to adopt definitions of antisemitism that explicitly include critiques of Israel. These definitions ultimately punish students standing in opposition to Israeli apartheid.

In September 2020, the SJP chapter at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) successfully passed a student government resolution calling on the university to divest from companies operating in illegal West Bank settlements. The resolution garnered national outrage from pro-Israel news outlets, and the names of activists involved in the campaign were eventually added to Canary Mission’s public blacklist.

Two months later, two students in collaboration with the Brandeis Center, a pro-Israel lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C., filed an official complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the UIUC administration had failed to protect students from antisemitism.

Filing complaints with the Department of Education became a highly effective tool for Israel lobbying organizations under the Trump administration. Kenneth Marcus, the founder of the Brandeis Center — the very organization filing antisemitism complaints against universities — was nominated by President Trump to act as assistant secretary for civil rights within Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education. There, Marcus announced the department would adopt a new “working definition” of antisemitism that would include criticisms of Israel. In practical terms, Marcus paved the way for pro-Israel students and organizations to leverage the financial and legal power of the Department of Education against universities that fail to take action against Palestine advocacy on their campuses.

The Brandeis Center complaint filed against UIUC bundles instances of explicit antisemitism — like the presence of swastika graffiti on campus property — with criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian liberation. A Brandeis Center lobbyist even admitted during a campaign at the University of Tennessee that the real antisemitism that Jewish students faced on the campus was from Christian evangelicals in the community trying to proselytize them, not the pro-Palestine activists at the center of the Brandeis Center’s lobbying efforts.

The UIUC university administration, under increased legal scrutiny, ultimately released a joint statement with pro-Israel organizations. The statement expressed a commitment to combating antisemitism on campus, which would include anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.

On May 14, 2021 — amidst the height of bombings of Gaza and one of the largest Palestinian uprisings since the intifadas — Illinois General Assembly Minority Leader Jim Durkin introduced new legislation calling upon the University of Illinois to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which pro-Israel organizations like the Brandeis Center endorse. This definition expands conceptions of antisemitism to include criticism of Israeli government policy and challenges to Zionism. Durkin told the Jewish Insider, “this resolution, I hope, puts the university on notice that we’re watching, and we want you to resolve this in the appropriate way.”

The progression of pro-Israel lobby suppression campaigns on college campuses.

Jewish-led organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have continuously rejected the lobby’s efforts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. On the contrary, prominent Jewish activists and scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler have argued that conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism can itself be antisemitic: For instance, provocations by Christian Zionists and evangelicals who suggest Jews living in the United States ultimately belong in Israel. Similarly, the suggestion that critique of Israeli state violence is antisemitic necessitates the belief that Israel, and its violent colonial expansion, reflect the will of the Jewish people as a whole rather than Israeli government policy.

Regardless, the pro-Israel lobby’s coordinated campaigns to target SJP’s activism have achieved their desired effect. As a Palestinian member of SJP UIUC explains, “The media and legal scrutiny have made many students afraid to speak out,” which raises the “stakes” for pro-Palestine advocacy. Student activists are forced to reallocate their energies away from effective advocacy for Palestine and towards addressing suppression campaigns.

What’s Next?

For Israel, the war of public opinion, particularly in the West, remains an essential feature of its national security strategy. Israel enjoys unconditional and bipartisan political support within the United States Congress, an asset leveraged to the tune of $10 million each day in military aid. It’s no surprise that the Israeli government invests enormously in preserving public support for Israel and subsequently working to neutralize organizations, groups and individuals engaged in critique of Israel’s illegal occupation and institutionalized apartheid.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have acted in lockstep with this systemic repression campaign. In September 2020, the U.S. State Department under Trump committed to “target,” “fight” and “kill” the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS), a nonviolent economic boycott campaign modeled after a similar campaign to fight South African apartheid. The Biden administration also signaled its commitment to disenfranchising Palestine advocates when his Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed that the administration “enthusiastically embraces” the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

The consequences of these coordinated suppression efforts are not hypothetical. They consume the political and professional careers of many Palestine solidarity activists. Recently, amid the bombing of Gaza, Emily Wilder, a Jewish journalist with the Associated Press, was fired following a campaign from right-wing groups who condemned her years of advocacy with Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s evident that Israel’s continued investment in surveillance and defamation campaigns is likely to continue to have a chilling effect, not only on the movement for Palestinian liberation but more widely on free speech.

But the enormous demonstrations taking place around the world in solidarity with Palestinian resistance to evictions in Jerusalem suggest Israel has lost the moral argument. While its lobbying power holds, many people are no longer finding Israel’s propaganda campaigns convincing. The country’s lobbying arms can no longer discredit the message — that Israel is a settler-colonial apartheid state — and instead invest in discrediting the messenger.

A member of Tufts SJP says that while they are heavily out-resourced by pro-Israel lobbying organizations, SJP campaigns are still finding success. Young people are increasingly rejecting the occupation and standing in solidarity with Palestinian freedom fighters. SJP activists can perhaps take solace in knowing that Israel’s expansion of coordinated repression is evidence of the movement’s ability to threaten the material support for colonialism, apartheid and violence that is at the heart of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

https://truthout.org/articles/zionist-groups-in-us-operate-campaigns-to-quash-palestine-solidarity-on-campus/

The On-Campus Israel Lobby: How the Suppression of Palestinian Activism on US College Campuses Is a Multi-Million Dollar Foreign-Funded Industry

Holly Jackson

Thesis Advisor: Mahmood Mamdani

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, October 2023

https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/m7fz-cn97/download

Abstract

The social groups we form in university are incredibly influential to our world view. As a result, there is a billion-dollar industry that attempts to influence the ideas of these groups. The power of student groups is evident through the long history of suppression of their free speech rights. Historically, media outlets, universities, and the government have engaged in aggressive suppression campaigns of critical American student movements — from the Black Campus Movement in the 60s to the anti-Shah Iranian student movement in the 70s.

The student Palestine solidarity movement is the current manifestation of this trend. Its centrality to the debate on Palestinian human rights in the US has been identified by many — from Palestinian human rights organizations to the Israeli prime minister. Nefariously, the current suppression movement of Palestinian activism on US college campuses is galvanized by millions of dollars from foreign actors. This study outlines how the Israeli government spends millions to infiltrate US university student life in order to spread political support for the State of Israel and suppress Palestinian activist voices.

https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/srtx-tj83

EXCERPTS FROM THE PAPER

One website, The College Fix, receives several hundred thousand dollars per year in backing from right-wing nonprofits.

Another site, called Campus Reform, is operated by the US-based conservative nonprofit the Leadership Institute25 (which had a 2021 revenue of 30 million dollars26). Campus Reform recruits and “trains conservative students to monitor, surveil and report on the speech and actions of left-leaning professors, students and campus activist groups for the organization’s daily blog.”27 Both sites have been accused of spreading misinformation. A survey in the American Association of University Professors’ Academe magazine found 40% of students and faculty who were targets of Campus Reform articles received “threats of harm” after publication.

29 In some cases, students and professors have had their personal information leaked online. The Intercept reports, “more than 12 percent [of targeted individuals] reported facing disciplinary action as a result of a Campus Reform story. Ironically, in their plights for “free speech” of conservative students, these websites frequently stifle the free speech of on-campus student groups.

the American Zionist Council received over five million dollars (equivalent to around 50 million in 2023) through the Jewish Agency for Israel — an Israeli-headquartered nonprofit that credits itself with “founding and building the State of Israel. Armed with the funds from the Jewish Agency140, the American Zionist Council undertook several secret lobbying and surveillance campaigns. They “cajole[d] and intimidate[d] news media, subvert[ed] open debate about Israel and undermine[d] reporting about key issues of the day.”141 In addition, they surveilled and intimidated American professors who held beliefs critical of Israel.142 All the while, “the budget for the AZC was…approved directly by the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem.”143 The money the American Zionist Council received from the Jewish Agency was conditioned on the AZC “creat[ing] favorable public opinion in this country [the USA] for Israeli government policies

AIPAC is the US’s self-proclaimed “pro-Israel” lobby148 and has never been registered as a foreign agent. AIPAC claims it has never received foreign funding nor acted on behalf of the State of Israel, but since its formation in the 1960s there have been multiple “efforts to have it register under FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] as an agent of the state of Israel. former AIPAC employee, M. J. Rosenberg, explains that AIPAC has never registered with the Foreign Agents Registration Act due to a “legal loophole by which AIPAC is defined not as a lobby for a foreign state but [as] Americans who support that state.”

Starting in 1948, the Department of Justice and other federal entities attempted “to get the Zionist Organization of America to register as a foreign agent seven times.”

154 They accused the Zionist Organization of America of acting as an agent of the World Zionist Organization an Israeli-headquartered NGO founded by the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. But after modifying its constitution, the Zionist Organization of America was able to escape registration. In the early 1970s, the Department of Justice subpoenaed the American Section of the Jewish Agency for Israel to reveal information on its secret agreements with the Israeli government. The American Section of the Jewish Agency for Israel had been a registered foreign agent since 1943, as it was a branch of the larger Jewish Agency for Israel. But, the DOJ was specifically asking for more transparency on the Jewish Agency’s “Covenant” agreement with the Israeli government, which allowed the Jewish Agency to “review legislation before it went to the Knesset [the Israel Senate]

American Sections of the Jewish Agency for Israel and World Zionist Organization still have actively-filed foreign agent registrations with the Department of Justice.167 On their tax returns, they mark each other and their Israeli-headquartered analogues as affiliates.

Grant Smith tracks “Israel affinity organizations,” which he defines as a group of 350 (as of 2015) US-based nonprofits that declare “unconditional support for Israel as a top priority.”170 He reports, in 2015, that the total revenue of these organizations was a combined $3.7 billion171 — which makes up more than 1% of the entire revenue of the US charitable sector as a whole that year. Smith reports that this revenue is rapidly growing as well, at about 5% per year. To put this in perspective, Smith explains, “At present, in aggregate, this sector of 350 organizations with Israel as a top priority are right behind the United Way, the largest tax-exempt organization, and right ahead of the Red Cross.”

Smith explains that the Israeli affinity sector has blossomed over a series of three waves — the first promoting Zionist immigration to Palestine, the second fundraising for the Israeli army and state building efforts, and the third focused on media watch and education. He points to a germinating fourth wave — which encompasses “campus monitoring” and “Israeli activity on campus.”

Palestine Legal has identified universities as “ground zero in the clash between advocates for Palestinian human rights and the counter-campaign to silence criticism of Israel.”174 In 2014, 89% of the activists they defended were students and scholars175, which suggests the efforts of the Israel lobby are transitioning towards the college campus. The Forward — an American magazine covering Jewish life — has even mentioned a shift in which American Jewish organizations “have grown more comfortable with the notion of taking Israeli government funds”, quickly giving a nod to Hillel, a national organization of on-campus clubs for Jewish student life. In fact, even former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennet announced, “The activities on campuses throughout the world are the real answer to the growing anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of Israel.”

In 2018, Al Jazeera planned to release a documentary series which supposedly revealed Israeli-governemnt-funded organizations that were spying on and publicly slandering American citizens, especially student activists. Ali Abuminah reports, “Some of the activity revealed in the film could include US organizations acting as front operations for Israel without registering as agents of a foreign state as required by US law.”178 This documentary series, however, was canceled after only two episodes under the suspicion that Al Jazeera faced pressure from the international Israel lobby.

Jewish student life organizations

The most popular on-campus Jewish student life organizations are a critical nexus of Israeli political activity on campus. Specifically, three organizations — Hillel, Chabad on Campus, and Olami — are the “largest providers of Jewish life on campus around the world”180, reportedly “responsible [for] 80% of activities for Jewish students on campuses.” Hillel in and of itself is “the largest Jewish campus organization in the world.”182 There are 873 Hillel branches in the US alone — which constitutes around 86% of all Hillel branches worldwide. Forty-nine of the US News’ top fifty American universities have a Hillel on-campus (the only exception is Illinois's University of Notre Dame, which explicitly promotes a Catholic education and only allows student-run Jewish associations).

many campuses are home to Chabad on Campus or Olami groups, right-wing Jewish organizations which have Hasidic leadership (but serve a non-denominational Jewish population).184 Chabad on Campus has over 260 locations on worldwide campuses185, and Olami has over 320 on- and off-campus groups for students and young professionals.186 Like Hillel, a majority of both their locations are in the US. Chabad on Campus is also regarded “as a safe haven” for “pro-Israel students.”193 While Chabad on Campus does not explicitly pledge allegiance to Israel in its mission statement, Chabad has a well-known “political role in Israel, where many of its rabbis and leaders are prominent in far-right, pro-settlement and anti-compromise activism.”194 Similarly, Olami is committed to support of the Israeli state. Olami offers activities that ensure “Israel will hold a special place in your heart and mind.”

Many Jewish students have complained that Hillel, Chabad on Campus, and Olami co-opt Jewish student life and have turned their opportunity for lifelong connection into a political project. While surveys of Jewish students have shown students’ interested in social and cultural topics far outranks their interests in politics (in fact, politics was ranked last on a list of twelve topics)196, former Hillel students and leaders have complained that being “pro-Israel” is a requirement of Hillel membership.197 Gordon Gladstone — a former director of UC Berkeley Hillel explains, “My experience is, the vast majority of students who walk through the doors of Hillel are not there because they are interested in Israel as a political issue…They’re looking for community. They didn’t sign up to fight the BDS war,” that is, to fight against Palestinians and anti-Zionists who advocate for the boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions of Israel.

198 Gladstone explains, however, that “there’s clearly a class of donors who very much think that should be the role and that should be the business…you realize the degree to which these donors have influence on the policy and behavior of the organization.”

Hillel, Chabad on Campus, and Olami partnered with an organization called Mosaic United. Mosaic United provided the groups with a combined 66 million dollars in funding over two years, from 2016 to 2018.

Mosaic is not an independent actor. The Jerusalem Post explains, “The Israeli government and Mosaic United reached an agreement whereby Jewish philanthropists would contribute $2 for every dollar donated by the Israeli government. To date [2021], Mosaic United has invested $165 million in educational programs around the world, $55 million of which has been contributed by the Israeli government.”209 This means Hillel, Chabad on Campus, and Olami received a third of their combined Mosaic funds from 2016 to 2018 (i.e. 22 million dollars) directly from the Israeli government. 

Hillel also partners with Taglit-Birthright, which provides Jewish students aged 18 to 26 with free trips to Israel.232 Taglit-Birthright receives 27% of its funding from the government of Israel and 6% from the government-affiliated Jewish Agency and Jewish Federations

Finally, Hillel has partnered directly with the Israeli-government-affiliated Jewish Agency for Israel. Their partnership pays for “Israel Fellows” — whose role is “promoting Israel advocacy” — to come to US college campuses.

Israel on Campus Coalition (henceforth, ICC) was co-created by Hillel in 2002.253 Since then, the ICC’s budget has grown to almost ten million dollars per year.254 It remains a close collaborator of Hillel, and Hillel frequently donates to its activities. In addition to mobilizing support for Israel on campuses, the ICC has been accused of “using its $9 million budget to fund bullying and intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish students alike on college campuses” who are critical of the Israeli state.259 In 2016, ProPublica and The Forward uncovered an ICC-funded Facebook campaign against a Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi who was visiting US colleges per the invite of Palestine solidarity organizations.260 Kanazi’s website explains he uses “his art to bring attention to systems of oppression in Palestine.”261 The ICC paid for Facebook ads to appear on profiles near the colleges Kanazi was visiting that painted Kanazi as hateful and antisemitic.

In late 2018, leaked clips from a mysteriously-canceled Al Jazeera documentary series on the USA’s Israel lobby revealed that ICC executives in fact seem to collaborate with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs on their organizational strategy.265 But covert collaboration is not the only way the Israeli government exerts influence on the ICC. Around eight percent of the ICC’s total budget (almost a million dollars) comes from the Jewish National Fund266 — an Israeli organization which owns approximately 13 percent of Israel’s total landmass267 and has a long history of close collaboration with the Israeli government

Students Supporting Israel (henceforth, SSI) is another organization with roots at over 180 US universities.268 SSI proudly announces its commitment to the Israeli State. They explain, “Our mission is to be a clear and confident pro-Israel voice on college campuses, and to support students in grassroots pro-Israel advocacy.” 269 SSI hosts over five hundred events each year, often inviting delegates from the Israeli government and former soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces.270 In addition to forging on-campus support of Israel, SSI boasts of its harassment of Palestine solidarity organizations.

The formation of Open Hillel is also a testament to this dynamic. An Open Hillel at Guilford University released a public statement explaining why it chose to break with the larger Hillel organization: “On our campus, it is an imperative that Hillel be a place that is for all Jewish students, irrespective of their political ideology. As an open Hillel, we believe that Jewish students should be supported in expressing their Jewish identity and values in the way that is most meaningful to them. … To be an open Hillel is to welcome all perspectives on Israel-Palestine.”200 Only four Hillels, however, have ever succeeded in declaring themselves “open”201, and, two of them have since re-affiliated with the larger Hillel organization.

Hillel, Chabad, and Olami participate in multiple, contradictory projects: building Jewish spiritual life, building solidarity with Israel, and targeting critics of Israel. Their many partnership programs (which will be explored below) are focused on forging solidarities with Israel and building on-campus support for the Israeli state. Simultaneously, these organizations also engage in activities that target critics of Israel — such as Hillel’s strict pro-Israel speaker rules that precipitated the formation of Open Hillel. Yet these activities often come into conflict with their mission of promoting Jewish student life — isolating Jewish students who are not interested in politics or who have dissenting views about Israel.

Student fellowships and funding

A related program, called the Hasbara Fellowships, offers American students the chance to be paid to travel to Israel and receive “an intensive 2-week training program in pro-Israel activism.”

277 Israeli charity Aish International (Olami’s close affiliate) reports that this fellowship program was a response to a 2001 “challenge” from the Israel Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Ministry commanded, “Israel is losing the PR battle on campus…Come up with a program and we’ll be your partners.”278 The Forward reports, “In 2020 alone, Hasbara Fellowships gave out over half a million dollars to students engaging in on-campus Israel advocacy.”279 The Hasbara website claims to have had 3,000 trip participants — with 200 yearly active fellows on 95 college campuses.

StandWithUs — an organization whose mission statement is “supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism around the world”281 — produced one of these blacklists. In 2014, Mondoweiss reported that StandWithUs had been compiling “secret dossiers on pro-Palestinian speakers” in the US.282 StandWithUs amalgamated the dossiers in a website — Stand4Facts.org — which had the stated purpose of helping “Israel advocates respond to and counter anti-Israel speakers who come to your campus.”283 The website had profiles on over 100 speakers who had visited college campus — accusing them of endorsing terrorism and being antisemitic. The profiles included many well-known academics and scholars such as human rights attorney and Rutgers professor Noura Erakat and California State University professor Asad Abu’Khalil. The profiles of female activists had ratings of their attractiveness.

StandWithUs has previously gotten into trouble for failing to declare its funding from the Israeli government. In 2019, StandWithUs was granted funds from Kela Shlomo (also known as Concert) — a company whose donations are matched one-for-one by the Israeli government. 285 Kela Shlomo was formed as a “buffer” through which the Israeli government could pass funds to American nonprofits.286 When this funding was revealed, StandWithUs rejected the grant, at risk of being subject to an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.287 Previously in 2015, StandWithUs had been hired by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office (for the equivalent of about 250 thousand dollars) “to help it [the PM’s office] push the government’s political line this year [2015] via social media.”

StandWithUs’s blacklist is no longer accessible, but a larger and more extensive blacklist is being compiled by Canary Mission. Canary Mission is a notorious website that has compiled over 1,000 student, faculty, and activist profiles in an effort to “ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”289 For the most part, the website is “[d]edicated to blacklisting students involved in Palestine solidarity activism, intimidating them and denigrating their public reputations.”

290 It mainly attacks Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students as well as students from other minority groups. 291 Fifty-two percent of the professors (full and associate) in Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies are on the blacklist.

The funding of Canary Mission has remained incredibly elusive. Canary Mission is not a registered non-profit even though it solicits donations on its website. It does not publicly declare any of its funding sources. Despite Canary Mission’s efforts to hide its financial backing, investigative journalists have uncovered clues about Canary Mission’s financial and organizational structure.297 Nora Barrows-Friedman reports, “Tax filings led reporters to an Israeli company named Megamot Shalom…‘that operates or operated Canary Mission.’ Their address is an abandoned office west of Jerusalem.”

Millions of dollars are funneled into US college campuses from the Israeli government each year. The campus organizations that are the recipients of these funds are not registered as foreign agents under FARA. These organizations masquerade as student-run groups — luring new members, many of whom are just looking for social connection, into a foreign-funded propaganda trap during the most impressionable years of their life. They use their millions of dollars of funding in explicit projects to spread Israeli political messaging and suppress any resistance from grassroots Palestine solidarity organizations.

AAAS BDS Actions

Association for Asian American Studies

Explainer: BDS American Studies Association -- What Does the Boycott Mean?

https://www.theasa.net/what-does-boycott-mean

What Does the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions Mean for the ASA? 

1) Who is calling for the boycott?

This boycott is called for by Palestinian civil society, including academics. The boycott is part of a larger movement, BDS, which stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. 

In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the wall Israel built on Palestinian territory was illegal. In 2005, a majority of Palestinian civil society groups and organizations organized together in protest against Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights. These organizations have called for non-violent tactics of boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against Israeli academic and cultural institutions. As with South Africa, Israel’s system of racial discrimination, at all institutional levels, constitutes apartheid as recognized by international law under the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The American Studies Association is one of several academic associations that have been asked to participate in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The Association for Asian American Studies already voted in Spring 2013 to support this boycott.

2) Why boycott Israeli academic institutions?

Israeli academic institutions function as a central part of a system that has denied Palestinians their basic rights.  Palestinian students face ongoing discrimination, including the suppression of Palestinian cultural events, and there is sanctioning and ongoing surveillance of Palestinian students and faculty who protest Israeli policies. Israeli universities have been a direct party to the annexation of Palestinian land. Armed soldiers patrol Israeli university campuses, and some have been trained at Israeli universities in techniques to suppress protestors.

3) Why is this issue relevant to the American Studies Association?

The ASA is an organization that supports the protected rights of students, scholars, and peoples everywhere to freedoms of expression, thought, and movement. The ASA has long played an important role in critiquing racial, sexual, and gender inequality in the United States. It condemned apartheid in South Africa and urged divestment from U.S. corporations with operations there. It has condemned anti-immigrant discrimination in Arizona and in other states. It has spoken out in support of the Occupy movement, and of the human dignity and rights of the economically disenfranchised.

In addition, the United States is the world’s strongest supporter of Israel, providing the majority of Israel’s military and foreign aid, and providing political support for settlement expansion. As a U.S.-based organization, the ASA condemns the United States’ significant role in aiding and abetting Israel’s violations of human rights against Palestinians and its occupation of Palestinian lands through its use of the veto in the UN Security Council.

By responding to the call from Palestinian civil society for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions, the ASA recognizes that 1) there is no effective or substantive academic freedom afforded to Palestinians under the conditions of Israeli occupation; and that 2) Israeli institutions of higher learning are a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights. The National Council’s decision to honor the call for the Academic Boycott of Israeli institutions is an ethical stance, a form of material and symbolic action. It represents a principle of solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and an aspiration to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians. 

4) What does the boycott mean for the ASA?

The ASA understands boycott as limited to a refusal on the part of the ASA in its official capacities to enter into formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions, or with scholars who are expressly serving as representatives or ambassadors of those institutions (such as deans, rectors, presidents and others), or on behalf of the Israeli government, until Israel ceases to violate human rights and international law.

We are expressly not endorsing a boycott of Israeli scholars engaged in individual-level contacts and ordinary forms of academic exchange, including presentations at conferences, public lectures at campuses, and collaboration on research and publication. U.S. scholars are not discouraged under the terms of the boycott from traveling to Israel for academic purposes, provided they are not engaged in a formal partnership with or sponsorship by Israeli academic institutions. The academic boycott of Israeli institutions is not designed to curtail dialogue. Rather, it emerges from the recognition that these forms of ordinary academic exchange are often impossible for Palestinian academics due to Israeli policies. We also recognize that there are inherent difficulties in parsing these distinctions, and that ASA members will want to engage in discussion about guidelines for action.

As a large member organization representing divergent opinions, the National Council further recognizes the rights of ASA members to disagree with the decision of the National Council. The Council’s endorsement of the resolution recognizes that individual members will act according to their conscience and convictions on these complex issues. As an association that upholds the principle of academic freedom, the ASA exercises no legislative authority over its members. By contrast, it is a civil offense for scholars within Israel to endorse this boycott.

5) Would Israeli scholars be permitted to participate in the ASA conference or to be invited to my campus to speak in general, even if they relied on Israeli university funding?

Yes. This boycott targets institutions and their representatives, not individual scholars, students, or cultural workers who will be able to participate in the ASA conference or give public lectures at campuses, provided they are not expressly serving as representatives or ambassadors of those institutions, or of the Israeli government.

*In accordance with the “yes” answer immediately above, Israeli academics attended our 2014-2016 conventions and are on the program for our 2017 convention.  The ASA will not prohibit anyone from registering or participating in its annual conference.

6) Would ASA members be permitted to work with Israeli scholars, Palestinian scholars in Israel, and/or collaborate with Palestinian research institutions in Israel?

Under most circumstances, yes. The academic boycott does not seek to curtail dialogue between U.S. and Israeli scholars. Collaboration on research and publications between individual scholars does not fall under the ASA boycott. However, the boycott does oppose participation in conferences or events officially sponsored by Israeli universities. Routine university funding for individual collaborations or academic exchanges is permitted. 

In general, the ASA recognizes that members will review and negotiate specific guidelines for implementation on a case-by-case basis and adopt them according to their individual convictions.

7) What is required for an Israeli university to no longer be subject to the boycott?

The boycott is designed to put real and symbolic pressure on universities to take an active role in ending the Israeli occupation and in extending equal rights to Palestinians. The international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement has called for a boycott to be in effect until these conditions are met. 

8) Is the academic boycott a violation of academic freedom?

Like other academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the ASA unequivocally asserts the importance of academic freedom and the necessity for intellectuals to remain free from state interests and interference as a general good for society. Over the years, the ASA has passed several resolutions in support of intellectual freedom. In our view, the academic boycott doesn’t violate academic freedom but helps to extend it.

Under the current conditions of occupation, the academic freedom of Palestinian academics and students is severely hampered, if not effectively denied. Palestinian universities have been bombed, schools have been closed, and scholars and students deported. 

The ordinary working conditions for Palestinian academics and students are severely constrained by restrictions on movement to and from work, on international travel, and by discriminatory permit systems. Israeli scholars critical of their country’s policies also face sanction since it is a civil offense for scholars in Israel to endorse the boycott.  The goal of the academic boycott is to contribute to the larger movement for social justice in Israel/Palestine that seeks to expand, not further restrict, the rights to education and free inquiry.

https://www.theasa.net/what-does-boycott-mean

2013Apr20: Resolution to Support the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions

April 20, 2013

Link to resolution

• Whereas the Association for Asian American Studies is an organization dedicated to the preservation and support of academic freedom and of the right to education for students and scholars in the U.S. and globally; and

• Whereas Arab (West Asian) and Muslim American communities, students, and scholars have been subjected to profiling, surveillance, and civil rights violations that have circumscribed their freedom of political expression, particularly in relation to the issue of human rights in Palestine-Israel; and

• Whereas the Association for Asian American Studies seeks to foster scholarship that engages conditions of migration, displacement, colonialism, and racism, and the lives of people in zones of war and occupation; and

• Whereas the Association for Asian American Studies seeks to advance a critique of U.S. empire, opposing US military occupation in the Arab world and U.S. support for occupation and racist practices by the Israeli state; and

• Whereas the United Nations has reported that the current Israeli occupation of Palestine has impacted students “whose development is deformed by pervasive deprivations affecting health, education and overall security”; and

• Whereas Palestinian universities and schools have been periodically forced to close as a result of actions related to the Israeli occupation, or have been destroyed by Israeli military strikes, and Palestinian students and scholars face restrictions on movement and travel that limit their ability to attend and work at universities, travel to conferences and to study abroad, and thereby obstruct their right to education; and

• Whereas the Israeli state and Israeli universities directly and indirectly impose restrictions on education, scholarships, and participation in campus activities on Palestinian students in Israel; and

• Whereas Israel imposes severe restrictions on foreign academics and students seeking to attend conferences and do research in Palestine as well as on scholars and students of Arab/Palestinian origin who wish to travel to IsraelPalestine; and

• Whereas Israeli institutions of higher education have not condemned or taken measures to oppose the occupation and racial discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, but have, rather, been directly and indirectly complicit in the systematic maintenance of the occupation and of policies and practices that discriminate against Palestinian students and scholars throughout Palestine and in Israel; and

• Whereas Israeli academic institutions are deeply complicit in Israel’s violations of international law and human rights and in its denial of the right to education and academic freedom to Palestinians, in addition to their basic rights as guaranteed by international law; and

• Whereas the Association for Asian American Studies supports research and open discussion about these issues without censorship, intimidation, or harassment, and seeks to promote academic exchange, collaboration and opportunities for students and scholars everywhere;

Be it resolved that the Association for Asian American Studies endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Be it also resolved that the Association for Asian American Studies supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

PASSED. No OBJECTIONS. No ABSTENTIONS.

April 20th, 2013 by the General Membership of the Association for Asian American Studies.

https://aaastudies.org/resolutions/resolution-to-support-the-boycott-of-israeli-academic-institutions/

2013April23 - Zionist- SCATHING CRITICISM

A First for the Israel Boycott?

April 23, 2013

The general membership of the Association for Asian American Studies unanimously approves a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli universities.          

By  Elizabeth Redden

The general membership of the Association for Asian American Studies has unanimously approved a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli universities, making it the first scholarly organization in the U.S. to do so, according to the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

About 10 percent of the association’s membership was present for last week’s secret ballot vote, which was open to all members and took place on the final day of the AAAS annual conference in Seattle. The resolution raises a number of concerns about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian students and scholars – including restrictions on travel and the forced closure or destruction of schools as a result of Israeli military actions – and describes Israeli academic institutions as “deeply complicit in Israel's violations of international law and human rights and in its denial of the right to education and academic freedom to Palestinians, in addition to their basic rights as guaranteed by international law."

“Be it resolved that the Association for Asian American Studies endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions,” the resolution reads in part.  “Be it also resolved that the Association for Asian American Studies supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.”

The AAAS president, Mary Yu Danico, confirmed the resolution was approved and directed questions to the association’s past president, Rajini Srikanth, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Srikanth likened the academic boycott to that which was levied against South African universities to protest apartheid, and emphasized that the boycott is of institutions, not individual academics. “The reason that we’re very clear that this is a boycott of Israeli institutions and not Israeli scholars is that we are very aware that there are Israeli scholars who understand the difficulties that Palestinian academics and students have and speak up in support of Palestinian rights,” she said. “So we would absolutely be working with them, and providing them whatever support they need to challenge their institutions.”

At the same time, she said, “We would discourage partnerships with Israeli academic institutions, whether they’re curriculum partnerships or study abroad partnerships, because that would be becoming complicit with the discriminatory practices of Israeli institutions, and we would be encouraging faculty, staff and students to forge alliances with Palestinian faculty and Palestinian students who now have so much difficulty engaging in conversations with scholars from the rest of the world."

Britain’s main faculty union, the University College Union, has issued a series of resolutions over the years that fall just short of endorsing an academic boycott of Israel (see for example this 2008 resolution and this one from 2011). In April, the Teachers Union of Ireland became the first educational trade union in Europe to support an outright boycott, as The Jerusalem Post reported. However, the issue hasn’t gotten as much traction among academics on this side of the Atlantic, where boycotts are widely viewed as antithetical to academic freedom.

The American Association of University Professors opposes academic boycotts, stipulating in a 2005 statement that "since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas." (The AAUP further elaborated on that statement in regards to a then-proposed boycott of two Israeli universities here.)

“It’s a morally incoherent argument that somehow on behalf of the Palestinian cause it’s O.K. to abandon the principles that academics normally hold dear, which is that you don’t penalize scholars for having political affiliations that you may or may not agree with,” said Richard L. Cravatts, the president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel organization, and the director of Simmons College’s communications management program. "Having a litmus test for the political affiliations or connections of professors has always been anathema to most academics."

Cravatts also rejected as “abhorrent” what he described as a singling out of the Jewish state for criticism when many other governments engage in condemnable behavior. Srikanth argued, however, that on the contrary academic criticism of Israel is subject to suppression through intimidation or censorship and that it is precisely the absence of meaningful criticism of Israel's human rights record on the part of the U.S. government that necessitates an academic boycott. "This is where civil society comes into play," she said.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/24/asian-american-studies-association-endorses-boycott-israeli-universities

2019Feb19 RE Disciplinary Action BDS- Letter to Dean Cole at the University of Michigan Regarding Professor John Cheney-Lippold

February 19, 2019

Elizabeth R. Cole, Interim Dean
College of Literature, Science and the Arts
University of Michigan
ecole@umich.edu

Dear Dean Cole:

We write the Executive Board of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) to express our grave concern
about your decision to impose disciplinary sanctions against Professor John Cheney-Lippold of the Department of
American Culture.

The ostensible reason for your action stem from his decision to not to write a letter of recommendation for a student
that would be used to support her application for a study-abroad program in Israel. As a result of your action,
Professor Cheney-Lippold will be ineligible for a salary increase for the current academic year and his sabbatical
eligibility and credits will be frozen for two years. Your decision to punish Professor Cheney-Lippold for acting on
the basis of his convictions and exercising his discretion as a faculty member is a distressing and dangerous
violation of his academic freedom.

We understand that Professor Cheney-Lippold had written this student a letter in which he explained that his
decision was informed by the “academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine.” As a
supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, Dr. Cheney-Lippold viewed this action as one
that adhered to BDS guidelines which includes a stipulation that “international faculty should not accept to write
recommendations for students hoping to pursue studies in Israel….” The University of Michigan’s Standard Practice
Guide says the following on the question of freedom of speech and artistic expression:

“Expression of diverse points of view is of the highest importance, not only for those who espouse a cause
or position and then defend it, but also for those who hear and pass judgment on that defense. The belief
that an opinion is pernicious, false, or in any other way detestable cannot be grounds for its
suppression” (Article 601.01).

Your institution’s very guidelines proscribe anyone—including deans, university administrators, or members of
boards of trustees or boards of regents—the authority to police the boundaries of academic freedom, especially in
the arbitrary way that has taken place.

Professor Cheney-Lippold came to this decision not lightly, but rather on the basis of sincerely held convictions
about an issue of public concern. Your decision to sanction him is a clear violation of the letter and spirit of the
university to which you are both employed. We therefore call on you to rescind your decision to impose disciplinary
penalties on Professor Cheney-Lippold and to publicly reaffirm the University of Michigan’s commitment to respect,
and vigorously protect, the academic freedom and free speech rights of its faculty.

Sincerely,
Theodore S. Gonzalves, Ph.D.
President (on behalf of the Executive Board) Association for Asian American Studies

https://aaastudies.org/endorsements/letter-to-dean-cole-at-the-university-of-michigan-regarding-professor-john-cheney-lippold/

Other association actions

Chancellor mocks ' Chinese language’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5MuEDkib6M

2020May01 AAAS resolution calling for a decolonizing peace and a formal end to the Korean War

May 1, 2020

Whereas progressive Koreans within the diaspora, including in the United States, have long organized for a peaceful resolution to the Korean War and, alongside many Asian and Pacific Islander peoples, have waged grassroots struggles against U.S. war and militarism;

Whereas the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) seeks to advance a critique of U.S. war and empire; foster scholarship, innovative pedagogy, and public awareness about the far-reaching impact of U.S. militarism and racial violence in Asia and the Pacific; and support people’s anti-imperialist struggles for liberation and self-determination;

Whereas the root of the current conflict on the Korean peninsula is the unresolved Korean War, an asymmetrical war of U.S. aggression precipitated by the 1945 U.S. decision to divide Korea at the 38th parallel without consulting the Korean people and undermining the Korean people’s long struggle against Japanese colonial rule and historic efforts to realize democratic self-governance;

Whereas the United States, the primary Korean War belligerent and the world’s greatest nuclear proliferator and detonator, has refused to sign onto a permanent peaceful settlement, despite the temporary July 1953 armistice recommendation that the major signatories–the United States, North Korea, and China–negotiate peace terms within three months’ time, in contrast to North Korea’s numerous requests to end the Korean War;

Whereas without a peace agreement, war can resume at any time in Korea, which stands to destroy the lives of 80 million people on the peninsula in addition to many other Asian and Pacific Islander peoples, and in this era of a nuclear-armed North Korea to inflict catastrophe within the United States and on a planetary scale;

Whereas the ongoing state of war and division in Korea has exacted a massive human toll by keeping millions of families separated, including roughly 100,000 Korean Americans, by authorizing an exploitative system of international adoption, by subjecting the peoples of Korea and the region to the constant threat of nuclear war, and by perpetuating an arms race that diverts resources from human needs and justifies the proliferation of garrison states;

Whereas U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific exploits the pretext of a menacing North Korea and the sub-imperial complicity of regional client-states, as in the South Korean deployment of over 300,000 soldiers to fight alongside U.S. forces in the U.S. war in Vietnam and in the strategic incorporation of sites like Diego Garcia, Guam, the Marshall Islands, Hawai‘i, and Okinawa into its “forward-deployed” posture against North Korea;

Whereas the Korean War, as a structure of permanent war, exacts an imperial toll, justifying monstrous trillion-dollar “defense” budgets–in 2015, 54% of the federal discretionary budget–enabling the United States to wage endless wars and maintain troops abroad, the contamination, resource exploitation, and seizure of Indigenous lands, and the militarization of poor, non-white peoples within its army, correlating to unemployment, austerity programs that deny access to decent education, healthcare, and housing, and the militarization of the police;

Whereas the Korean War, the longest-running U.S. conflict, enabled the United States to consolidate its global military-imperial dominance, inaugurating the U.S. military-industrial complex and justifying its base expansion, while continually justifying U.S. power projection in the region, its encirclement of China, and the ever-expanding U.S. military budget;

Whereas contrary to U.S. government and corporate media claims, U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea continue, rehearsing the collapse, invasion, and occupation of–as well as nuclear first strikes against–North Korea, according to the Pentagon’s operation plans;

Whereas the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula must be understood as imposing a commensurate obligation on the United States, given its history of repeatedly threatening North Korea with nuclear decimation and in violation of the 1953 Armistice deploying nuclear warheads to South Korea from 1958 to 1991, thereby requiring the elimination of all nuclear threats to the peninsula;

Whereas only a genuine peace agreement among the main parties to the Korean War, reflective of the Korean people’s struggle for decolonization, self-determination, liberation, and reunification, can reduce the risk of nuclear and conventional war in Korea;

Whereas the leaders of North and South Korea at the historic summit at Panmunjom on April 27, 2018 “solemnly declared before the 80 million Korean people and the whole world that there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun,” and pledged to work together for independent unification, and in September 2018, signed an historic military agreement to cease all hostile acts and have taken concrete steps to transform the so-called demilitarized zone (DMZ) into an actual peace zone;

Whereas, since the historic 2018 summit between North Korea and the United States, diplomacy has stalled, escalating threats of war, intensifying the possibility that the Korean War’s seventieth year could give rise to the end of North Korea’s self-imposed moratorium on nuclear weapons testing and resumption of full-scale U.S.-South Korea war exercises;

Be it resolved, on the Korean War’s seventieth year, that AAAS:

• Supports the Korean people who have long fought for peace and the self-determined unification of the Korean peninsula and considers ending the Korean War a necessary step in the decolonization of South Korea;

• Enacts solidarity with the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, and North America who have long waged anti-militarism struggles against the projection of U.S. war power in and militarized expropriation of their homelands;

• Calls on the United States to abolish its seven-decade policy of hostility and sweeping sanctions that isolate North Korea and aim to inflict widespread humanitarian catastrophe on its people, formally end the Korean War, and replace the 1953 Armistice Agreement with a permanent peace agreement;

• Demands that the United States to stop all military exercises that deploy or introduce its strategic assets on the Korean peninsula, abolish its nuclear umbrella over South Korea, Asia, and the Pacific, and meet its own obligations to create a nuclear-free world;

• Initiates critical reflection on and collective action regarding the complicity of U.S. universities within the military-industrial complex and our role as socially engaged scholars to analyze the structural moorings of our own conditions of possibility; and

• Encourages students and scholars to engage in a three-year research and teaching initiative, starting Fall 2020, that emphasizes critical approaches to and collective inquiry about the Korean War, with a focus on the racial, sexual, colonial, and sub-imperial violence of U.S. war power as well as peoples’ struggles for decolonization.

Sponsors:

Christine Hong, UC Santa Cruz

Alfred Flores, Harvey Mudd

Elaine Kim, UC Berkeley

Crystal Baik, UC Riverside

Patrick Chung, University of Maryland

Joo Ok Kim, University of Kansas

Deann Borshay Liem, Mu Films

Minju Bae, Temple/NYU

Monica Kim, NYU

Jeff Santa Ana, Stony Brook University

Ji-Yeon Yuh, Northwestern

Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University

Signers:

Rebecca Jo Kinney, Bowling Green State University

Daniel Kim, Brown University

Elena Shih, Brown University

Ida Yalzadeh, Brown University

Mark Tseng-Putterman, Brown University

Robert G. Lee, Brown University

Takuya Maedda, Brown University

Davorn Sisavath, CA California State University, Fresno

Susie Woo, CA California State University, Fullerton

Jinah Kim, CA California State University, Northridge

Eric Mar, CA SF State

Kira Donnell, CA SF State

Wei Ming Dariotis, CA SF State

Mary Yu Danico, Cal Poly Pomona

Edith Chen, Cal State University, Northridge

Gina Masequesmay, Cal State University, Northridge

JoAnna Poblete, Claremont Graduate University

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Columbia University

Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Duke University

Anne Joh, Garrett Theological Seminary

Kimberly McKee, Grand Valley State University

Lili Kim, Hampshire College

Sudipa Topdar, Illinois State University

Cynthia Wu, Indiana University

Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University

Nadia Young-na Kim, Loyola Marymount University

Long Le-Khac, Loyola University Chicago

Jeremy Tai, McGill University

Anita Mannur, Miami University Ohio

Elizabeth W. Son, Northwestern University

Michelle N. Huang, Northwestern University

Nitasha Sharma, Northwestern University

Cynthia Gao, NYU

Heijin Lee, NYU

Rachel Kuo, NYU

Aimee Bahng, Pomona College

Minh-Ha T. Pham, Pratt Institute

Beth Lew-Williams, Princeton University

Sarah Park Dahlen, St. Catherine University

Andrew Leong, UC Berkeley

Richard Kim, UC Davis

Christopher Fan, UC Irvine

Laura Kang, UC Irvine

Heejoo Park, UC Riverside

Sarita See, UC Riverside

Christen Sasaki, UC San Diego

Simeon Man, UC San Diego

Todd Henry, UC San Diego

Jane Komori, UC Santa Cruz

Jennifer Kelly, UC Santa Cruz

Ka-eul Yoo, UC Santa Cruz

Trung PQ Nguyen, UC Santa Cruz

Yuki Obayashi, UC Santa Cruz

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, UCLA

Hiroaki Matsusaka, UCLA

Jane Kuoch, UCLA

Jennifer Jihye Chun, UCLA

Joseph Ong, UCLA

Karen Umemoto, UCLA

Jean-Paul deGuzman, UCLA & The Windward School

Naomi Paik, UIUC

Grade Kweon, UNC Chapel Hill

Ji-Yeon Jo, UNC Chapel Hill

Audrey Wu Clark, United States Naval Academy

Nishant Upadhyay, University of Colorado Boulder

Chad Shomura, University of Colorado Denver

Na-Rae Kim, University of Connecticut

Laurel Mei-Singh, University of Hawai‘i Mānoa

Sunny Yang, University of Houston

Terry K. Park, University of Maryland

Miliann Kang, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Vivian Truong, University of Michigan

Aujean Lee, University of Oklahoma

Josen Masangkay Diaz, University of San Diego

David Roh, University of Utah

Vin Nguyen, University of Waterloo

James Matthew McMaster, UW Madison

Yumi Lee, Villanova University

Allan Lumba, Virginia Tech

Genevieve Clutario, Wellesley College

Salonee Bhaman, Yale University

Invitation to Members to Sign Petition Regarding Purdue University Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon

December 23, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5MuEDkib6M

Asian Americans Demand Accountability from Purdue University

Please add your name plus (optional) title and affiliation to co-sign the open letter in response to anti-Asian comments by Chancellor Thomas Keon and institutional racism at Purdue Northwest. Asian Americans and non-Asian American allies are all encouraged to sign.

SUMMARY: We call on Purdue to appoint an independent commission with expertise in Asian American Studies and the experience of Asians and Asian Americans in higher education to do the following as expeditiously as possible in dialogue with Asian American representatives of PNW’s students, staff, and faculty:

1) Develop a plan to hire a critical mass of faculty and develop curriculum in Asian American Studies throughout Purdue University.

2) Redress any identified problems of discrimination, marginalization, or under-representation in the recruitment, hiring, and retention of Asian American faculty and staff at Purdue Northwest.

3) Redress any identified problems based on a climate survey of Asian and Asian American students, faculty, and staff at Purdue Northwest.

4) Create a dedicated fund to augment co-curricular programs at Purdue Northwest that enhance understanding of Asian American history and culture.

5) Foster greater awareness and solidarity between Asian Americans and other communities of color and historically marginalized groups.

6) Secure a commitment from the university administration to fund and implement recommendations for structural change with clear benchmarks and timelines.

Link to the complete letter: https://tinyurl.com/pnwletter

The Force Behind the Nike Empire

Phil Knight built a successful business by selling shoes. He became a billionaire by selling dreams.

January/February 1997 https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-force-behind-the-nike-empire

Also in 1992, a group named Made in America called for a boycott of Nike products because Nike shoes (like most athletic footwear) are made overseas, mainly in Asia where labor is cheap. Nike has been criticized for its low pay and abusive treatment of some workers. Using independent subcontractors, Nike makes many of its products in Indonesia, a world pariah for its well-documented human-rights abuses. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has launched his own crusade against Nike. He accuses the company of exploiting Indonesians while quietly encouraging the Suharto government to crack down on dissent.

Over the years, Nike has also rattled cages with its penchant for signing athletes with rebellious, even dicey, reputations, such as the outspoken Barkley and the untethered Chicago Bull, Dennis Rodman. Not that Reebok endorser Sean Kemp or Converse man Larry Johnson (both guilty of taunting lesser opponents while representing the United States in the 1994 World Games) are paragons of virtue, but Nike pioneered the trend of signing athletes who project attitude as well as excellence.

An impenitent Knight shrugs when asked about these issues. "Our business practices are no different than those of our competitors," he says. "But we are bigger, and thus more visible, so we get more flack."

But it's more than that. Nike courts controversy. For instance, Nike donated $25,000 to Tonya Harding's defense fund in 1994, in part to tweak Reebok, the sponsors of Nancy Kerrigan. Nike's analog isn't the conservative team owner, but the cocky superstar who sets the agenda and is so wildly popular he knows he can get away with just about anything. "Nike is at times feisty, or counterestablishment, deliberately," says Spence, the business school dean. "That's partly Phil and partly the athletic culture Nike is modeled after."

References form Professor

Analogy to stanford boycott of Nike; boycotting in name of sustainability, and its practical implications…

LINK to GOOGLE Doc

Contents

⏩BDS law groups - Instagram Victory Posters

⏩Dualing in the Chronicle of Higher ED

⏩Opinion Chronicle 2022Oct20: No, Berkeley Isn’t Discriminating Against Jews

⏩Opinion Chronicle 2022Oct24: Yes, Berkeley Is Silencing Jews

⏩U.C. Berkeley School of Law Faculty Statement in Support of Jewish Law Students:

⏩Pepperdine Dean Paul Caron - Update The Review | Opinion

⏩Legal attacks

⏩TITLE VI CLAIM AGAINST UC BERKELEY LAW SCHOOL

⏩National Press

⏩2022Nov20 LAT- How a Berkeley Law debate on free speech got turned into a social media circus - Los Angeles Times

⏩2022Dec21 NYT: At UC-Berkeley Law, A Debate Over Zionism, Free Speech, And Campus Ideals

⏩Critics & Chronicles: Paul Caron, Law Dean, Pepperdine U.

⏩More Critics

⏩Bernstein: Some Berkeley Law "Jew Free Zone" Updates

⏩Wapo 2015 Opinion Bernstein: The one-state solution and the brutal honesty of Edward Said

⏩2019: Cal Jewish students still ‘pained’ over anti-Zionist remarks

In Internal Memo, American Jewish Committee Blasts Op-Ed on “Jewish-Free Zones” at Berkeley Law

The group’s disavowal of an article written by Israel advocate Kenneth Marcus revealed tension over the best strategy to combat campus Palestine activism.

In Internal Memo, American Jewish Committee Blasts Op-Ed on “Jewish-Free Zones” at Berkeley Law

Mari Cohen and Alex Kane

October 14, 2022

On September 28th, prominent Israel advocate Kenneth Marcus published an op-ed in the Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal that quickly grabbed national attention. The op-ed accused the University of California Berkeley School of Law of maintaining what Marcus—the former assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education and founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, an Israel-advocacy legal group—called “Jewish-free zones.” In fact, no such zones existed; Marcus was referring to the fact that nine student groups at the law school, responding to a campaign by the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, had adopted a new bylaw pledging not to invite speakers who support Zionism. In the widely circulated piece, Marcus argued that this policy amounts to “target[ing] Jewish Americans directly” and that “using ‘Zionist’ as a euphemism for Jew is nothing more than a confidence trick.”

Bullying

Other Israel-advocacy groups, like the American Jewish Committee (AJC), appeared to share Marcus’s desire to condemn Berkeley. In an October 3rd open letter published in the Jewish Journal, the AJC joined 39 “pro-Israel” groups, including Marcus’s Brandeis Center, in demanding that Berkeley sanction the student groups if they did not rescind the bylaw. At least one AJC chapter, in Seattle, shared Marcus’s piece on its Facebook page.

But behind the scenes, the AJC was critical of Marcus’s tactics. In a confidential internal memo obtained by Jewish Currents, Sara Coodin, the AJC’s director of academic affairs, wrote that Marcus’s op-ed’s “central claim was inflammatory, resulting in a distorted picture of both this incident and the overall climate for Jewish students on campus.” Through its own meetings with Berkeley students and professors, Coodin wrote, the AJC had learned that “conversations on campus have had a less contentious tone than those taking place in the wider American Jewish community”; she highlighted a Jewish News of Northern California op-ed by Berkeley Israel studies professor Ron Hassner and history professor Ethan Katz arguing that Jewish student life and Israel studies programming at Berkeley is “thriving.” Still, Coodin said that if other university chapters introduce similar campaigns encouraging clubs to bar Zioinst speakers, the AJC plans to combat them. (Coodin and the AJC did not respond to requests for comment on the memo by press time, nor did Marcus.)

The AJC’s internal disavowal of the Marcus op-ed illustrates a strategic tension that exists even among Israel-advocacy groups that broadly share the goals of combatting Palestine activism on US campuses. While hardline groups like Marcus’s Brandeis Center condemn US colleges as bastions of Jew-hatred and seek to punish them with civil rights claims on behalf of Jewish students, organizations like the AJC tend to employ a softer touch, and are more willing to work with universities. “There’s a long-running debate” among Jewish organizations over “what strategy is best: whether you should work more quietly and work with those on campus, or whether you should use a more confrontational approach with the potential threat of lawsuits,” said Dov Waxman, director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and author of Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel. “The AJC’s advocacy model has always been quiet diplomacy.”

In August, nine Berkeley Law student groups—including the Muslim Student Association, the Queer Caucus, and Women of Berkeley Law—voted to adopt a bylaw that endorsed boycotts and sanctions of entities complicit in Israel’s apartheid system and also promised not to invite speakers who support “Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”

•  The bylaw language was written and advocated for by the law school’s SJP chapter, which, on its Instagram page, applauded the groups for “refusing to be complicit in Israeli apartheid.” In a follow-up post addressing the backlash, the group said it will “continue to invite student organizations to democratically adopt the bylaw.”

• “It’s a solidarity-building tool. That’s part of why this agitated so many people on campus and beyond,” said Liz Jackson, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, a group that defends the free speech rights of Palestine activists in the US. 

• “It takes the issue of Palestine from a niche or isolated issue, and makes it a cross-movement cause.” Jackson defended the rights of student groups to adopt such bylaws. “A political organization can lay out its political commitment,” she said. 

• In fact, Jackson noted, it’s a similar move to one made by Hillel International, which has specific policies that prevent the organization’s campus chapters from hosting anti-Zionist speakers. 

• “Students have a right, if they are part of an organization, to not invite speakers that are complicit in any way with oppression of Palestinian people,” said a Berkeley Law SJP member who asked to remain anonymous due to concerns about facing harassment. “It’s similar to student groups that have a clear policy that they will not invite white supremacists.” 

• The SJP member also noted that the bylaw places no restrictions on the views of students who join the clubs or attend their events—only invited speakers.

Indeed, even some commenters who say they disagree with barring Zionist speakers have defended the groups’ right to do so. “Ultimately, it is their right to make these decisions that I think are wrongheaded,” said Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, who served as director of the AJC’s division on antisemitism and extremism until 2014. “There are some Jewish students who are supporting the pro-Palestinian positon and say their Judaism leads them to an anti-Zionist position. Who am I to say that that’s not legitimate?”

While the action of the nine student groups received some coverage in the Jewish press, and Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky emailed students to say the group’s adoption of the bylaw was “troubling,” it otherwise received little attention until Marcus published his op-ed.

The singer Barbra Streisand and comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted the piece, Senator Ted Cruz called the actions of the student groups “disgraceful,” New York Congressman Ritchie Torres denounced the bylaw as “an example of how anti-Zionism in policy translates into antisemitism in practice,” and Fox News ran a segment interviewing Marcus. 

Dean Chemerinsky responded to Marcus’s piece in The Daily Beast, disputing Marcus’s characterization of “Jewish-free zones” but also saying that groups that excluded speakers because of their Israel views would be “subject to sanction.”

The increased scrutiny has heightened tensions on campus. The AJC memo noted that a Jewish Berkeley student who had previously served as an AJC fellow told an AJC staffer that Marcus’s op-ed had made the controversy “less of a local issue and more of a national one.” 

The student also told the AJC that the groups’ new bylaw had not extensively changed students’ experiences on campus, and that the groups in question already had little involvement with pro-Israel students or speakers. Meanwhile, the SJP member who spoke with Jewish Currents noted that, while bylaw-supporting student organizations have faced harassment and are concerned by the dean’s threat to sanction them, the visibility has also bolstered their campaign: In the past month, five more clubs have adopted the bylaw, bringing the total to 14.

Bullying

The AJC memo highlighted concerns that emphasizing alleged antisemitic threats on campuses might inadvertently threaten recent successes for campus Israel advocates. Coodin reported that staff had spoken with “two Berkeley faculty members, founders of Berkeley’s Israel Studies program” who were concerned that media coverage of Berkeley could lead to a “divestment” response from the Jewish community. Instead, the AJC said, the professors hoped the AJC would support Berkeley’s Jewish and Israel education programs. (Jewish Currents has reported that over the past two decades, some donors and advocates have seen funding Israel studies academic programs as a key tool for countering Palestine solidarity activism on campuses; today, such advocates view Berkeley’s Israel studies institute, which hosts visiting Israeli scholars and offers students fellowships to create courses and events, as a gold-standard program.) Coodin wrote in the memo that the AJC plans to move forward in ways that “resist damaging productive existing initiatives at Berkeley.”

Marcus a little thug - LawFare Title VI, Abusing Law against spirit of Law.

Marcus, for his part, has taken a far more pugnacious approach, hinting that he may file a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education if UC Berkeley doesn’t take stronger action against the student groups that passed the bylaw. The filing of civil rights complaints using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act is a strategy that Marcus himself pioneered. Such complaints—which typically claim that certain forms of Palestine solidarity activism create a hostile environment for Jewish students, and that university administrators have not taken effective action against such activism—seek to trigger federal investigations into schools’ compliance with Title VI, which prohibits federal funding of universities that discriminate against protected minority groups. 

Marcus and his allies have filed scores of complaints since 2004, when Marcus—at the time an assistant secretary with the DOE—announced new guidance proclaiming that the department’s Office of Civil Rights would “aggressively prosecute” Title VI cases involving Jewish students, as well as those involving Arabs and Muslims, among others. Marcus’s strategy was bolstered in 2019, when, while he once again worked in the DOE as an assistant secretary for civil rights, President Donald Trump issued an executive order encouraging federal agencies to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition—which classifies some types of anti-Zionist speech as antisemitic—as a guide for adjudicating Title VI complaints. (The order remains in place.)

The strategy has a mixed record: While it has not triggered any federal funding cutoffs, the civil rights lawsuits attract widespread media attention regardless of their merit, and have also resulted in settlements with universities that have agreed to clarify anti-discrimination policies and conduct outreach and training on antisemitism to students and faculty. But the strategy has been controversial among mainstream Jewish groups. 

• In 2010, the AJC joined a wide swath of Jewish organizations in writing to then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan, requesting that he issue new guidelines to again affirm Title VI protections for Jewish college students. But in April 2011, Stern, who was then the AJC’s director on antisemitism and extremism, issued a joint statement with the president of the American Association of University Professors saying that some Jewish groups were abusing Title VI “to silence anti-Israel discourse and speakers,” an approach that is both “unwarranted” and “dangerous.” 

• The AJC statement drew criticism from hardline groups like the Zionist Organization of America, which said the AJC was “minimizing the problems” faced by Jewish students. Four months later, The Forward reported that AJC Executive Director David Harris had written an email apologizing to a Stern critic for releasing the statement, saying it was “ill-advised.” 

• Marcus wrote a Forward op-ed applauding Harris for repudiating the statement. Today, the AJC no longer publicly criticizes Title VI civil rights complaints: A 2018 AJC statement urging the Senate to confirm Marcus to his Trump administration DOE post says the group has long “maintained that expressions and actions related to criticism of Israel can create a hostile environment actionable under Title VI.” But Title VI advocacy is not a central plank of the group’s strategy.

Even if Marcus and the AJC differ on the correct strategy to combat Palestinian rights activism on campus, they agree on the goal of countering SJP efforts. The AJC’s memo said the group planned on devising “ways to strategically combat ‘copycat’ SJP initiatives elsewhere” and that it hoped to employ “intelligent strategy *and* strategic partnerships with existing faculty, administrators, and students on campus” to oppose such bylaw campaigns. “What is at the core of this is that Palestinians advocating for their rights—the right to liberation—and Palestinians being actively and publicly Palestinian is taken as a direct threat to Jewish identity,” said Sarah Anne Minkin, director of programs & partnerships at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. “The AJC and the Brandeis Center are falling on the same side of that.”

Liz Jackson of Palestine Legal said that each strategy poses a distinct challenge to Palestinian rights advocates. “The public strategy spreads disinformation through headlines, and retweets from Barbra Streisand,” she said. “The backchannel maneuvering gets through to university administrators to twist the facts and to erase the context, which is Palestinian students’ concern about their families’ basic freedoms.”

In Internal Memo, American Jewish Committee Blasts Op-Ed on “Jewish-Free Zones” at Berkeley Law

➤Return to Top of Page

Berkeley Develops Jewish-Free Zones-Jewish Journal

After we published this op-ed by Kenneth Marcus, Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley School of Law, sent us a response. You can read it below, followed by a response from Marcus.

September 28, 2022  LINK to article

If it wasn’t so frightening, one might be able to recognize the irony in the sight of campus progressives trying so hard to signal progressive virtue that they fall victim to a deeper moral shame.

Nine different law student groups at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law, my own alma mater, have begun this new academic year by amending bylaws to ensure that they will never invite any speakers that support Israel or Zionism. And these are not groups that represent only a small percentage of the student population. They include Women of Berkeley Law, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Law Students of African Descent and the Queer Caucus. Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a progressive Zionist, has observed that he himself would be banned under this standard, as would 90% of his Jewish students.

It is now a century since Jewish-free zones first spread to the San Francisco Bay Area (“No Dogs. No Jews”). Nevertheless, this move seems frightening and unexpected, like a bang on the door in the night.

Berkeley law students are not the first to exclude Zionists. At the State University of New York at New Paltz, activists drove two sexual assault victims out of a survivor group for being Zionists. At the University of Southern California, they drove Jewish student government vice president Rose Ritch out of office, threatening to “impeach [her] Zionist ass.” At Tufts, they tried to oust student judiciary committee member Max Price from the student government judiciary committee because of his support for Israel.

These exclusions reflect the changing face of campus antisemitism. The highest profile incidents are no longer just about toxic speech, which poisons the campus environment.

Now anti-Zionist groups target Jewish Americans directly.

Anti-Zionism is flatly antisemitic. Using “Zionist” as a euphemism for Jew is nothing more than a confidence trick. Like other forms of Judeophobia, it is an ideology of hate, treating Israel as the “collective Jew” and smearing the Jewish state with defamations similar to those used for centuries to vilify individual Jews. This ideology establishes a conspiratorial worldview, sometimes including replacement theory, which has occasionally erupted in violence, including mass-shooting, in recent months. Moreover, Zionism is an integral aspect of the identity of many Jews. Its derogation is analogous, in this way, to other forms of hate and bigotry.

Some commentators defend these exclusions on speech grounds, arguing that “groups also have a right to be selective, to set their own rules for membership.” They are wrong about this. As Dean Chemerinsky explains, the free speech arguments run in the other direction: Berkeley’s anti-Zionist bylaws limit the free speech of Zionist students.

Discriminatory conduct, including anti-Zionist exclusions, is not protected as free speech. While hate speech is often constitutionally protected, such conduct may violate a host of civil rights laws, such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is not always the case that student groups have the right to exclude members in ways that reflect hate and bigotry. In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of another Bay Area University of California law school, Hastings College of the Law, to require student groups to accept all students regardless of status or beliefs. Specifically, the Court blessed Hastings’ decision to require Christian groups to accept gay members.

Discriminatory conduct, including anti-Zionist exclusions, is not protected as free speech.

Putting legal precedents aside, major universities generally require student groups to accept “all comers,” regardless of “status of beliefs.” They also adopt rules, aligned with federal and state law, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of various classifications such as race, ethnicity, heritage or religion. Those who adopt such rules may not exclude Jews from these protections.

The real issue here is discrimination, not speech. By adopting anti-Jewish bylaw provisions, these groups are restricting their successors from cooperating with pro-Israel speakers and groups. In this way, the exclusionary bylaws operate like racially restrictive covenants, precluding minority participation into perpetuity.

Universities should not have to be legally compelled to do what is obviously right. Anti-Zionist policies would still be monstrously immoral, even if they were not also unlawful. The students should be ashamed of themselves. As should grownups who stand quietly by or mutter meekly about free speech as university spaces go as the Nazis’ infamous call, judenfrei. Jewish-free.

Response from Dean Chemerinsky:

Kenneth L. Marcus’ article, “Berkeley Develops Jewish-Free Zones,” paints a misleading picture of what happened at Berkeley Law.  There is no “Jewish-Free Zone” at Berkeley Law or on the Berkeley campus.  Indeed, as Mr. Marcus advocates, and as I explained in a recent message to the Law School community:  “The Law School has an “all-comers” policy, which means that every student group must allow any student to join and all student organized events must be open to all students.”  I know of no instance in which this has been violated or there has been any discrimination against Jews.  I have been in regular contact with our Jewish students about this.

Mr. Marcus points out and identifies some student groups that adopted a statement drafted by Law Students for Justice In Palestine condemning Israel.  But what he does not mention is that only a handful of student groups out of over 100 at Berkeley Law did this.  He also does not mention that in a letter to the leaders of student groups I expressed exactly his message:  excluding speakers on the basis of their viewpoint is inconsistent with our commitment to free speech and condemning the existence of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism.

Finally, it is important to recognize that law student groups have free speech rights, including to express messages that I and others might find offensive.

Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley School of Law

Kenneth L. Marcus Responds:

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a distinguished constitutional law scholar, responds that we should be less concerned about the formal and official exclusion of Zionists from appearing as speakers before nine Berkeley law student organizations. I couldn’t disagree more.  And based on the overwhelming support my article has received, including much international attention, it appears others vehemently disagree as well.

Chemerinsky defends Berkeley Law, my alma mater, on the ground that other Berkeley law student groups have not amended their bylaws to exclude Zionist speakers. This in and of itself is a highly concerning argument. Would it be okay for only 5% or 10% of the campus to be segregated? What percentage of the Berkeley campus should be open to all? Shouldn’t it be 100%? And what is the right number of doors that should be closed to students of any race or ethnicity: isn’t it zero?

Chemerinsky misses the point when he insists that all clubs admit Jewish students as members. No one denies this. Nevertheless, an unmistakable signal is sent to those same students when they are told that they would be barred from appearing as invited speakers. This sends a clear signal: Jews are not welcome, unless they deny their support for Israel which, for many, is an integral element of Jewish identity.

In addition, Chemerinsky’s free speech message misses the point. Excluding Zionists is not like excluding Republicans and environmentalists. It is not just viewpoint discrimination. If a Democratic club amended their bylaws to prohibit Republican speakers from appearing before them, we could accept their right to do so. We might regret that they are restricting the possibility of dialogue. We might prefer the approach of those law student groups that seek balanced presentations, in order to advance civil dialogue and promote learning. But we wouldn’t consider this to be a civil rights issue.

When persons are excluded on the basis of their ethnic or ancestral identity, however, we must respond differently. It would not be acceptable for students to adopt bylaws banning Black or Chinese speakers, perhaps with an exception for Black or Chinese students who agree to criticize their communities. This would immediately be recognized as exclusionary conduct, not protected speech. And we would not accept the response that these groups permit Black or Chinese members, as long as these minorities do not wish to appear as speakers. We would recognize it as rank bigotry; and we would reject it.

While I am pleased to see that Dean Chemerinsky has written a letter, it would be better to see him take action. Discrimination should have no place at the University of California, or at any institution of higher learning. Those who care about free speech should protect it fiercely, but that does not mean invoking it where it does not apply. To do so cheapens the value of free speech, as well as providing intolerable barriers to equal opportunity. Those who want to talk about Israel should be free to do so, regardless of their perspective; they should not silence one side of the debate. And they should certainly not use this as an excuse to restrict participation of any ethnic or religious group.

Kenneth L. Marcus is founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which has represented Jewish students in the New Paltz, Tufts, and USC cases discussed above. He served as the 11th Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights.

Berkeley Develops Jewish-Free Zones

Brandeis Center files lawsuit against UC Berkeley for hostile campus environment

By Haley Cohen

November 28, 2023 jewishinsider.com

From <https://jewishinsider.com/2023/11/university-of-california-berkeley-brandeis-center-campus-anitsemitism/>

Citing claims of a “longstanding, unchecked spread of antisemitism” on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a complaint on behalf of Jewish students on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the campus is a “hotbed of anti-Jewish hostility and harassment,” Jewish Insider has learned.

The lawsuit, which names the University of California (UC) Regents, UC President Michael Drake, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and other officials as defendants, claims that since Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel, antisemitism has been exacerbated at the school — citing several on-campus incidents of intimidation, harassment and physical violence against Jewish students.

UC Berkeley Jewish students wrote in the complaint that the school does so little to protect Jewish students, it feels as if the school is condoning antisemitism. They added that officials at the university display a “general disregard” for Jewish students.

“The concerns of Jewish students are not being taken seriously and incidents that are affecting Jewish students are not being treated the same as incidents that would affect another targeted minority on campus,” Hannah Schlacter, an MBA student at the school, told JI. 

The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by JI, details a pro-Palestinian rally following Oct. 7 in which a Jewish undergraduate who was draped in an Israeli flag was attacked by two protesters who struck him in the head with a metal water bottle. 

It further cites that Jewish students and Jewish faculty are receiving hate mail calling for their gassing and murder, and claims that many Jewish students report feeling afraid to go to class. Pro-Palestinian protesters, the suit continues, disrupted a prayer gathering by Jewish students and blocked the main entrance to campus, and a faculty member went on an 18-minute anti-Israel rant in front of roughly 1,000 freshmen in his lecture class. 

“Frankly, I’m not sure why a Jewish student would come to [Berkeley] law school,” UCB professor Steven Davidoff Solomon, who teaches an undergraduate class on antisemitism in the law, told JI. “There’s a group of students who feel free to say the nastiest slurs as long as they substitute Zionist for Jew and they repeatedly do that while the administration refuses to take steps to condemn it, to conduct training, to take measures they would take if it was discrimination against other minorities, and it’s disappointing,” he said, calling the lawsuit a “last resort.” 

UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky acknowledged rising antisemitism at the school in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.” He noted that, “[t]wo weeks ago, at a town hall, a student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school would be to ‘get rid of the Zionists.’” He added he had “heard several times that I have been called ‘part of a Zionist conspiracy,’ which echoes antisemitic tropes that have been expressed for centuries.”

Schlacter, who testified about antisemitism on campus to the University of California Board of Regents earlier this month, said, “When we look at the policy in place, it appears the policy is not being enforced for issues affecting Jewish students. When it isn’t enforced for our situation but is for other situations, that to me is discrimination.” 

“Moreover, policy not being enforced sends a message that when there are hate crimes against Jewish students, that is accepted because it will be swept under the rug,” she continued. “We’ve made efforts to speak to the administration and do not feel like we are taken seriously. There’s a disconnect between the asks students are making [and] the actions the administration is taking.”  

After Schlacter and other students met with UC Regents, the board committed $7 million to combating antisemitism and Islamophobia. “Seven million dollars distributed across 10 campuses per year, I’m not sure how far that will go,” she said. “Also, throwing money at the problem is not getting to the root, which is that Jewish students are being treated differently and policies are not being enforced when there’s Jewish students involved.” 

Schlacter said she does not want to see the campus anti-Israel group, Bears for Palestine, named for the school’s mascot, shut down, as several other schools have done with chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. “Disbanding those groups is not a long-term solution,” she said. “The long-term solution is looking at culture across the UC system. Why is there hostility and how do we combat that in the culture? What programs and initiatives can we launch to have a more truly inclusive culture?” 

Schlacter said she would like to see the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office employees be trained on identifying antisemitism.  

UCB Chabad Rabbi Gil Leeds, who is also a UCB alum and has served as the campus Chabad rabbi since 2007, said the antisemitism situation is worse than it’s ever been at the school. “Jewish students assaulted at rallies is a whole new level of hostilities that we haven’t seen,” Leeds said, noting that several students involved with Chabad are from Israel. “Police are scared to get involved because they are worried about greater violence. That shows you what we’re dealing with.” 

Leeds said there has been “tremendous fear and trepidation,” particularly last month when National SJP called for a “Day of Resistance” at campuses nationwide. “Our armed guard that day came prepared with tear gas, everything he thought he would need… the company that we contacted would not agree to send us an unarmed guard, that’s the level of intensity.” 

[the law school fake controversy]

The lawsuit states that while antisemitism has increased since Oct. 7, it has long been prevalent on campus. It cites a decision last year by nine law school student organizations to amend their constitutions with a bylaw that bans any pro-Israel speaker. The numbers have now swelled to 23 groups, including academic journals that prohibit Zionists from publishing and pro-bono organizations that prevent Jewish students from receiving hands-on legal experience, training, supervision and mentorship. 

• The ban denies Jewish law students networking opportunitIes provided to others; deprives them of earning pro-bono hours for state bar requirements; curtails their avenues for developing and improving legal research, writIng, and editIng skills; and limits their choices for obtaining academic credits towards graduatIon, according to the lawsuit, which notes this is all illegal under federal law and university policies.

”The situation at Berkeley has deteriorated to the point that something really needs to be done beyond just raising awareness. We’re facing antisemitism at campuses around the country, but Berkeley is especially bad. Of all places, Berkeley had a number of warnings that they needed to address antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and yet they failed to heed them,” said Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center founder and a Berkeley Law school alum.

While the situation that was highlighted last year focused on the law school, Marcus said “it has certainly spread far beyond that and we have been getting reports throughout the university, including the undergraduate institution.” 

According to the complaint, Berkeley’s acquiescence to these discriminatory policies has helped give antisemitism free reign on campus in violation of the law. “This suit targets the longstanding, unchecked spread of antisemitism at the University of California Berkeley, which, following the October 7 Hamas attacks, has erupted in on-campus displays of hatred, harassment, and physical violence against Jews,” states the complaint. “Court interventIon is now needed to protect students and faculty and to end this anti-Semitc discrimination and harassment, which violates University policy, federal civil rights laws, and the U.S. Constitution.” 

Earlier this month, the Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel International and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP launched the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line (CALL), a free legal protection helpline for college students who have experienced antisemitism. 

“After Oct. 7 there’s been a lack of moral leadership but when you look more closely, Jewish students [at Berkeley] have been discriminated against for well over a year,” the ADL’s Central Pacific regional director, Marc Levine, told JI. “It wasn’t just demonstration in support of Hamas’ attacks that this began. Student groups already were actively banning Zionists from participating in their activities.” 

Levine, a former California State assemblymember, called on local politicians to hold the University of California accountable for the “gutless response to antisemitism on campus.”

https://jewishinsider.com/2023/11/university-of-california-berkeley-brandeis-center-campus-anitsemitism/

Exploiting Crisis

American Jewish Council Propaganda Points (on behalf of the fascist Israeli government)

https://www.ajc.org/UniversityStudentsActionPlan

https://www.ajc.org/news/how-to-respond-to-common-misconceptions-about-the-attack-on-israel

https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-ceo-ted-deutch-debunks-the-four-big-lies-spread-by-hamas-supporters

University Presidents: Act Against Antisemitism

LINK

In the wake of Hamas’ murderous rampage against Israeli civilians on October 7, we’ve seen a stark increase in antisemitic incidents on U.S. college campuses.  

Jewish and pro-Israel students have been intimidated, targeted, and even assaulted at their schools. Many are left feeling so vulnerable they are now afraid to come to campus and attend classes.  

University and college administrators must act now.

Add your name, and join American Jewish Committee (AJC), the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people, in calling on university leaders to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism and take additional concrete action steps that protect Jews on campus.

AJC Student Guide - Confronting Campus Antisemitism: An Action Plan for University Students

A Toolkit for University Students

Link

American Jewish Committee (AJC), the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people, understands that college students today are facing an unprecedented environment, with the growing threat of antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric and real threats to student safety and well-being. At the same time, many students are looking for opportunities to express their values, engage in constructive dialogue, and come together with like-minded peers. Therefore, AJC has created this concise action plan with steps to support students in their efforts to improve their campus’ atmosphere and ensure their own safety. 

University Presidents: Act Against Antisemitism

Encourage university presidents to take proactive steps against antisemitism on campus.

This action plan closely follows the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. That strategy charts a broad and ambitious series of action steps spanning sectors and communities, in response to the threat to the integrity of our shared institutions, including higher education, posed by antisemitism. AJC experts are available to work in partnership with students and campus organizations to help build an atmosphere more resilient against rising Jew-hatred. We look forward to working with you. For more information about anything in this action plan, or to set up a meeting, please be in touch with AJC Campus Affairs. AJC has also created An Action Plan for Heads of Independent Schools.

What students can do right now

• Prioritize your own safety. The October 2023 war between Israel and Hamas has resulted in anti-Israel campus protests escalating in intensity and scope, and threats to Jewish student safety have risen dramatically at many schools. Students should take extra precautions to ensure their own safety and take recommendations from the university and campus organizations like Hillel and Chabad seriously. This includes not engaging directly with protesters. 

• Encourage your university to address safety. It is the university’s responsibility to respond to the increase of threats to the Jewish community on campus and take action so that Jewish students, faculty, and staff are safe and feel safe on campus, and Jewish programming and facilities are protected. Inquire about the security measures your school is taking and advocate for additional steps to enhance campus safety

• Report all antisemitic activity. Hate speech and other forms of antisemitism cannot be addressed if it is not reported. Be sure to report any and all antisemitic activity on campus, both to the university and local authorities so they can be properly addressed. Professionals on campus from Hillel and Chabad can assist you and can often ensure anonymity.

• Report students who violate university codes of conduct. Anti-Israel campus protests have become increasingly unruly and, in some cases, violent since the October 7 attacks. Message boards and social media are being weaponized to threaten and intimidate Jewish students. Threatening behavior, property destruction, and disorderly or antagonizing conduct, among other actions, constitute breaches of university codes of conducts and should be reported immediately. Make sure you understand how to report bias crimes and other violations of your school’s code of conduct and encourage friends and peers to report all violations and bias incidents.

• Report faculty who create hostile environments. Faculty must adhere to professional standards and should not create a hostile environment for students based on their personal views. If a professor is making you feel unwelcome, providing misinformation in class, engaging in hate speech, or offering advantages to those with whom they agree, report the professor to the department chair and Academic Affairs offices to ensure that the proper disciplinary measures are enforced. 

• Educate yourself about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Join educational events or workshops on Israel, its history, and the various narratives involved. Avoid relying solely on social media or biased sources. Dive deeper with books, podcasts, and videos from respected organizations you trust. The AJC Campus Library offers several excellent resources from which you can learn and stay informed. 

• Build a community with your peers both on and off campus. Work with AJC and campus organizations like Hillel and Chabad to engage with a diverse group of Jewish students on and off campus. Make an effort to attend a local Shabbat dinner, join events celebrating Jewish life, and more. AJC is helping in organizing and sponsoring Shabbat dinners both on and off campus. Please contact us for more information and apply for leadership opportunities like AJC’s Campus Global Board, Goldman Fellowship, and Campus Track at Global Forum.

• Foster dialogue and advocate for inclusivity. Organize open forums or panel discussions where students can engage in constructive conversations about antisemitism and its impact on campus life. Collaborate with other student groups, including interfaith organizations, to promote understanding and unity. Work with the student government to pass resolutions or policies that condemn antisemitism and promote a more inclusive campus environment. Advocate for the inclusion of antisemitism awareness and education in diversity and inclusion programming at your school.

• Encourage your school’s administrators to address antisemitism in its most potent forms, including the intersection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism provides a clear framework for understanding the various manifestations of antisemitism on college campuses nationwide, including debates about Israel’s right to exist and Zionism. The IHRA definition offers contemporary and practical examples of anti-Zionist forms of antisemitism, explicitly noting that criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitic. Encourage your school to directly address the areas where anti-Zionism and antisemitism overlap, as these issues have been at the forefront of campus activism and have posed threats to Jewish student safety following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. 

• Encourage your school to convene an antisemitism task force. Task forces, comprised of Jewish students, faculty, and campus leaders, have proven to be an effective way to counter the rise of antisemitism on campus. The task force should report directly to senior university leadership, providing an actionable list of initiatives and a clear timeline for implementation. 

PROPAGANDA - Hasbara (see wiki entry below).

Google Doc Page Link -

Contents

⏩2024jan07 Comment in Hareetz - Dormus Jessop

Omer Abessera

Time will tell Sam. Like the exaggerated death toll, rapes and beheadings of babies in the Oct 7 massacre. Many killed with friendly fire by the IDF. The death numbers coming from Gaza is much higher than 25,000, those under the rubble are not counted! Wait until the Kahane government releases the number of wounded and death of IDF soldiers. Listening to hasbara rhetoric machine spokesman from the IDF will lead no where but to an Orwellian dystopian alternative universe of lies are truth and truths are lies! 

The slaughter of 109 by drone of Al Jazeera journalists, another one today proves this fact beyond a doubt! What do you think Israel is trying to hide? I thought they were the "Most Moral Army" in the world, if so. Wouldn't they like the truth to come out? Israel like Churchill and Empire put into words knows the truth is the enemy " Ahh the truth, it is so precious, it must be locked tightly away, and surrounded by lies". Hasbara in a nut shell!

• Cyber-Hacking

• Palestine-Israel Cyber report - 16 October 2023, Jeremiah Fowler

• Murdering “Bad” Press?

⏩2024jan10 Israeli army appears to change tack on strike that killed Gaza journalists

⏩2024jan07 Israeli strike kills two Palestinian journalists in Gaza, officials say

⏩2023nov18 Understanding Hasbara: Israel's propaganda machine - newarab

⏩2014aug29 'Hasbara': an exercise in the impossible -opendemocracy

⏩Mepc- Hasbara and the Control of Narrative as an Element of Strategy

The Hillel Sheep Repeat Slogans on Demand

⏩2001aug25 nyt:Jewish Collegians Prepare to Defend Israel on the Campuses

⏩2014Jul15 NYT Young Israelis Fight Hashtag Battle to Defend #IsraelUnderFire

⏩2015Jun15 NYT Israeli Government Cartoon Mocks Foreign Coverage of Gaza

Photograph your local culture, help Wikipedia and win!

Public diplomacy of Israel aka "Propaganda" or "Hasbara"

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's layout guidelines. Please help by editing the article to make improvements to the overall structure. (February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Israel uses public diplomacy to communicate directly with citizens of other countries to inform and influence them so that they support or tolerate the Israeli government's strategic objectives.

Terms and types

Different terms have been used to describe Israel's and other actors' efforts to reach audiences abroad.

Among early Zionists it was common to label communicative efforts propaganda. Theodor Herzl used the term at the 3rd Zionist Congress in 1899, where he asked fellow Zionists in the audience "to engage in propaganda".[1] At the time the term "propaganda" was considered neutral. The term is now pejorative. Propaganda is now typically used for official government statements or by critics of pro-Israeli advocacy groups to portray the communication as misleading and manipulative.

Hasbara was formally introduced to the Zionist vocabulary by Nahum Sokolow.[1] Hasbara (Hebrew: הַסְבָּרָה) has no direct English translation, but roughly means "explaining". It is a communicative strategy that "seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified".[2] As it focuses on providing explanations about one's actions, hasbara has been called a "reactive and event-driven approach".[3][4]

Today,[clarification needed] Israeli practitioners tend to label their communicative efforts "public diplomacy", not hasbara, indicating a shift in strategy. They consider a focus on "explaining" too defensive and prefer to actively determine the agenda by being less reactive and more proactive, moving to a more comprehensive, long-term strategic approach.[4][5][6][7][8]

Israeli public diplomacy encompasses different forms of communication and other forms of interaction with the public abroad. For instance, Israel engages in open and fully attributable, unidirectional mass communication that targets so far unaffiliated civil populations in other countries (a form of communication Hirschberger defines as "external communication"[4]), both via social media and traditional mass media. The Israeli government uses this type of communication especially to depict Israel positively (a communication strategy Hirschberger calls "branding").[4] The Israeli government and pro-Israeli groups also use interventive communication to counter what they see as attempts at delegitimisation of Israel, e.g., in the context of BDS. The Israeli government also engages in activities beyond communicative efforts in social media and the traditional mass media, e.g., in the form of cultural diplomacy. The communicative efforts of pro-Israeli civil society groups are partially also called "advocacy".

Sources for disseminating information

Various branches of the Israeli government as well as pro-Israeli civil society organizations engage in public diplomacy efforts:

• IDF Spokesperson's Unit: The spokesperson's unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) plays a central role in the Israeli government's public diplomacy.[9] The IDF's English-language Facebook page is one of the most-followed army social media worldwide.[9] The unit has become Israel's largest spokesperson unit, with more than 400 officers, civilians and soldiers. There is also a reserve unit of almost 1,200 soldiers and officers.[10][9] As of 2017, the unit has 15 staff members that are responsible only for the IDF's social media platforms to reach audiences abroad.[11] As of 2015, the IDF is active on 30 different social media platforms.[11][12]

• Spokesperson's Unit of COGAT: The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the IDF unit responsible for coordination and liaison with the Palestinian Authority,[13] has a spokesperson's unit of its own as well as its own social media channels in English and Arabic.[14]

• Prime Minister's Office (PMO): Within the Israel Prime Minister's Office, the Government Press Office (GPO), the Public Diplomacy Directorate and the National Information Directorate are involved in public diplomacy efforts.[15] The National Information Directorate is in charge of coordinating "the public diplomacy activities of various governmental bodies in foreign and security affairs, and on socioeconomic issues" (Israel PMO s.a.[further explanation needed]).[16][15] The Public Diplomacy Directorate is responsible for communicating the Prime Minister's and the government's policies and decisions.[15][16] The directorate is headed by the Prime Minister's Media Advisor.[15][16]

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA): The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs also has a Public Diplomacy Directorate. "The directorate consists of the Media and Public Affairs Division, the Division for Cultural Affairs and Scientific Cooperation and the Bureau for Religious Affairs and Relations with the Jewish Diaspora. The Media and Public Affairs Division comprises one department in charge of 'branding', a department in charge of collecting information, producing visual media content such as videos and drafting policy papers for briefing Israeli missions all around the world, as well as the spokesperson’s bureau, which is in charge of the relationship with the press. Furthermore, the division also has an academic department and a small department dealing with issues of civil society affairs, especially the battle against BDS. Finally, the ministry has also a Digital Diplomacy Department, which is in charge of all digital channels of the ministry".[15][attribution needed]

• Pro-Israeli civil society organizations: Various civil society organizations and initiatives from Israel and abroad support the Israeli public diplomacy efforts.[17] Prominent examples are StandWithUs, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the Israel on Campus Coalition, the AMCHA Initiative and "The David Project".[18]

• Masbirim Israel: In 2010, the Israeli Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs launched the PR campaign "Masbirim Israel". The campaign intended to encourage Israeli citizens to contribute to improving Israel's image by talking with their international contacts about the country.[19]

From Wikipedia

Raskin Floor Remarks on H. Res. 845

 November7, 2023

Washington, DC - Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) today gave the following remarks on the House Floor while managing the debate of House Resolution 845, a resolution to censure Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI-12). Raskin urged the House to respect and protect the right to political free speech granted under the First Amendment and the Speech or Debate Clause by not using the House disciplinary process to punish Members’ political speech; warned of the chilling effects that politicizing and weaponizing the House’s censure mechanism would have on the speech of all Members; and noted that, in the history of the House of Representatives, the overwhelming number of censures have been for conduct, like taking bribes, embezzling funds, assaulting other Members, engaging in mail fraud, and having sex with pages, and that the only kinds of speech that have ever been punished have been true threats of violence, fighting words on the floor towards other Members, and incitement to insurrection and secession, none of which are protected by the Constitution and none of which are implicated here.  

What about the 11 Members of this body who lost the 405-11 vote in 2019 recognizing that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I was a genocide?

Does their denial of the genocidal character of the deaths of more than one million Armenians qualify them for institutional punishment? Can we convert differing interpretations of history into the basis for legislative punishment?  

Perhaps you say that political dissent should be uniquely punishable when it comes to foreign policy. But the First Amendment does not distinguish between speech having domestic policy or foreign policy content.  All of it is protected. If not, every Member of this body who has voted against aid to Ukraine and praises Vladimir Putin for his “genius” and “savvy,” as former president Donald Trump did, or says “Putin is not our enemy,” as several have, could be censured for it.

There were 50 Members who voted against our entrance into World War I. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong, but surely, they shouldn’t be censured for it.

The Congresswoman from California, Ms. Lee, was the only Member for the House to vote against the open-ended authorization of use of force following 9/11, which led to our longest war in Afghanistan. Although she was vilified at the time for her vote, in the wake of 20 years of war in Afghanistan her vote today is seen as visionary by many people.  Should she have been arraigned on the floor of the House of Representatives and censured for her unorthodox ideas about the dangers of war?  

This Resolution not only degrades our Constitution but it cheapens the meaning of discipline in this body for people who actually commit wrongful actions, like bribery, fraud, violent assault and so on.

When people are punished for their political ideas and expression, they will wear it as a badge of honor; they will fundraise on it, as several have done in the past, raising millions of dollars from an outraged public; and they will join the public in mocking the speech censors of Congress.

A secure constitutional Republic which actively protects the freedom of dissenting speech to allow for serious debate shows its strength—not its weakness.  As Thomas Jefferson put it, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Now is a moment when we will get to see who in the House of Representatives believes in the freedom of speech, even the speech they hate, versus those who want to impose a political straitjacket of cancel culture on America and Congress. 

###

Permalink: https://raskin.house.gov/2023/11/raskin-floor-remarks-on-h-res-845

November7, 2023

Washington, DC - Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) today gave the following remarks on the House Floor while managing the debate of House Resolution 845, a resolution to censure Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI-12). Raskin urged the House to respect and protect the right to political free speech granted under the First Amendment and the Speech or Debate Clause by not using the House disciplinary process to punish Members’ political speech; warned of the chilling effects that politicizing and weaponizing the House’s censure mechanism would have on the speech of all Members; and noted that, in the history of the House of Representatives, the overwhelming number of censures have been for conduct, like taking bribes, embezzling funds, assaulting other Members, engaging in mail fraud, and having sex with pages, and that the only kinds of speech that have ever been punished have been true threats of violence, fighting words on the floor towards other Members, and incitement to insurrection and secession, none of which are protected by the Constitution and none of which are implicated here.  

Congressman Raskin: I have images of three politicians displayed in my office: Abraham Lincoln; Robert F. Kennedy; and Samuel F. Bellman who was the first Jewish person ever elected to the Minnesota legislature, a great champion of the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, and human rights, and of the creation of Israel, the Jewish Democratic State, in 1948. [https://www.lrl.mn.gov/legdb/articles/11213STObit.pdf - bellman obit]

And he was my grandfather.

He was elected at a time of terrible antisemitism, not unlike today. Minneapolis was called “the antisemitism capital of America” and my Grandpa Sam told me a story I’ll never forget.

The DFL and Republican Caucuses both had their annual retreats at a country club that did not allow Jews or blacks to enter. My grandfather complained privately with the Speaker that he would not be able to go, and the Speaker apologized but said this was the tradition.

So my grandfather, the only Jewish person in the Chamber, spoke on the floor about antisemitism and he was booed and jeered at and Members left as he tried to speak.

When the Minority Leader asked me to manage our time today, I thought about my grandfather and how he must have felt on that day.

• So I’m here not in spite of the fact that I am a Jewish American who supports the Constitution and the Jewish Democratic State and hates the antisemitic tyrants and terrorists of the world, from Vladimir Putin in Russia and Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia to Hezbollah and Hamas; I am here because of these things and because of everything I believe in and stand for.

• At this moment when democracy is under siege all over the world, America must stand tall for the Constitution. But this Resolution is about one thing and one thing only: the punishment of speech.

• So we have the chance to show the world what the American Constitution means and how we hold fast to our core principles even when we are drawn away from them by our passions and our righteous anger.

The Constitution is “the Supreme Law of the land,” and the very heart of it is in our First Amendment, which protects every citizen’s freedom of speech and says Congress shall make no law abridging it.

• The freedom to speak includes the freedom to disagree, the right to think radically differently from the majority about important things, or else it is no freedom at all. It’s easy to defend free speech for people when you agree with them; the test for each Member is whether you can defend free speech for people when you most fundamentally and vehemently disagree with them.

The First Amendment is like an apple. Everybody wants to take just one bite out of it. Someone wants to punish left-wing speech someone right-wing speech, someone sexist speech, someone radical feminist speech, homophobic speech or pro-LGBTQ speech, anti-war speech, pro-war speech, religious speech, sacrilegious speech and everybody wants a bite of the apple, but then at the end of the day, once everyone has had his or her bite, the whole apple is gone.

There’s nothing left.  If you want to save the apple, you have to learn to tolerate not just the speech you love the most, which is easy, but the speech you hate the most. 

Like the First Amendment, the Speech or Debate Clause also embodies this central value in the legislative process. It states that Members of Congress “shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” (emphasis added)

The Speech and Debate Clauses in the thirteen original colonies were the basis for the freedom of speech later established for all citizens; indeed, of the original 13, only Pennsylvania’s Constitution protected “freedom of speech” for anyone but legislators. In other words, we had better take freedom of speech seriously for legislators because if we don’t protect our own free speech, how can we protect freedom of speech for the people we represent? 

In the two-and-a-half century history of our Chamber, Members have been overwhelmingly censured for their actions, not for their speech. Actions like:

• Participating in the violent assault against Charles Sumner. Assaulting Representative Josiah Grinnell of Iowa with a cane. Selling military academy appointments. Taking bribes.

• Selling $33 million of stock in the Credit Mobilier scandal to fellow Members at an undervalued price to bribe them.

• Engaging in mail fraud and payroll fraud.

• Improper use of campaign funds and Congressional funds.

• Engaging in sexual misconduct with a House page.

Do you see the difference? Not what they said, what they did.

I can find only three categories of cases where speech is the sum and substance of the charge and they are all exceptions that have been ratified by the Supreme Court.

• One is where the speech makes violent threats against other Members of the body.  As the Supreme Court found as recently as April, in Counterman v. Colorado, “true threats” of violence are never protected under the First Amendment.  

• A second category is essentially fighting words, the use of unparliamentary or aggressively insulting language on the House floor that constitutes a direct affront to another Member.

• The Supreme Court has also said fighting words are not protected.

• The final is speech advocating or promoting treason, Confederate secession or insurrection, all of which arguably lie outside of the First Amendment because of numerous provisions opposing and condemning insurrection.

• That’s it: violent threats against another Member, fighting words on the floor, speech inciting insurrection or secession.

• But the Resolution offered against the gentlewoman from Michigan is all about censuring her for her unpopular political speech and literally nothing else. No actions, no conduct is being punished.

The entire censure motion is about her speech and how much we hate it and how wrong we think it is. All of that is fine for all of us to express individually—in newspapers and the media, on the floor and in committee, in social media and in conversation—and I have told Ms. Tlaib that the phrase “from the river to the sea” is abhorrent to me and cannot be salvaged politically, at least to my taste, even with her published explanation of what she means by it, which is certainly very different from the way Hamas uses it.

But, in any event, I would never think of disciplining her or punishing her because we disagree about that and have a dramatic difference in our political views.

But the Resolution proposes to condemn her for quoting this objectionable phrase in her video, which is indisputably protected speech under the First Amendment. Unlike the gentleman from New York, Mr. Santos, whose proposed expulsion by Members of the Majority was rejected by a commanding bipartisan majority because he has not yet been convicted of either the criminal or ethics charges against him, Ms. Tlaib, has been criminally charged with nothing and has been civilly sued for nothing and has no ethics charges outstanding before the Ethics Committee. 

It’s easy to see why. She can’t face criminal punishment or civil liability for her alleged speech offenses because in the United States of America we don’t punish people for their political ideas, no matter how wrong and offensive other people think they are. Congresswoman Tlaib won reelection with 71% of the vote in Michigan’s 12th district and if anyone is going to punish her for her political ideas or manner of expression, it must be the people of her own district, who sent her here to represent them.

Mr. Speaker, the disciplinary process should never be used to punish the political speech or viewpoints of a Member of this Chamber just because the majority disagrees. If you disagree, why don’t you get up and explain why your ideas are better than hers or where you think she has gone wrong in her values or analysis or explanation? Don’t punish her for not thinking the way you do.

The punishment of dissenting political viewpoints will mean that Members will be censured just for being in the minority rather than actually doing something wrong. And that will come to stifle significant dialogue and haunt all of us in our work.

For example, there’s another censure motion being proposed now against the Representative from Florida who compared “Palestinian civilians” to “Nazi civilians” and stated that “there are very few innocent Palestinian citizens.” 

The Resolution stated that his outrageous conflation of innocent Palestinian civilians with Hamas terrorists is “false, misleading, dehumanizing, dangerous and unbecoming of a Member of Congress.” 

This motion is the mirror image of the complaint against the Gentlewoman from Michigan, although in this case, significantly, the alleged offense consisted of statements that the Member himself made in his own words in the House.

But, in any event, both Members are being charged with what are inescapably speech offenses and thought crimes. And yet the case against the Representative from Florida has been held while we have moved to a vote against Ms. Tlaib. Why is that?

Solely because the Gentleman’s party is in the majority. But a disciplinary process which operates on the basis of raw partisan voting power has no integrity or legitimacy in the eyes of the public.      

The minute we start punishing the content or viewpoint of Members’ political speech, the process inescapably loses its legitimacy and becomes just a partisan weapon.

For example, the Speaker of the House has taken positions in the past arguing that sex between consenting gay adults should be a crime, that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas and wrong to give gay people the right to marry in Obergefell, a right he said that is “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest Republic.” He even supported the idea that gay people could be cured of their malady with so-called “conversion therapy,” which has been discredited by science.

• Now, the vast majority of Americans reject these positions as extreme in opinion polls and believe that all citizens have the freedom to pursue their own love lives and to marry someone they love. If the House majority changes hands, should we censure the former Speaker for his constitutional apostasy and thought crimes against the rights of millions of Americans?

• I sure hope not, because the Gentleman from Louisiana is absolutely entitled to his extreme political and religious views no matter how outside the constitutional and American mainstream they are and no matter how much I reject them. Under the First Amendment, extremism is in the eye of the beholder. But how will we resist the temptation to punish the former Speaker in the future if we set a precedent today that Members can be censured and canceled simply for their political heresies in the eyes of the majority?

• If we say that the gentlelady can be punished because her views of history are wrong, can we then punish Members of this body who refused to vote to take down in our halls statues of Members of Congress from the 19th century who joined the Confederacy and committed treason against the Union, people like John Breckenridge, a former Vice President and U.S. Senator who was expelled from the Senate after he defected to the Confederacy?

• Should we use the disciplinary process to impose historical orthodoxy? If anything, there’s a better case for punishing the 120 Members of the House who voted against taking down statues of Confederate traitors because multiple provisions of the Constitution explicitly forbid and punish participation in insurrection. Do Members who voted that way want to risk being censured by establishing that divergent minority views on American history are a legitimate matter of institutional discipline?  

• What about Members who defended conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and stated that the Sandy Hook and Parkland mass murders of dozens of schoolchildren were “staged” by Hollywood to generate support for gun safety measures?

• That’s not even a matter of opinion but adjudicated positive fact, and still the Constitution protects your right to be wrong about facts unless you’re deliberately defrauding or cheating someone out of something, like their money or campaign contributions. 

• What about all of those Members, including the Chair of the Judiciary Committee, who follow Donald Trump in advancing the Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election? Should we convert the 60 federal and state court decisions rejecting claims of election fraud and corruption, decisions that the Supreme Court never changed in any way, into a mass disciplinary offensive? Should we convert indisputable historical truth into discipline and punishment of dissenters and heretics?  

What about the 11 Members of this body who lost the 405-11 vote in 2019 recognizing that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I was a genocide?

Does their denial of the genocidal character of the deaths of more than one million Armenians qualify them for institutional punishment? Can we convert differing interpretations of history into the basis for legislative punishment?  

Perhaps you say that political dissent should be uniquely punishable when it comes to foreign policy. But the First Amendment does not distinguish between speech having domestic policy or foreign policy content.  All of it is protected. If not, every Member of this body who has voted against aid to Ukraine and praises Vladimir Putin for his “genius” and “savvy,” as former president Donald Trump did, or says “Putin is not our enemy,” as several have, could be censured for it.

There were 50 Members who voted against our entrance into World War I. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong, but surely, they shouldn’t be censured for it.

The Congresswoman from California, Ms. Lee, was the only Member for the House to vote against the open-ended authorization of use of force following 9/11, which led to our longest war in Afghanistan. Although she was vilified at the time for her vote, in the wake of 20 years of war in Afghanistan her vote today is seen as visionary by many people.  Should she have been arraigned on the floor of the House of Representatives and censured for her unorthodox ideas about the dangers of war?  

This Resolution not only degrades our Constitution but it cheapens the meaning of discipline in this body for people who actually commit wrongful actions, like bribery, fraud, violent assault and so on.

When people are punished for their political ideas and expression, they will wear it as a badge of honor; they will fundraise on it, as several have done in the past, raising millions of dollars from an outraged public; and they will join the public in mocking the speech censors of Congress.

A secure constitutional Republic which actively protects the freedom of dissenting speech to allow for serious debate shows its strength—not its weakness.  As Thomas Jefferson put it, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Now is a moment when we will get to see who in the House of Representatives believes in the freedom of speech, even the speech they hate, versus those who want to impose a political straitjacket of cancel culture on America and Congress. 

###

Permalink: https://raskin.house.gov/2023/11/raskin-floor-remarks-on-h-res-845

From <https://raskin.house.gov/2023/11/raskin-floor-remarks-on-h-res-845>

Gaza solidarity protests continue at college campuses across the nation — as does the police crackdown. This comes as more than 50 chapters of the American Association of University Professors have issued a statement condemning the violent arrests by police at campus protests. At Dartmouth College last week, police body-slammed professor and former chair of Jewish studies Annelise Orleck to the ground as she tried to protect her students. She was charged with criminal trespass and temporarily banned from portions of Dartmouth’s campus. She joins us to describe her ordeal and respond to claims conflating the protests’ anti-Zionist message with antisemitism. “People have to be able to talk about Palestine without being attacked by police,” says Orleck, who commends the students leading protests around the country. “Their bravery is tremendous and is inspiring. And they really feel like this is the moral issue of their time, that there’s a genocide going on and that they can’t ignore it.”

US universities search for ways to defuse campus tensions over Gaza

Jack, Andrew   FT.com  London (Nov 28, 2023).

The heads of Stanford and Berkeley had no time to chat about American football while they watched the high stakes “Big Game” between their two rival university teams together this month. They were too busy discussing the reverberations on their campuses from the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

“Whenever I meet another chancellor, this is what we talk about,” says Carol Christ, the top official at Berkeley. Along with higher education leaders across the US, she has been exploring ways to balance freedom of speech with student safety, education and cultivating tolerance of different viewpoints.

The political tensions between students, staff and faculty on US campuses are at a pitch not seen since the Vietnam war. They have been ramped up by donors, alumni, recruiters and politicians and amplified on social media.

“Just because you have the right to say [something] doesn’t mean it’s right to say it,” Christ says. “We have both pro-Israel Jewish and Palestine advocates, each of which are fiercely convinced they are right and the others are wrong. They feel anguished, angry and deeply convinced of their rightness.”

The intense polarisation on campus reflects wider sentiment on the war in the US. Polls show Americans are more concerned about the conflict than people in other leading industrial nations. Younger people are also more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause with growing support for a ceasefire by Israel.

At Berkeley recently, activists draped a long banner with the Palestinian flag from its landmark Sather Tower in an unauthorised protest. At Stanford, police are investigating a hit and run incident against a Muslim student. Three more were shot and wounded near the University of Vermont in Burlington last weekend, according to police, who are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

Columbia University joined Brandeis and the state of Florida in banning pro-Palestinian student groups, while New York University has been sued for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.

Across the country, the Council on American-Islamic Relations flagged nearly 1,300 complaints about Islamophobia in the month since Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on October 7, including several at Harvard focused on “doxxing” or publicly identifying allegedly pro-Palestinian students. Last week it sued the state of Florida for banning campus groups.

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League has tracked nearly 1,000 antisemitic incidents — 157 on campuses alone — with a particular concentration in north eastern US states, most notably at the universities of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Columbia.

All three of these institutions are high-profile, have strong links to influential donors, a significant number of Jewish students and, particularly in Columbia’s case, a deep history of Palestinian scholarship and activism. Their presidents are also all recently appointed and have been thrown into a fierce debate with little time to build connections.

“It matters a lot how long a president has been in position — they have relationships and understand different viewpoints,” says Christ, who began her role at Berkeley six years ago.

She also points out that as a public university, it has a strong obligation to protect free speech and more limited powers than her private rivals, such as Columbia and Brandeis, to limit demonstrations or ban student organisations.

The east coast universities in the spotlight are all located in cities with large student bodies that are fragmented and can be infiltrated by non-university demonstrators. They offer limited opportunities for those from different backgrounds to live together and learn to get on — a situation exacerbated by their isolation during the pandemic.

One response to the current crisis has been to start to create committees to build tighter links among students and tackle sensitive issues: both Columbia and New York University announced groups on antisemitism recently, for example. Berkeley established advisory committees for Jewish and Muslim students a decade ago.

A second initiative has been to foster more tolerance outside the classroom by encouraging diverse groups to live together and learn to get along. A senior academic at Yale says its approach of placing undergraduates in diverse residential colleges from the start of their studies where they sleep and eat in smaller groups has “really helped in defusing tensions”.

By contrast, Harvard’s equivalent “house” system begins only in the second year of study, by which time students have often already formed their own social groups. But Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education at Harvard, says the university has begun appointing a larger number of residential “proctors” to support students in their first year.

She says students are shocked when faced with controversial ideas at university because they increasingly come from schools where “sensitive topics are off-limits and there is very little preparation in how to grapple with challenges like gender, race or sexuality”.

Harvard is also in discussions with PEN America, the freedom of speech group, to offer training on campus around academic freedom. “We took academic freedom for granted and stopped explaining it,” she says.

A third approach concerns their role to directly inform and to “model” civilised discussion even when there is disagreement. Shira Hoffer, a student at Harvard, this month launched a text Hotline for Israel/Palestine “promoting education for peace”. A variety of experts provide questioners with additional reading on the background to the conflict.

“There is a need for information,” she says. “The more I learn, the less moral clarity there is. People should be empowered with all information that is available. Non-partisan doesn’t exist, but we are multi-partisan.”

While students express suspicion at university-hosted events, Christ at Berkeley is among the leaders who have sought to urge respect for differences of opinion. Within days of October 7, she circulated an email from Hatem Bazian, a lecturer of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Ron Hassner, professor of Israel Studies.

It read: “We are two professors on this campus who disagree, vehemently. But we have always treated one another with respect and dignity . . . Disagreement and differing points of view are an essential part of campus life, and we expect that you treat one another with the same respect and dignity that we are modelling here.”

Christ hopes that between Thanksgiving, exams, the Christmas holiday and a ceasefire, the conflicts on campuses will ease. But she stresses that despite the relative calm at Berkeley, she has “a lot of humility — tomorrow something could happen”.

Andrew Jack in New York

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023

From <https://www.proquest.com/central/printviewfile?accountid=6749>

Works Cited

Jack, Andrew. "US Universities Search for Ways to Defuse Campus Tensions Over Gaza." FT.com (2023) ProQuest. 6 Feb. 2024 .

From <https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2894317523/C6E8ABA568334E68PQ/3?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Trade%20Journals#>

chicagobusiness.com

Parent of Northwestern's student newspaper under fire over response to fake papers

By Brandon Dupré

 By Brandon Dupré

Brandon Dupré is a reporter covering labor, nonprofits, higher education and the legal industry for Crain’s Chicago Business. Prior to joining Crain’s in 2022, he covered breaking news and COVID-19 at the New York Times. He was part of the Times’ coronavirus-tracking project, an effort that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021.

Credit:Northwestern University

Northwestern's Evanston campus

February 05, 2024 02:43 PM

Students Publishing Company, the parent company of Northwestern's student newspaper The Daily Northwestern, is facing growing criticism for bringing charges against two NU students accused of producing and distributing a fake student paper that said the school was “complicit in genocide of Palestinians.”

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/education/daily-northwestern-parent-criticized-over-response-fake-papers

Northwestern roiled by criminal charges against two students who made parody copies of student paper

Syed, Zareen Buckley, Madeline

. Chicago Tribune (Online)Tribune Publishing Company, LLC. Feb 5, 2024.

Divisions over the war in Gaza, questions about race as it relates to how the law is enforced, and what free speech means on campus are part of a controversy at Northwestern University and its student paper after two Black students were charged criminally for distributing a parody of the publication.

Nearly 90 Northwestern students, professors and community members criticized the response to the incident late last week, calling it part of an effort to silence pro-Palestinian voices that disproportionately affect people of color.

The two students were accused of distributing a parody of The Daily Northwestern and the consequences have many students and faculty calling it an overstep and a “symptom of the over-policing of Black students” on campus.

The men, 20 and 22, were charged in December with theft of advertising services, a class A misdemeanor, according to Cook County court records. The records say they were released on the scene, but the charge is still pending.

The men were the subject of the letter that identified them as Northwestern students who allegedly created an imitation front page of the campus newspaper that critiqued the university’s actions in connection to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in response to last year’s Hamas terror attacks.

An attorney representing the men declined to comment. They are scheduled to appear in court again Feb. 29 in the Skokie branch court.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx also declined to respond to messages seeking comment.

“I think the approach to these two students was extremely aggressive and unnecessary,” said Mary Pattillo, professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern, who signed the letter. “This strikes me as very much in line with a country that has no other way to manage behavior other than criminalizing it.”

On Oct. 25, students on campus could find a single-page flyer that looked similar to the popular student-run newspaper with the headline “Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians” printed across its lower third.

A court filing accuses the two men of attaching “an unauthorized replica of the Daily Northwestern Newspaper” to a previously distributed edition and placing copies in the newspaper stand.

The charges say they did so “without a contractual agreement between the publisher and an advertiser.” Listed as the complainant is Stacia Campbell, general manager of Student Publishing Co.

In a Monday statement, Student Publishing, parent company of The Daily Northwestern, said it reported the fake front page to campus police, which resulted in charges filed by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

It noted that as a private entity, it does not have the ability to file or dismiss charges.

“The content of the fake front page had no bearing on this decision,” the statement read.. “This is not an issue of speech or parody. A fake newspaper distributed on its own, apart from The Daily Northwestern, would cause no concern. But tampering with the distribution of a student newspaper is impermissible conduct.”

Evgeny Stolyarov, a second-year student of Middle East and North African studies, said when he first saw copies of the parody newspaper in his biology lecture hall on Oct. 25, he thought the move was “genius.”

“I don’t think a single person who saw those thought it was the real ‘Daily Northwestern,’” Stolyarov said. “First of all, it was not called the ‘Daily Northwestern,’ but the ‘Northwestern Daily.’ The reaction wasn’t as big at the moment, and I don’t think anyone expected that it would be a Class A misdemeanor.”

Stolyarov noted that the authentic newspaper’s print cycle is Mondays and Thursdays, and the parody was distributed on a Wednesday.

“So no one was looking for the new copy and walked into this thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve been fooled!’” he said. “So to say that somehow this infringed on the rights of the journalists – who also released a statement saying that the charges should be dropped – I just think that all across the board, the arguments don’t add up.”

In an editorial posted Feb. 5, The Daily Northwestern Editorial Board said they don’t support the criminal prosecution of the students responsible for the parody paper.

“Our newspaper has always prided itself on its commitment to informing and supporting students, and we believe our publisher should play no part in perpetrating harm against the communities we aim to serve,” the editorial stated.

“Our university and community — along with the American policing and justice system as a whole — has a long history of placing people of color in harm’s way. As a publication that strives to unearth these injustices through our reporting, we remain wholeheartedly opposed to any course of action that would entwine our publication with this harmful legacy.”

Pattillo said, unfortunately, the approach taken doesn’t surprise her. The conflict has stirred controversy at elite universities across the country.

“I think campuses are always forever challenged with how to approach the energies of their students,” she said. “In this moment where we might think about other approaches like restorative justice or, on a college campus, one might think of more dialogue – instead, this escalated to the criminal legal system.”

Pattillo noted that this type of policing is what Black students organized against last year after the university announced it would use private security to remove them from campus buildings at night when Northwestern University Community Not Cops’ (NUCNC) protests to invest in Black students were met with pepper spray and arrests.

“I think given that students of color are especially at the forefront of this particular social movement, and at the forefront of many social movements, it is the students who represent groups who experience oppression who rise up and protest,” Pattillo said.

According to Pattillo, students of color facing a greater extent of the law is an issue seen on college campuses near and far.

In November, a Palestinian American student at the University of Illinois at Chicago was handcuffed and arrested in a classroom and charged with criminal defacement for marking up property with messages supporting Palestine around campus.

Though the charge was dismissed, students said the consequences were an overreach by the university.

“We’ve had so many instances where UICPD has been aggressive to Muslim students for no reason,” said Celine Taki, a Syrian American junior at UIC, who was at a January rally calling for the firing of the campus police officers who carried out the arrest. “That girl was arrested just because she wrote Free Palestine on the wall. There’s been over 130 cases of vandalism on this campus, but only that one resulted in an arrest where she was detained.”

According to the latest available UIC police records, the Palestinian American student is the only person to have been arrested for criminal defacement on campus.

“On university campuses, it is always important to remember that we’re talking about 18- to 22-year-olds, sometimes 17- to 22-year-olds – I think the most important approach is to think of the university as one large classroom and to treat all students as students and that this is their learning journey, and to approach them as learners and as teachers as well,” Pattillo added. “I do think that their activism is also instructive for their colleagues and for their faculty members and staff and administrators. That is the kind of approach that should be taken in these very, very tense and difficult moments.”

Northwestern community members who penned the North by Northwestern letter are asking others to show support by adding their names to a Change.org petition demanding the charges be dropped.

“The vast majority of the student body, whether it’s groups that are directly connected to Palestine or groups that have nothing to do with the movement, all agree that this will have a chilling effect on free speech,” said Stolyarov, who is a member of Jewish Wildcats for Ceasefire. “It’s nothing new that the university uses police brutality, especially against black students, so it was both shock and a sense that we’ve seen this before.”

Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union Illinois, said the charges feel like “a misuse of the statute” the pair was cited under.

“These are college students that were engaging in a political protest, one might even describe it as a stunt to make a political point,” Yohnka said. “No one was meaningfully harmed as a result of this.”

Yohnka noted that criminal charges could follow and potentially harm individuals for years and said the use of the statute in this instance raises concerns that criminal charges could be levied unequally based on the type of speech in question.

“This is where the prosecutorial power that is going to be used feels a little off the mark in a use of taxpayer dollars,” he said.

Copyright Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 2024

From <https://www.proquest.com/central/printviewfile?accountid=6749>

Works Cited

Syed, Zareen, and Madeline Buckley. Northwestern Roiled by Criminal Charges Against Two Students Who made Parody Copies of Student Paper. Chicago: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC, 2024. ProQuest. 6 Feb. 2024 .

From <https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2922216686/8A9367F22DBA4A39PQ/3?accountid=6749&sourcetype=Blogs,%20Podcasts,%20&%20Websites#>

Outcry Over Northwestern Students Charged for Parody Pro-Palestine Newspaper

‘OVER-POLICING’ Two students face charges for distributing a fake front page condemning Israel with the university’s official student newspaper.

Edith Olmsted

Breaking News Intern

Published Feb. 06, 2024 2:55PM EST 

From <https://www.thedailybeast.com/outcry-over-northwestern-students-charged-for-parody-pro-palestine-newspaper>

Two students at Northwestern University are facing up to a year in prison for distributing a parody front page attached to the school’s newspaper that criticized the university’s response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

The faux “Northwestern Daily” paper’s front page featured the headline “Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians,” along with invented quotes from school officials, a false report about a leaflet drop telling students who lived above a certain street to evacuate their homes, and a fake ad for a “Birthright Israel” trip with the slogan, “One man’s home is another man’s former home!”

The students face charges for theft of advertising services, a Class A misdemeanor specific to Illinois and California that was originally used to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from distributing materials in their daily papers, according to The Intercept. The charges carry a potential sentence of up to a year in prison, and a $2,500 fine.

When 300 copies of the fake paper were first distributed in October, Students Publishing Company, which owns the real Daily Northwestern, announced that it had informed the police about the incident.

“We reject and condemn this act of vandalism, and we have engaged law enforcement to investigate and find those responsible,” the Board of Directors wrote in a statement. A spokesperson for the SPC told The Intercept that the organization had pursued a criminal investigation.

On Monday, The Daily Northwestern’s editorial board published a statement objecting to the charges and the treatment of their peers.

“While the students’ alleged actions may violate Illinois law, we believe SPC’s decision to engage the criminal justice system during this investigation was unnecessary and harmful,” they wrote. They have asked the SPC to notify the Cooks County State’s Attorney’s office that it no longer wishes for the charges to be prosecuted.

The Daily Northwestern’s editorial board said that the case against the students, who are Black, is part of “a long history of placing people of color in harm’s way.”

“We hope this situation invites reflection about the impacts that people, particularly people of color, may face as a result of decisions that involve the police,” they wrote in the statement. Over 6,000 Northwestern students have signed a petition opposing the criminal charges, and the “targeted over-policing of Black students.”

The SPC’s board has denied having a political agenda in its pursuit of criminal charges. “This is not an issue of free speech or parody,” the board said in a statement on Monday. “[J]ust as you cannot take over the airwaves of a TV station or the website of a publication, you also cannot disrupt the distribution of a student newspaper.”

Edith Olmsted

Breaking News Intern

@edieocreedith.olmsted@thedailybeast.com

From <https://www.thedailybeast.com/outcry-over-northwestern-students-charged-for-parody-pro-palestine-newspaper>

Criminal Charges for Pro-Palestine College Newspaper Parody

Publishers of the school newspaper notified police. Now the students, charged under an obscure anti-KKK law, face a year in jail.

Connor Echols

February 5 2024,

Students at Northwestern University, in the Chicago suburbs, woke up on October 25 to face an unexpected allegation. “Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians,” declared the school’s venerable student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, in a front-page story.

The students, however, weren’t really looking at the Daily Northwestern. Instead, they had found the Northwestern Daily, a parody newspaper attacking the school’s stance on Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. 

The mock front page featured fake quotes from school officials, accusations of Israeli war crimes, and a fake ad for Birthright Israel — the travel abroad program that sends young American Jews to Israel — with the tagline “One man’s home is another man’s former home!” Overnight, someone had pinned the mock papers on bulletin boards, spread them on desks in lecture halls, and even wrapped the false front pages around roughly 300 copies of the Daily Northwestern itself.

IMAGE: A photo of the parody cover of the Daily Northwestern mocking Northwestern University’s stances on Israel’s war in Gaza.

Obtained by The Intercept

The stunt quickly sparkedOpens in a new taba furor among Israel’s supporters online. One writer, at the conservative National Review, said the fake newspaper included an antisemitic “blood libel.” The university itself saidOpens in a new tabthe spoof “included images and language about Israel that many in our community found offensive.” 

The parent company of the school paper, Students Publishing Company, or SPC, announcedOpens in a new tabthat it had “engaged law enforcement to investigate and find those responsible.” The results of the inquiry are just now coming to light. 

Following the investigation, local prosecutors brought charges against two students for theft of advertising services. The little-known statute appears to only exist in IllinoisOpens in a new taband CaliforniaOpens in a new tab, where it was originally passedOpens in a new tabto prevent the Ku Klux Klan from distributing recruitment materials in newspapers. The statute makes it illegal to insert an “unauthorized advertisement in a newspaper or periodical.” The students, both of whom are Black, now face up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

have never seen anyone charged with theft of advertising,” said Elaine Odeh, a lawyer who formerly supervised public defenders in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Evanston, where Northwestern is based.

Jon Yates, a spokesperson for Northwestern, told The Intercept and Responsible Statecraft, “The Students Publishing Company, independent publisher of The Daily Northwestern, pursued a criminal complaint related to the publication of the ‘fake Daily’ this fall. As required by law, University Police pursued a criminal investigation, which led to a citation for violating state law that was issued to multiple students.” (SPC is independentOpens in a new tabfrom the university, though several professors and students sit on its board of directorsOpens in a new tab.)

Some student staffers working for the actual Daily Northwestern are angry that charges are going forward, according to a former Daily Northwestern editor and current student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from school officials. “It’s very clear that this is a discriminatory action,” the student said. The Daily Northwestern’s own editorial board wroteOpens in a new tabMonday that its publisher should formally request that the case be dropped, calling the investigation “unnecessary and harmful.” (Disclosure: I am a graduate of Northwestern’s journalism school but was never involved with the Daily Northwestern.)

The Class A misdemeanor charges, the highest level short of a felony, represent an escalation in the battle over free speech and protest on college campuses as the war in Gaza drags into its fifth month. Pro-Palestine activism on campus has faced a severe crackdown due to what Israel’s backers say is antisemitism and hate speech, with school administrations working closely with police. 

“It’s always a concern when colleges and universities appear to be disproportionately targeting one form of political speech.”

At American University, school officials enlisted the FBI to help investigate incidents in which students defaced pro-Israel posters. Several colleges have banned or suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, a popular pro-Palestine group, including at Columbia University, which subsequently beefed upOpens in a new tabits police presence. And several dozen students at the University of Michigan are facing charges for trespassing after refusing police orders to leave a building.

Graham Piro of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit specializing in free speech advocacy, said, “It’s always a concern when colleges and universities appear to be disproportionately targeting one form of political speech.”

“Pursue It as a Criminal Act”

At Northwestern, the criminal charges struck many as a serious escalation. One student, who requested anonymity to prevent backlash from family in Israel, said he found the parody “offensive” but felt the charges went too far. 

Stephanie Kollmann, the policy director of a Northwestern’s law school clinic focused on criminal justice, questioned why SPC chose to go directly to the police rather than issuing a cease-and-desist letter to the students. Kollmann said colleges and affiliated institutions often seek to keep incidents out of the courts despite potential criminal conduct. The fact that charges were brought in this case means that SPC, university police, and the state’s attorney’s office all used their discretion to opt for the harshest response.

“The idea that multiple people in a chain of reaction to this incident repeatedly decided to not use any of the other tools of reproval available to them,” said Kollmann, “but rather chose to pursue it as a criminal act is frankly remarkable.”

Many at the university are pushing back on the charges. Over 70 student organizations — including high-profile groups like Mayfest Productions, which sponsors an annual music festival on campus — have pledgedOpens in a new tabto not speak with the Daily Northwestern until the charges are dropped. “Even students who have just been generally quiet on what’s happening with Israel and Palestine, I’ve been seeing them speak out for the first time regarding this,” said a student organizer, who requested anonymity due to fears of retaliation from the university.

More than 5,000 people have signedOpens in a new taba student-led petition calling on SPC to drop the charges and alleging that the incident represents “targeted over-policing of Black students.” 

Students and lawyers expressed surprise that prosecutors chose to bring the hammer down using such a little-known law, especially one originally designed to target white supremacist groups. Chicago police have only ever arrested one person under the statute, according to the city’s arrest databaseOpens in a new tab.

 Israel’s War on Gaza

The decision of whether to prosecute the charges now rests solely with the local prosecutor, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, which did not respond to a request for comment. SPC, however, can join students in asking prosecutors to drop the case, which could influence their decision-making going forward. 

SPC’s board of directors, for its part, denies that political motivations had anything to do with its decision to report the incident to police. “This is not an issue of free speech or parody,” the board said in a statement. “[J]ust as you cannot take over the airwaves of a TV station or the website of a publication, you also cannot disrupt the distribution of a student newspaper.”

The board includes several prominent journalists and media executives, including longtime ESPN personality J.A. Adande, CNN legal director Steve Kiehl, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robert Samuels.

The war in Gaza has created a litany of challenges for Northwestern. President Michael Schill initially drew backlash when, shortly after October 7, he saidOpens in a new tabthe school would not take a position on the conflict. Schill issuedOpens in a new taba second statement just a day later, in which he condemned Hamas’s attacks as “barbaric acts” that are “clearly antithetical to Northwestern’s values.”

“If this was done about literally any other topic, there would not be this amount of blowback.”

Some facultyOpens in a new taband studentsOpens in a new tabhave loudly condemned the school, saying it’s showed a bias against pro-Palestinian activists. However, pro-Israel advocates claim Schill has failed to protect Jewish students. Alums for Campus Fairness droppedOpens in a new taba cool $600,000 on ads attacking Schill, including a 30-second spot that ran during Northwestern’s bowl game. The ad allegedOpens in a new tabthat student groups “resoundingly support” Hamas and called on the school to “take decisive action against individuals violating university policy.”

Evgeny Stolyarov, a Jewish student at Northwestern who supports a ceasefire in Gaza, said that the charges will have a “chilling effect on speech” related to the war. 

“If this was done about literally any other topic, there would not be this amount of blowback,” Stolyarov said. “It also, in some ways, reinvigorates the student body,” he added. “Hopefully this ends up bringing activists on campus together.”

From <https://theintercept.com/2024/02/05/northwestern-criminal-charges-palestine-newspaper-israel/>

Editorial: The Daily objects to the prosecution of our peers

The Daily Northwestern Editorial Board

February 5, 2024

In a letter to the editor published in student magazine North by Northwestern on Friday, 89 student organizations, faculty and other Northwestern affiliates called on Students Publishing Company to drop charges against two Black students implicated in the false front pages placed onto copies of The Daily Northwestern’s Oct. 23, 2023 print paper. As of Sunday night, over 5,500 people have signed a petition urging the same.

After SPC — The Daily’s parent company — reported the incident to University Police, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office charged two Northwestern students with theft of advertising services in November. This charge is a Class A misdemeanor in Illinois and carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. 

Specifically, the act of attaching imitation papers to The Daily’s print paper without a contract can be seen as theft of paid advertising space under Illinois law –– regardless of their content or status as protected speech under the First Amendment.

While the students’ alleged actions may violate Illinois law, we believe SPC’s decision to engage the criminal justice system during this investigation was unnecessary and harmful. As the editorial board, we have outlined our concerns with SPC’s course of action and asked the board of directors to submit a formal recommendation to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office requesting that charges against the two students be dismissed.

Neither SPC nor The Daily has the authority to bring or dismiss criminal charges against any person — that decision lies with the state’s attorney’s office. However, the editorial board hopes that if SPC notifies the office that it no longer has an interest in seeing the students prosecuted, the prosecutor will likely drop the charges.

The Daily did not authorize the copies nor their content. We object to tampering with The Daily, and we acknowledge that the imitated front pages damaged our relationships with community members. Our publication remains committed to free expression and sharing stories with accuracy, nuance and precision.

Despite these objections, the editorial board cannot support the criminal prosecution of our peers.

Our newspaper has always prided itself on its commitment to informing and supporting students, and we believe our publisher should play no part in perpetrating harm against the communities we aim to serve. 

Our University and community — along with the American policing and justice system as a whole — has a long history of placing people of color in harm’s way. As a publication that strives to unearth these injustices through our reporting, we remain wholeheartedly opposed to any course of action that would entwine our publication with this harmful legacy.

We hope this situation invites reflection about the impacts that people, particularly people of color, may face as a result of decisions that involve the police. Making a call or filing a complaint demands extraordinary thought and consideration beyond an action’s legality.

This piece represents the majority opinion of the editorial board of The Daily Northwestern. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members or editorial board members of The Daily Northwestern.

From <https://dailynorthwestern.com/2024/02/05/top-stories/editorial-the-daily-objects-to-the-prosecution-of-our-peers/>

Students Publishing Company: We will intercede with State’s Attorney on charges

John Byrne, Chair of Students Publishing Company Board of Directors

February 6, 2024

To the Northwestern Community:

Just a few days ago, most of you had no idea of our existence.  Now, after a change.org petition, letters to the editors of campus publications, an editorial, board statements, social media posts, calls for boycotts, more letters to the board, and now local and national news media coverage, I thought it might be good to introduce the Students Publishing Company Board of Directors.

We are part of the Northwestern community – 13 volunteers who are students, faculty, staff members and alumni – including four former editors-in-chief of The Daily Northwestern.  Our primary role is to manage the business of the paper, including significant fundraising, and select editors-in-chief who have the talent and wits to run a thriving, independent newsroom.  Each board member loves what we do as the collective nonprofit “publisher” of what we consider the best student newspaper in the country.

We owe you a fact-filled explanation of what’s been happening since several hundred copies of The Daily were tampered with on October 25, 2023.  And we need to express our regret for the unintended consequences of our actions since that tampering, not the least of which has been the harm to the students criminally charged in connection with the incident, as well as the distress over it in our own newsroom.

You’ve probably already heard about the tampering, which involved wrapping several hundred copies of The Daily Northwestern with a fake front page designed to closely resemble the paper, down to the look of the top “nameplate,” as well as the layout and the fonts used.  Except the nameplate read “The Northwestern Daily,” and the content was not something you would ever see in the actual Daily.

Whatever you might think about the content of that fake front page – and many of us were offended by it – the disturbing words and images weren’t the reason we decided to take action.  It was the use of The Daily as a vehicle to distribute the fake front page that upset us.  This co-opting of the work of our student journalists and the potential damage to the reputation of the paper built upon more than a century of hard work was the problem.  To us, it seemed no different from someone hacking into our website to post their own content and replace ours.

So, we reported the tampering to Northwestern Police, thinking this was our best option.  Our intent was to protect the student journalists at The Daily, as well as the paper’s reputation.  We wanted to show how much we valued our students’ efforts and our front page, the manifestation of the best of our journalists’ reporting efforts.  

Once we informed the NU Police of the incident, their investigation identified two people who were possibly involved.  At that point, we were asked to sign “complaints” against those two individuals, presumably as part of the investigation.  We didn’t understand how these complaints started a process that we could no longer control – and something we never intended.  As it turned out, we were never informed by the State’s Attorney’s Office that these people would be charged – and we were not asked whether we even wanted them to be charged.  We heard nothing further on the investigation from NU Police despite reaching out to them.  Eventually, we received some second-hand information – now clearly incorrect – that the two individuals were not NU students.  Otherwise, we didn’t know anything about them.  

The charge the two people face is misdemeanor-level “theft of advertising.” They apparently weren’t arrested but instead received notice of the charge in the form of a written citation (like a ticket but worse).  However, one citation apparently was delivered in person by uniformed police, which we’re sure was an unpleasant, if not downright frightful, experience. For someone convicted of theft of advertising, the penalties can be as harsh as some jail time, a substantial fine (for a student), or both.  It also can mean a permanent mark on someone’s “record” that follows them for many years, if not forever.  Illinois allows for expungement of records for these types of crimes after a certain amount of time, but there’s no guarantee.

It’s only been in the last four days that we learned more information about the people charged:  that they are students; that they are Black. Some may disagree, but these facts matter to us.

We have been listening to our fellow community members, and they have been heard.  We understand and recognize why we need to take action.  We hope to heal the hurt and repair the relationships that have been damaged and frayed by our unintentional foray into the criminal justice system.

So, what are we doing? As of yesterday, we have hired legal counsel to work on our behalf with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to pursue a resolution to this matter that results in nothing punitive or permanent.  Since we are not a party to the case, we lack any authority to ensure this resolution, but we intend to use all available resources in good faith to try to get there.  

As a board and as individual members of the Northwestern community, we don’t wish to cause harm to other members of this community.  We hope that everyone else in our community feels the same.

We have been reminded of Students Publishing Company’s primary mission:  “To enhance, implement and further the educational and charitable goals of Northwestern University … and to serve the interests of the Northwestern University community.”  We are reaffirming our commitment to this mission.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

John Byrne

Medill 1990, Daily Northwestern Editor-in-Chief 1989-90

Chair, Students Publishing Company Board of Directors

From <https://dailynorthwestern.com/2024/02/06/top-stories/students-publishing-company-we-will-intercede-with-states-attorney-on-charges/>

NU newspaper publisher criticized by campus groups, student editors for pursuing criminal charges over fake front pages

Two students charged with rare misdemeanor originally created in response to white supremacist group

byAlex HarrisonFebruary 6th, 2024

Students Publishing Company, the nonprofit owner and publisher of student newspaper The Daily Northwestern, is facing backlash from campus organizations and the newspaper’s own staff for filing misdemeanor complaints against two Black NU students for allegedly wrapping imitated front pages around real copies of the paper in October 2023.

The single-page leaflet imitated the style and layout of The Daily’s front page, and contained content accusing Northwestern University of being “complicit in genocide of Palestinians” in reference to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. Sometime before the morning of Oct. 25, 2023, prints of the leaflet were wrapped around copies of The Daily’s Oct. 23 print edition in dozens of newsstands and left on classroom desks around Northwestern’s campus.

Now, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office is prosecuting two Northwestern students for creating and distributing the leaflets with charges of “theft of advertising services” based on criminal complaints filed by SPC. The charge is a Class A misdemeanor, which carries a sentence of up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500, and was originally created in 2001 in response to a white supremacist group’s activities downstate.

A collection of student organizations and other campus community members have published letters to the editor in The Daily and student magazine North by Northwestern calling on SPC to request prosecutors drop the charges.

“These charges are a stark reminder of the intersectional battle against racial bias and the silencing of dissenting voices within our academic institutions,” reads the letter published in The Daily, which is signed by 70 student organizations. “They reveal a disturbing confluence of over policing and anti-Blackness, disproportionately affecting students of color who dare to engage in critical discourse and advocacy.”

A majority of The Daily’s student editors published their own editorial objecting to the charges on Feb. 5.

“The editorial board cannot support the criminal prosecution of our peers,” the editorial reads. “Our newspaper has always prided itself on its commitment to informing and supporting students, and we believe our publisher should play no part in perpetrating harm against the communities we aim to serve.”

The same day, the SPC board published its own statement in The Daily responding to an online petition demanding the charges be dropped, writing that the decision to file criminal complaints was “not an issue of speech or parody.”

“A fake newspaper distributed on its own, apart from The Daily Northwestern, would cause no concern,” the board’s statement reads. “But tampering with the distribution of a student newspaper is impermissible conduct.”

SPC Board Chair John Byrne and Daily Editor-in-Chief Avani Kalra both declined to comment beyond the published statements.

The RoundTable confirmed the students’ identities but will not publish their names due to the charges being misdemeanors. The students’ defense attorney, Andrew Finke, declined to comment for this story.

Imitating the front page

The newspaper-length leaflet wrapped around the newspapers included a masthead reading “The Northwestern Daily” in a similar font and color as the paper’s real masthead, as well as an altered website and social media handle.

Below the masthead was a photo of doctors holding a press conference surrounded by deceased civilians in the rubble of al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 18, following an explosion that killed hundreds of Palestinians the day prior. Further down the page was a satirical article with the headline “Northwestern complicit in the genocide of Palestinians,” as well as a fake advertisement for Birthright Israel and a QR code linking to the website northwesternhasbloodonitshands.com.

Following the leaflets’ discovery on Oct. 25, Kalra said the paper’s staff were “unaware and unaffiliated with” their creation, while the SPC board of directors wrote in a statement that they “reject and condemn this act of vandalism.”

“We have engaged law enforcement to investigate and find those responsible,” the SPC board wrote in its statement.

One month later on Nov. 27, criminal complaints signed by SPC General Manager Stacia Campbell were filed alleging the students committed theft of advertising services, according to court filings reviewed by the RoundTable on Feb. 5. The filings did not contain any incident or investigation reports, or other information about the investigation conducted by Northwestern’s University Police.

Stephanie Kollmann, the policy director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, wrote in an email to the RoundTable that while it’s reasonable for the published to want to “prevent any future tampering” which could cause confusion for readers, pursuing criminal charges seems “disproportionately harsh” and “contrary to the goal itself.”

She added that other options like university discipline or a cease and desist letter could have been pursued instead, and noted that the specific charge is obscure and “is almost never used to prosecute anyone.”

“Neither the SPC nor Northwestern notified the broader student campus community of the fact that wrapping a parody sheet around a student newspaper could be considered a criminal act,” Kollmann wrote. “To me, if the goal were to prevent future incidents of students wrapping the newspaper, the information that it was a crime to do so would have been publicized.”

Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates told the RoundTable via email that University Police completed the investigation and delivered misdemeanor citations to the students, and that officers did not arrest the students in the process.

“The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office determines whether charges are brought with respect to this matter,” Yates wrote. “We cannot comment on specifics of the pending investigation.”

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Legislative intents

State law defines theft of advertising services as when someone “attaches or inserts an unauthorized advertisement in a newspaper or periodical” without the consent of the paper’s publisher or distributor.

The offense was created in Illinois by the adoption of House Bill 3214 in 2001, and otherwise appears to exist only in California, where it was intended to combat recruitment efforts by the Ku Klux Klan. 

Prior to the bill’s initial passage by the Illinois House of Representatives, sponsor and former State Rep. Sidney Mathias said that it was introduced in response to “a hate group” inserting “hate literature” into newspapers in peoples’ driveways in the downstate town of Pekin, according to a legislative transcript. The Copley News Service reported at the time that this group was the neo-Nazi “World Church of the Creator,” led by white supremacist Matt Hale.

According to another legislative transcript, sponsor and former State Sen. William Peterson said prior to its passage in the Illinois Senate that the bill was not intended to criminalize placing unauthorized materials outside of a newspaper. One example he discussed was if a political campaign volunteer placed a pamphlet for their candidate on top of a newspaper at someone’s home.

“An individual can put the pamphlet underneath the paper; they can put it on top of the paper,” Peterson said, according to the transcript. “They can’t put it in the paper. What you’re doing is depriving that newspaper of the funds that they would receive if you went and gave them those pamphlets to insert [and] to distribute. There are other ways to get around it.”

In its Feb. 6 statement, the SPC board stressed that decisions to drop or pursue criminal charges are “made by the state’s attorney alone.” In their editorial published the same day, The Daily’s editors wrote that they hope that “if SPC notifies the office that it no longer has an interest in seeing the students prosecuted, the prosecutor will likely drop the charges.”

Kollmann, the legal policy director, stressed in her email to the RoundTable that “political speech is well-protected” and wrote she’s concerned the charges will lead students to believe “the parody itself is somehow illegal.”

“Because risking confusion over whether speech is criminalized is not in the public interest,” Kollmann wrote, “and the goals of preventing future incidents like this were able to be achieved in so many other ways that do not involve state and county resources, it would not surprise me if the Cook County State’s Attorney decided to decline to prosecute the incident.”

The students’ next court appearance is scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 29, according to court filings.

From <https://evanstonroundtable.com/2024/02/06/nu-newspaper-publisher-criticized-by-campus-groups-student-editors-for-pursuing-criminal-charges-over-fake-front-pages/>

Cook county

https://www.cookcountyil.gov/agency/states-attorney>

https://www.cookcountystatesattorney.org/about/kimberly-foxx

Criminal Prosecutions Bureau

As the largest bureau within CCSAO, the Criminal Prosecutions Bureau (CPB) comprises multiple divisions and units. With a team of approximately 500 dedicated Assistant State’s Attorneys, CPB is committed to serving the residents of Cook County through diligent and honest prosecution of crimes.

From <https://www.cookcountystatesattorney.org/criminal-prosecutions-bureau>

Organization of the Circuit Court

The Circuit Court of Cook County of the State of Illinois is the largest of the 24 judicial circuits in Illinois and one of the largest unified court systems in the world. It has about 400 judges who serve the 5.2 million residents of Cook County within the City of Chicago and its 126 surrounding suburbs. More than 1 million cases are filed each year.

From <https://www.cookcountycourt.org/ABOUT-THE-COURT/Organization-of-the-Circuit-Court>

https://www.cookcountycourt.org/ABOUT-THE-COURT/Organization-of-the-Circuit-Court

Log in

Sign up

This is an unverified company page.

 or learn more!

Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office

0 followers

With more than 700 attorneys, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office is the second largest prosecutor's office in the nation. The CCSAO is responsible for the prosecution of all misdemeanor and felony crimes committed in Cook County, one of the largest counties in the United States. The CCSAO als... Read more

Industries

+1

Headquarters

Employees

Links

Org chart

KF

Kim Foxx

Cook County State's Attorney

Kim Foxx

ull Licensed Name

Kimberly Michelle Foxx

Registered Address

Cook County State's Attorney

69 West Washington Suite 3200

Chicago, Illinois 60602-3174

Registered Phone

(312) 603-3035

From <https://www.iardc.org/Lawyer/SearchResults#>

Collapse

Cathy McNeil Stein

Full Licensed Name

Cathy McNeil Stein

Registered Address

Cook County State's Attorney's Office

50 W. Washington Street 5th Floor

Chicago, Illinois 60602-1305

From <https://www.iardc.org/Lawyer/SearchResults#>

Chief Civil Actions Bureau

EH

Ethan Holland

Chief Criminal Prosecutions Bureau

James Chandler

Chief Special Litigation Division

Meriel Coleman

Chief Ethics Officer

Patrick Waller

Chief Special Prosecutions Bureau

DG

Donyelle L. Gray

Director Of Diversity Equity And Inclusion

Lauren Simmons

Director Of Community Engagement

Matthew S.

Chief Data Technology Officer

Donyelle L. Gray

Collapse

Christine Chan

Community Engagement Liaison

Joshua Wilkinson

Clerk Human Trafficking Unit

Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office ICAC Task Force

From <https://theorg.com/org/cook-county-states-attorneys-office>

https://www.cookcountyil.gov/sites/g/files/ywwepo161/files/service/county-wide-org-chart-12-7-18.pdf

==============

alma.anaya@cookcountyil.gov

From <https://www.google.com/search?q=%40cookcountyil.gov&newwindow=1&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=7412f18cd7d011ba&sxsrf=ACQVn08ffdAf8a2TGrfl4epMRSR5dptf8Q%3A1707291588966&ei=xDPDZY7DOqe2qtsPtfCx4Ag&ved=0ahUKEwiOtcDl3JiEAxUnm2oFHTV4DIwQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=%40cookcountyil.gov&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiEUBjb29rY291bnR5aWwuZ292MgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeMgQQABgeSPwwUKYjWJQucAV4AZABAJgBcqAB4AGqAQMwLjK4AQPIAQD4AQL4AQHCAgoQABhHGNYEGLAD4gMEGAAgQYgGAZAGCA&sclient=gws-wiz-serp>

ALMA E. ANAYA

alma.anaya@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...on/alma-e-anaya

ANTHONY J. QUEZADA

BILL LOWRY

Bill.Lowry@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...rson/bill-lowry

BRIDGET DEGNEN

Bridget.Degnen@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo.../bridget-degnen

BRIDGET GAINER

Bridget@bridgetgainer.com

https://www.coo...ridget-gainer-0

DENNIS DEER

Dennis.Deer@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...son/dennis-deer

DONNA MILLER

Donna.Miller@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...on/donna-miller

FRANK J. AGUILAR

Frank.Aguilar@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...frank-j-aguilar

JOHN P. DALEY

john.daley@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...on/john-p-daley

JOSINA MORITA

KEVIN B. MORRISON

Kevin.Morrison@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...evin-b-morrison

MAGGIE TREVOR

MONICA GORDON

SCOTT R. BRITTON

Scott.Britton@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...scott-r-britton

SEAN M. MORRISON

Sean.Morrison@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...sean-m-morrison

STANLEY MOORE

stanley.moore2@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...n/stanley-moore

TARA S. STAMPS

From <https://cook-county.legistar.com/People.aspx>

LAW ENForceMENT COMMITTEE

DONNA MILLER

Commissioner

12/3/2018

12/6/2026

Donna.Miller@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...on/donna-miller

FRANK J. AGUILAR

Vice Chairman

5/21/2020

12/6/2026

Frank.Aguilar@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...frank-j-aguilar

KEVIN B. MORRISON

Commissioner

12/3/2018

12/6/2026

Kevin.Morrison@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...evin-b-morrison

SCOTT R. BRITTON

Commissioner

12/3/2018

12/6/2026

Scott.Britton@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...scott-r-britton

SEAN M. MORRISON

Commissioner

12/5/2022

12/6/2026

Sean.Morrison@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...sean-m-morrison

STANLEY MOORE

Chairman

4/11/2013

12/6/2026

stanley.moore2@cookcountyil.gov

https://www.coo...n/stanley-moore

TARA S. STAMPS

Commissioner

6/29/2023

12/6/2026

From <https://cook-county.legistar.com/DepartmentDetail.aspx?ID=21918&GUID=1B1E5177-ED4F-44CB-BD29-E6C3ED84ADB8&Search=>

COOK COUNTY BOARD PRESIDENT:

• Toni Preckwinkle, info@tonipreckwinkle.org, (312) 603-6400

COOK COUNTY COMMISSIONERS:

1st District: Earlean Collins, earlean.collins@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603-4566

2nd District: Robert Steele, r.steele@robertsteele.org, (773) 722-0140

3rd District: Jerry “Iceman” Butler, jerry.butler@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603 6391

4th District: William M. Beavers, william.beavers@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603-2065

5th District: Deborah Sims, deborah.sims@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603 6381

6th District: Joan Patricia Murphy, joan.murphy@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603-4216

7th District: Jesus G. Garcia, jesus.chuy.garcia@gmail.com, (312) 603-5443

8th District: Edwin Reyes, edwin.reyes@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603-6386

9th District: Peter N. Silvestri, cookcty9@aol.com, (312) 603-4393

10th District: Bridget Gainer, commissioner@bridgetgainer.com, (312) 603-4210

11th District: John P. Daley, john.daley@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603-4400

12th District: John A. Fritchey, commish@fritchey.com, (312) 603-6380

13th District: Larry Suffredin, larry.suffredin@cookcountyil.gov, (312)603-6383

14th District: Gregg Goslin, commissioner.goslin@cookcountyil.gov, (312)603-4932

15th District: Timothy O. Schneider, tim.schneider@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603-6388

16th District: Jeffrey R. Tobolski, Jeffrey.tobolski@cookcountyil.gov, (312) 603-6384, (708)352-2301

17th District: Elizabeth “Liz” Gorman, liz@lizgorman.com, (312 )603-4215

From <https://news.wttw.com/content/contact-cook-county-leadership-team>

==================

Office of the Independent Inspector General

• Agencies > 

• Office of the Independent Inspector General

Phone Number

(312) 603-0350

Email

Independent.InspectorGeneral@cookcountyil.gov

Mission Statement

The mission of the OIIG is to detect, deter and prevent corruption, fraud, waste, mismanagement, unlawful political discrimination and misconduct in the operation of Cook County government with integrity, independence, professionalism and respect for both the rule of law and the people we serve. The OIIG conducts investigations and issues findings and recommendations to Cook County government officials. The OIIG also investigates potential criminal violations involving the conduct of Cook County employees acting in their official capacities and refers such matters for prosecution. Because the OIIG is a fact-finding agency, it cannot dictate a legal outcome.

The OIIG also serves as a liaison between the County and outside law enforcement authorities and prosecutorial agencies when cases are referred.

The OIIG's jurisdiction includes employees, elected and appointed officials in the performance of their official duties, as well as contractors and subcontractors doing or seeking to do business with Cook County government.

Agency Head

Steven E. Cyranoski, Interim Inspector General

From <https://www.cookcountyil.gov/agency/office-independent-inspector-general>

=============

Address: Morton Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave., Evanston, IL 60201

Email: erevelle@cityofevanston.org

Phone: 312.459.0644 

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/7th-ward>

Email: tsuffredin@cityofevanston.org

Phone: 847.859.7810

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/6th-ward>

Email: jgeracaris@cityofevanston.org

Phone: 847-868-2197

Facebook: @NinthWardJuan

Instagram: @9thWardJuan

Ward Meetings

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/9th-ward>

Email: dreid@cityofevanston.org

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/8th-ward>

Email: bburns@cityofevanston.org

Cell: 847-766-5871

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/5th-ward>

Email: jnieuwsma@cityofevanston.org

Phone: 773-255-0716

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/4th-ward>

Email: mwynne@cityofevanston.org

Phone: 847.840.7751

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/3rd-ward>

Email: kharris@cityofevanston.org

Phone: 847-448-0986

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/2nd-ward>

Email: ckelly@cityofevanston.org

Phone: 224-612-2008

From <https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/1st-ward>

Bruce A. Lewis

Chief of Police and Senior Associate Vice President, Department of Safety & Security

847-491-4933

Eric Chin

Deputy Chief of Police

847-467-3064

Kenneth Jones

Commander of Police Services--Chicago

312-503-0371

Matt Wietbrock

Commander of Evanston Patrol Operations and Accreditation

847-467-7726

Latori Bartelle

Interim Commander of Investigative Services

847-467-5420

Jeff Burklin

Director of Security Systems & Technical Services

847-467-3205

Jill Johnson

Senior Director of Finance & Business Operations

847-467-3413

Merrill Silverman

Director of Transportation & Parking Services

847-467-5382

Chris Yohe

Director of Environmental Health & Safety

847-467-6342

Dave Young

Director of Behavioral Consultation Programs

847-467-2069

Joe Frascati

Emergency Preparedness Senior Manager

847-467-

From <https://www.northwestern.edu/up/about/contact/staff-directory.html>

BALewis@northwestern.edu

eric.chin@northwestern.edu

k-jones@northwestern.edu

matthew.wietbrock@northwestern.edu

l-bartelle@northwestern.edu

J-Burklin@northwestern.edu

jill.johnson@northwestern.edu

merrill.silverman@northwestern.edu

chris.yohe@northwestern.edu

dyoung@northwestern.edu

Joe@northwestern.edu

Serving the Campus Community

As our community returns to campus after years of pandemic challenges and the period of reflection inspired by the social justice movement, the Northwestern Police Department is evaluating the ways we can continue to serve our community with respect and effectiveness. Inspired by the work of the Campus Safety Advisory Board, we have made changes in several key areas and are working toward additional service enhancements, which are detailed on the Campus Safety & Wellness Committee website.

From <https://www.northwestern.edu/up/>

Bruce A. Lewis promoted to senior associate vice president

May 7, 2020

From <https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/05/bruce-lewis/>

bruce A. Lewis, associate vice president of the Department of Safety & Security and chief of police of Northwestern University, has recently been promoted to senior associate vice president, Craig Johnson, senior vice president for business and finance, announced May 7.

Bruce A. Lewis

Lewis will continue to oversee and facilitate the University’s security and emergency operations and will continue to serve as chief of police.

In addition to his current portfolio of law enforcement services, emergency management and parking and transportation, Lewis also will now expand engagement with our affiliate healthcare providers in Chicago. 

“Bruce’s leadership and steady hand have been integral to the enhanced safety of our campuses over the last 17 years,” said Johnson. “His expanded role reflects Northwestern’s broad reach across the Chicago area, and I am confident he will bring to these new responsibilities the same dedication to service and community engagement he has always shown.”

In 2003, Bruce Lewis joined Northwestern as chief of police and in 2008 was promoted to associate vice president. His recent achievements with his team include raising community awareness to respond to critical incidents with the production of the Run-Hide-Fight training video, developing a centralized security plan on the Chicago campus for the Simpson Querrey Biomedical Research Center in collaboration with Lurie Children’s Hospital and transitioning to the AlertNU emergency notification system. 

He prioritized strengthening University Police’s partnerships through joint tactical response readiness training with Evanston and Chicago police and fire departments and collaboration with the City of Evanston to facilitate the City’s use of Northwestern’s emergency operations command center to coordinate responses to major events. 

“I am honored to serve Northwestern in this expanded leadership role,” Lewis said, “and I am proud to work with the dedicated Safety and Security team. I look forward to building upon our successes as we strive for the highest standards of professionalism and service to create an even safer environment in which our University community can learn, work and live.”

Prior to Northwestern, Lewis served as the chief of police of the University of Illinois at Chicago and at universities in Ohio and Louisiana. Lewis earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and master's degrees in criminal justice from Grambling State University and in public administration from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He is currently pursuing a doctorate at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management and has completed executive education programs at Kellogg School of Management, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Northwestern's Center for Public Safety and the FBI's Law Enforcement Executive Development Scho

From <https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/05/bruce-lewis/>

Eric.Reese@ic.fbi.gov;

Wheeler@ic.fbi.gov;

From <https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/robert-w-wes-wheeler-jr-named-special-agent-in-charge-of-the-chicago-field-office>

LETTER: An open letter from IU Academics for Justice in Palestine

IMAGE: Protestors hold signs opposing IU's cancelation of Palestinian artist Samia Halaby's exhibit during a demonstration Jan. 26, 2024, outside Bryan Hall. A silent demonstration in protest of IU's cancellation of the planned exhibition ended with chants outside the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President.

Photo by Mia Hilkowitz / The Indiana Daily Student

By Letter to the Editor

Feb 8, 2024 9:00 am

Editor’s note: Indiana University Academics for Justice in Palestine is a member of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network. The names of the faculty who have signed have been kept anonymous due to concerns over job safety and censure. 

We write to announce the formation of Indiana University Academics for Justice in Palestine, a collective of those who support the teaching mission of Indiana University, including faculty, lecturers, staff and graduate employees. We have constituted ourselves in solidarity with the ongoing and urgent struggles of Palestinians resisting occupation, warfare and displacement. 

By organizing together we aim to speak and associate freely on matters related to Palestine, to support and amplify the work of student groups at IU, and to network in coalition with national and regional organizations committed to peace and justice in Palestine and Israel, in particular as a member of the new Faculty for Justice in Palestine network, which includes chapters at Harvard, the University of Michigan, NYU, Princeton, Penn and UCLA. 

The urgency of organizing such a group comes from two directions. 

On the one hand, Palestinians have endured over 75 years of dispossession and what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé calls "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of the Israeli state, leading mainstream human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch (in 2021) and Amnesty International (in 2022) to refer to Israel as an "apartheid" state. 

• Last November, UN experts already warned that the ongoing onslaught on Gaza constituted "genocide in the making." Two months later, with no letup to the aggression, the International Court of Justice, responding to South Africa's case charging Israel with violation of the Genocide Convention, has made provisional demands on Israel that, according to the Jerusalem Post, represent a "harsh diplomatic blow for Israel" and give South Africa's claim "tacit legitimacy."  

• To cite just two measures of the scale of the violence, in the space of four months and in an area smaller than Monroe County, a bombing campaign called “the most destructive of this century” has killed more children than were killed in all of the world's conflicts between 2020 and 2022. And by January 20 the bombings had also systematically destroyed all of Gaza's universities, killing 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers in the process. 

At the same time, the longstanding U.S. military, economic and moral support for Israel remains firm, with 72% of the Senate on January 16 voting against a measure that would have the U.S. government simply investigate whether its aid to Israel is being used to carry out human rights abuses and with the Biden administration choosing to bypass congressional oversight in its weapons shipments.  

• We feel that this moment is comparable to others in history — the rise of German fascism in the 1930s, the debate over slavery in the U.S., the U.S. war in Vietnam — when people of good conscience must speak out, especially those of us affiliated with a university that touts its long-standing "commitment to global engagement." 

• On the other hand, just when the need to discuss what is unfolding in Palestine is greatest, what we are seeing on our campus is blatant attempts to prevent such discussion. By now, everyone should be aware of IU President Pamela Whitten's vacuous or one-sided statements, the attempt to prevent a prominent critic of Israel from speaking on campus, the suspension of one of our colleagues over a trumped-up minor technicality that is in violation of clear university and campus policies and the cancellation of an exhibit by a pro-Palestinian artist and IU alumna.  

• IU is in the national news — for example, in the New York Times, on Democracy Now and in the Chronicle of Higher Education — not for its academic achievements but for the silencing of voices calling for justice in Palestine, for an administration that might as well be working directly for the Israeli lobby. 

While the IU administration is certainly out of touch with the faculty and students, its actions are consistent with efforts from outside the university to stifle debate, most often framed as attempts to identify or punish "antisemitism." The most blatant and outrageous of these was the well-publicized letter of Congressman Jim Banks sent to President Whitten. Banks, founder of the Congressional "anti-woke caucus," threatened loss of federal funding for "condon[ing] or tolerat[ing] campus antisemitism." Two bills before the Indiana General Assembly, H.B. 1002 and H.B. 1224, take a similar tack. And at the federal level, the House of Representatives continues to demand that universities survey and punish speech that centers justice for Palestinians. 

• Stifling criticism of Israel and deflecting attention from the campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people by conflating criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism is an old tactic. In fact, as Judith Butler has argued, it is rather the attempt to "conflate Jews with Israel" that constitutes "an antisemitic reduction of Jewishness." IUAJP stands against racism and chauvinism in all their manifestations, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. 

IUAJP's specific short-term goals include organizing opposition to H.B. 1002 in the Indiana Senate, support for the creation of an IU Muslim Cultural Center and inviting a prominent anti-Zionist academic such as Norman Finkelstein or Rashid Khalidi to IU as a Patten Lecturer. 

More generally, we call on all IU faculty to uphold academic responsibility in their actions and decisions. We call on this administration and the Board of Trustees to uphold the principles of shared governance and academic freedom for all in our community. In the absence of institutional support, we will work to ensure the safety of all members of our campus community who stand in solidarity with movements for Palestinian justice. We will advocate for colleagues who fear discriminatory actions when they exercise their right to open expression as they speak for justice in Palestine. In doing so and in alliance with other groups that share our principles, we will renew our community and strengthen our commitment to the exchange of ideas and scholarship, which we understand to be the foundation of IU, and to the maintenance of the intellectually rich and diverse international community, which we take to be one of IU's most powerful legacies. 

To contact IUAJP, email us at iuajp@proton.me. 

This letter has been signed by 20 members of the IU faculty.

AMCHA Database of Antisemitism Claims:

Indiana University Bloomington 02/08/2024

IU Academics for Justice in Palestine published an "open letter" in the Indiana Daily Student which demonized Israel, stating, in part, "Stifling criticism of Israel and deflecting attention from the campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people by conflating criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism is an old tactic. In fact, as Judith Butler has argued, it is rather the attempt to "conflate Jews with Israel" that constitutes "an antisemitic reduction of Jewishness." [1]

Category: ANTISEMITIC EXPRESSION

Classification: DEMONIZATION

To contact IUAJP, email us at iuajp@proton.me.

Contents:

• 2024Feb13- Letter to the Editor: Letters criticizing antisemitic undertones should not be written by non-Jewish individuals 

• 2024Feb06- Letter to the Editor: Labeling informational journalism antisemitic harms public discourse, free speech

• 2024Jan29-Letter to the Editor: Front-page story on Bruins for Israel rally perpetuates antisemitic stereotypes

• 2024jan16 Documents reveal details behind planning process of Bruins for Israel rally

2024Feb13- Letter to the Editor: Letters criticizing antisemitic undertones should not be written by non-Jewish individuals

By Bella Brannon   Opinion Daily Bruin

Feb. 13, 2024 12:33 a.m.

Dear Editor:

I was disheartened to read Tajvir Singh’s recent letter criticizing a previous letter that brought attention to the antisemitic undertones of a Jan. 16 article by the Daily Bruin titled “Documents reveal details behind planning process of Bruins for Israel rally.”

Let’s be clear: Only Jewish people can authentically define what is and isn’t antisemitic.

The Daily Bruin’s Jan. 16 article searches for a scandal that does not exist by making skin-deep claims about the policies one of the largest Jewish groups on campus. Although the piece focused on Jewish groups – including Hillel at UCLA and Bruins for Israel – the Daily Bruin opted to include the voices of non-Jewish students, allowing them to speak on behalf of a community they are not part of.

True investigative journalism is led by evidence, not agenda.

To solely investigate economic conspiracies against Jewish groups is, at best, prejudice against Jewish groups and, at worst, a callback to ancient antisemitic tropes about Jews and money that have propelled violence against Jewish people for centuries. Instead of addressing these criticisms, Singh dismisses the valid qualms of the author of the letter and creates a false boogeyman of censorship.

If a student told another minority group that their experiences were not valid, people would be rightfully up in arms. Only Black people get to define anti-Black racism. Only queer people get to define homophobia. Why are we allowing a non-Jewish student to demean the experiences of the Jewish community? That approach is certainly not in favor of an “exchange of ideas on all issues.”

Further, Singh claims that expressing legitimate concerns about journalism stifles free speech. On the contrary, dismissing someone’s free speech in the name of free speech is what truly stifles freedom of expression. Criticism, scrutiny and listening to the first-hand experiences of communities are essential components of healthy discourse. Expressing concerns about journalistic integrity isn’t censorship but an attempt to uphold principles of transparency and honor.

Free speech does not mean freedom from accountability.

Sincerely,

Bella Brannon

Bella Brannon is a third-year public affairs student and editor-in-chief of Ha’AM, UCLA’s Jewish Student Magazine.

➤Return to Top of Page

2024Feb06- Letter to the Editor: Labeling informational journalism antisemitic harms public discourse, free speech

By Tajvir Singh | Daily Bruin | Feb. 6, 2024

Dear Editor:

I wish to point out the issues in promoting the recent letter responding to the Daily Bruin’s article about the Bruins for Israel rally. In the letter, Paula Tavrow believes the importance of the event and its planning is overstated, and that the Daily Bruin’s headline promotes antisemitic tropes.

Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that the planning and execution of a significant campus event like the Bruins for Israel rally are of legitimate interest to the student body. With a substantial turnout, notable speakers and a campus-wide march, the event drew considerable attention. Therefore, a detailed examination of its planning, including the associated costs, is reasonable journalism. The article includes insights from Dan Gold, executive director of Hillel at UCLA, providing context for the expenditures and offering organizers an opportunity to explain their budget.

As for the accusation of antisemitism, it’s essential to emphasize that attributing malicious intent to a publication without concrete evidence is poisonous to public discourse. Upholding the principles of free speech is crucial on a university campus, where diverse perspectives should be encouraged. Accusing the Daily Bruin of forwarding antisemitic tropes based on the article’s prominence and subheadline is not warranted. Such accusations legitimize censorship of opinions contrary to the pro-Israel narrative. If the article is considered antisemitic, then it gives a justification to powerful entities and organizations to label any amount of pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech as such.

Secondly, it chills speech and deters those from voicing opinions that may run contrary to the pro-Israel narrative. Individuals may express concern from voicing their own opinions out of fear of institutional backlash and being labeled an anti-Semite. This applies to speech everywhere – clubs, campus and even between friends.

Upholding the principles of free speech and fostering diverse perspectives should be paramount on a university campus. Labeling an article as antisemitic stifles open discourse and deters individuals from expressing their views. To maintain our values of free speech, we must reject this approach in favor of open dialogue and an exchange of ideas on all issues.

Sincerely,

Tajvir Singh

Tajvir Singh is a third-year political science student.

➤Return to Top of Page

2024Jan29-Letter to the Editor: Front-page story on Bruins for Israel rally perpetuates antisemitic stereotypes

By Paula Tavrow

Jan. 29, 2024 | Daily Bruin Opinion

Dear Editor:

I am concerned that your front-page article published on Jan. 16, “Documents reveal details behind planning process of Bruins for Israel rally,” subtly perpetuates antisemitic tropes.

First, the article is placed on the front page as the banner headline, which suggests that it has major importance, while in reality it is just a banal accounting of the costs of holding a rally that required security. 

Second, the headline suggests that shady details have now been revealed, which plays into the idea that Jews are secretive plotters. 

Third, the subheadline states that “thousands” were spent on this rally, which implies that Jews are ultra-rich and are using their money to flood UCLA with pro-Israel propaganda.

One has to read beyond the headlines – which most will not do – to find out that the rally organizers spent $1,775 on renting chairs, tables and place settings to symbolize the hostages who were taken to Gaza by Hamas. Yes, it is a lot of money for catering supplies, but a lot of hostages were taken on Oct. 7.

Another $1,400 was spent on security, because sadly the rally organizers were worried that their peaceful protestors might be attacked, so they wanted to deter any attempts by having a visible security presence.

That leaves about $470 for everything else, including banners, flags, posters and the like.

Is this really a front-page story?

I hope that the editors will be more vigilant in the future of not engaging in this type of baiting journalism.

Sincerely,

Paula Tavrow, Ph.D. ptavrow@ucla.edu

Paula Tavrow is an adjunct professor in the Community Health Sciences Department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

➤Return to Top of Page

2024jan16 Documents reveal details behind planning process of Bruins for Israel rally

The Hillel at UCLA building is pictured. Hillel is a campus organization that organizes and funds events aimed for Jewish students. (Daily Bruin file photo)

By Dylan Winward and Catherine Hamilton

Jan. 16, 2024 | Daily Bruin

Documents received by the Daily Bruin revealed the details behind the planning of a recent rally hosted by Bruins for Israel.

According to documents obtained through a public records request, a Bruins for Israel event hosted Nov. 7 cost a total of $3,584.67 to organize. This included $1,775 spent on rented tables and chairs for a display symbolizing Israelis who would be missing Shabbat dinners after being kidnapped by Palestinian militant group and political party Hamas. The event included live speakers, prayers, chanting and a march around the UCLA campus.

[Related: Jewish organizations at UCLA host rally to call for release of Israeli hostages]

Dan Gold, the executive director of Hillel at UCLA, said some of the money was managed through his organization, since Bruins for Israel is a subgroup of Hillel at UCLA. He added that Hillel’s subgroups must align with the organization’s core values and mission.

“Any group can try to be a part of Hillel from an administrative standpoint, as long as the mission of that group is Israel having a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people,” Gold said.

Gold also said Hillel individuals who advocated against Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland would be asked to stop affiliating with Hillel.

Hillel at UCLA is a nonprofit organization, relying on donations from the public without university funding, Gold said, adding that fundraising efforts have increased since Oct. 7 – particularly to fund security for its programs.

The documents The Bruin obtained revealed that BFI spent $1,339.67 on three security guards for the event, organized through the UCLA Events Office. Gold said spending money on security is important because of antisemitic threats in other parts of Los Angeles against Jewish centers and communities.

“Security is a massive concern for our community,” he said. “We’ve had to independently fund all the security for our organization. We’ve had to increase security twofold since Oct. 7.”

Although UCPD was notified about the rally, it did not respond to requests for comment about its role in providing security. A Bruins for Israel spokesperson also said in an emailed statement that the rally’s organizers did not have direct contact with UCPD ahead of the event.

However, Gold said UCPD has helped secure its venues for other off-campus events.

“UCPD has kept an open line of communication. They’ve come by our building during peak times,” he said. “They’ve been very supportive.”

Gold said the security measures were important because of recently reported antisemitism on campus.

[Related: Jewish students express concern over antisemitism on UCLA campus]

In an email sent to UCLA Academic Senate Chair Andrea Kasko, Lauri Mattenson [mattenson@humnet.ucla.edu], a lecturer for UCLA’s writing programs, said she wanted guidance on dealing with an email from Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA asking her to cancel class during a rally it was holding Oct. 25. [perhaps ask Israel to reschedule genocide on a more convenient date for your writing program]

“I find it inappropriate for students to email faculty in this way,” she said in the email. “As someone who knows many Jewish students at UCLA who are afraid to be here at the moment, I am writing to ask for your guidance about how to deal with this message.”

Mattenson did not respond to requests for comment.

Gold said hate has affected some of UCLA’s faculty, an issue that Hillel branches across American universities have been tracking.

“In some cases, faculty are experiencing anti-Jewish hate from their fellow faculty and sometimes are facing it from their students,” he said. “The situation with Lauri, unfortunately, was not uncommon (and) was not the only situation I was made aware of.”

In a written statement, Mohammad, a spokesperson for SJP at UCLA who was granted partial anonymity for safety reasons, said the email was sent to all faculty members whose classes coincided with a walk-out event and national call for action.

Ricardo Vazquez, a UCLA spokesperson, said faculty members concerned about an imminent threat should report the concern to UCPD, adding that they can report to other resources, such as the Staff Diversity & Equal Employment Opportunity Compliance Office and the Discrimination Prevention Office.

Gold also said he thought some Instagram stories posted by student leaders, including the Cultural Affairs Commission of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, were antisemitic. The examples he flagged included a repost by Cultural Affairs Commissioner Alicia Verdugo of an article that claimed Israeli soldiers killed Israeli civilians at the Nova music festival, as well as a repost by the CAC of accusations that Israel has harvested organs in the Gaza Strip.

Another post the commission shared on its Instagram story told individuals that students supporting Israel were putting razors in poster papers intending to harm counterprotesters who tried to tear them down. Gold said he thought these claims were false and antisemitic.

CAC did not respond to requests for comment.

Gold said he encouraged all students to report any incidents of antisemitism to the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

The documents The Bruin obtained also showed there were plans for the Israeli consul general in LA to speak at the rally Nov. 7, which Gold said did not materialize for security reasons.

However, Gold said even though the Israeli consulate general does donate to Hillel at UCLA, it does not influence the center’s programming. He added in a text message sent after the interview that the local Israeli consulate’s contribution to Hillel at UCLA is less than 1% of Hillel’s annual operating budget.

“We have zero formal relationship or connection to the Israeli consulate,” he said. “Students and student groups sometimes get microdonations from the consul general’s office.”

A Bruins for Israel spokesperson said in an emailed statement that they have not applied for or received direct funding from the Israeli consulate.

Mike Cohn, who is the BFI SOLE advisor, also said in an email sent to Bruins for Israel on Nov. 6 that he would directly lead the march.

“Let the students know I will lead the march with them,” he said in the email. “You have done a terrific job with all of the planning!”

Although the Daily Bruin requested an interview with Cohn, Vazquez could not arrange it in time. However, Vazquez said in an emailed statement that Cohn meant that, if the event included a march, he would suggest the best route for those participating. Vazquez added that it is normal for Student Affairs staff to walk at the front, middle and back of a march to promote safety.

The Bruins for Israel spokesperson said in the emailed statement that the planned events aim to make their community’s voice feel heard.

“Bruins for Israel plans events that are important to the students in our community,” they said in the statement. “Our main priorities are ensuring our students feel safe and heard; therefore, our events are always planned with those two points in mind.”

➤Return to Top of Page

2023Nov7- Jewish organizations at UCLA host rally to call for release of Israeli hostages

People gathering in Wilson Plaza to show support for Israel are pictured. The rally, which was co-hosted by UCLA organizations and the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles, featured singing, prayers and speeches. (Joseph Jimenez/Photo editor)

By Dylan Winward and Catherine Hamilton

Nov. 7, 2023 8:44 p.m.

This post was updated Nov. 7 at 11:12 p.m.

Around 200 people gathered in Wilson Plaza on Tuesday to call for the release of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas exactly one month ago.

The event, which began at noon, was hosted by Bruins for Israel and Hillel at UCLA along with the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles and several other organizations. It featured speakers, prayers led by rabbis, the singing of Israel’s national anthem, a march around campus back to Wilson Plaza and chants such as “Bring, bring our people back.”

According to the Associated Press, on Oct. 7, militant group and Palestinian political party Hamas attacked and took hostages from Israeli villages, continuing attacks on the region since then. In response, Israeli bombings and airstrikes, including a series of attacks on apartments in a Gaza refugee camp Oct. 31, as well as a ground invasion have killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, according to AP.

Fewer than 10 counterprotesters attended the event and shouted “Free Palestine.” Members of UCLA’s student affairs team attempted to separate protesters and counterprotesters.

Gabby, an organizer of the rally who was granted partial anonymity for safety reasons, said the rally was held to raise awareness about hostages taken by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack. She added that she felt it was important to share Israeli perspectives because multiple groups supporting Palestine have hosted rallies and protests in recent weeks.

[Related: Hundreds of UCLA students participate in march, walkout for Palestine]

Protest organizers also placed strollers and children’s shoes in Meyerhoff Park alongside posters with the faces and names of Israelis taken hostage. A Shabbat table with empty chairs was also set up in Wilson Plaza to represent those who will miss Shabbat dinners.

Gabby also said she has heard students expressing fears about antisemitism on campus.

“So many students expressed to me that they’ve been feeling scared to walk on campus, so to see their bravery to come out here today and show that they stand in solidarity with the hostages that have been taken really meant a lot to me,” she said.

Natalie Masachi, the president of Students Supporting Israel at UCLA, said in a speech that she encourages attendees to think of Israelis who have died and pray for the return of hostages.

Bella Brannon, student president of Hillel at UCLA, said in a speech that she wants people to support anyone facing violence because of this conflict but added that she thinks some students’ actions seem to be endorsing terrorism. Brannon, a third-year public affairs student – who is also the editor in chief of Ha’Am, another UCLA Student Media publication – said she feels students and professors have equated what she believes is terrorism with Palestinian liberation.

Masachi, a third-year English student, also said that she thinks some events on campus supporting Palestine have been in support of violence that has occurred.

“I am here to call to action,” Masachi said. “We have to direct condemnation of the support for pro-terror and stand by the Jewish students on campus.”

While people are still hurting after the Oct. 7 attacks, some Jewish community members have also come together to pray and hope for the return of hostages, said Carly Sheinfeld, a member of the student board of Chabad at UCLA.

“That is why we fight for Israel, not only because we have nowhere else to go, but because we have no one else to be,” Sheinfeld said.

Mayim Bialik, a UCLA alumnus and actress, said in a speech at the rally that she encountered anti-Zionism while a student at UCLA, adding that she feels students today have a responsibility to advocate for the Israeli hostages.

Bialik, who starred on the television show “The Big Bang Theory,” also called upon students to mourn for both Israeli and Palestinian lives lost rather than engaging in political debate as others might.

“They use the competition of suffering to abdicate the responsibility to have a heart big enough to hold the suffering of the Palestinian people as well as the suffering of the Jewish people,” she said.

California State Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, whose district includes Westwood and UCLA, said in a speech that he is actively providing support for the Jewish community in his district. He added that attending the rally was particularly important to him because his district, District 51, has one of the highest populations of Jewish people in any California assembly district.

Zbur also expressed disappointment in some of the slogans chanted at events on campus that have supported Palestine.

He added in his speech that the Jewish Caucus of the California legislature sent a letter to UC President Michael Drake to argue for more to be done on campuses to protect Jewish students. The letter was also sent to California State University Chancellor Mildred García.

The UC Office of the President did not respond in time to a request for comment.

Shana Adelpour, a fourth-year sociology student, said she attended the event because she believes Israel has a right to defend itself. She added that right before she came to the event, she saw someone tear down one of the signs around campus showing the hostages held by Hamas.

“Who I talk to nowadays, it’s very limited,” Adelpour said. “I’m just scared I’m going to get screamed at.”

Nicole Morovati, a third-year sociology student, said she attended the rally to stand in solidarity with members of her community and to bring awareness to current events in Israel. She added that she feels that this support is important because she thinks there has been a rise in antisemitism at colleges, including UCLA.

“I think showing support and being there for the Jewish community, and for Jewish students during this difficult time, is really important,” she said.

Bialik said in her speech that while the rally called for the return of hostages, it also displayed unity among the Jewish community.

“We are showing the UCLA community that the Jewish spirit is one that will continue to seek justice and pursue it for our people – for all people – because our hearts are big enough,” Bialik said.

AMCHA’s Beckwith’s Makes the Nazi Argument for being Neutral on Nazi-Zionism

One side fits all - Los Angeles Times

By Leila Beckwith

Aug. 28, 2005 | latimes.com

Leila Beckwith is professor emeritus of pediatrics at UCLA.

MOST CALIFORNIANS, including most University of California professors, think that they know the meaning of the term “academic freedom.” They assume it’s the equivalent of free speech and therefore that it is bestowed on faculty by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. Because they conflate academic freedom and free expression, they assume that academic freedom is immutable and eternal and exists without responsibilities.

ARGUMENT: Academics conflate academic freedom and free expression. Academic “freedom” is Our Zionist Freedom to decide what you get to think, say,  present to students, and investigate as a researcher and academic.

These misconceptions lead smart people to conclude that any changes to current academic freedom rules, including a pending amendment to the California Education Code proposed by state Sen. Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside), sully the ivory towers of academia with politics and thought suppression. 

• In truth, political agitators accomplished that corruption of higher education in 2003 when they succeeded in changing the University of California Academic Freedom rules that had stood since 1934.

• From 1934 to 2003, UC regulations defined academic freedom this way: “The function of the university is to seek and transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary, in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts.”

• Those statements subjugated faculty members’ academic freedoms to a student’s right to pursue knowledge. Scholarship and teaching were to be concerned with the logic of the facts. Academic freedom was not the same as 1st Amendment rights.

Yet, in 2002, the University of California, in an egregious act of irresponsibility, backed away from these rules after a UC Berkeley graduate student taught a remedial reading and writing course titled “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance.” By all accounts, including the instructor’s, the course was strongly committed to the Palestinian perspective in the conflict with Israel and taught without any obligation to present alternative views or inconvenient facts. The original course description went so far as to encourage conservative thinkers to seek other classes.

Though the school rewrote that description, then-President Richard Atkinson also began the process of gutting its academic freedom rules, and, by 2003, the university had eliminated the statements quoted above from its regulations and removed any obligation for professors and instructors to aspire to maintain political neutrality in their courses or even inform students that other viewpoints exist. [NEUTRALITY MEANS BEING ANTI-AMERICA, PRO-ZIONIST]

Political ideologues had won a major victory. They revealed to Californians what should have been obvious to everyone: Colleges and universities nationwide have their own definitions of and rules for academic freedom, and those can be modified to advance or impede the academic pursuit of truth and knowledge.

For Diversity–Nah, Not Really–Diversity means Acceptance of Zionist BS

Submission: Faculty should consider pros, cons ahead of diversity requirement vote

Feb. 25, 2015 | Daily Bruin

The original version of this article contained multiple errors and has been changed. See the bottom of the article for more information.

In multiple previous advisory votes, the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences faculty defeated proposed diversity requirements, including a decisive rejection two years ago. This past October, 24 percent of the College faculty voted “yes” and 22 percent voted “no.” This weakness of support for the requirement is striking because the entire discussion leading up to the vote was one-sided. The Committee on Rules and Jurisdiction criticized the official omission of any pro and con arguments on the October ballot. A full and fair informed faculty vote – following clear Senate rules – is the only way to know if there is an unambiguous mandate for the largest redirection of our curricular requirements and teaching resources in many decades.

Requirement advocates have worked very hard to prevent a Senate vote. Their assertion of “curricular autonomy” – that faculty outside of the College should be excluded from decision-making which primarily concerns undergraduates – is misleading. The issue is campus-wide. The main motivation given for the diversity requirement is “improving the campus climate.” However, as evidenced by the Moreno report, most of the racial incidents that revived the push for a diversity requirement were not caused by undergraduates.

The rules are clear: the Senate alone exercises ultimate authority over the most important academic decisions at UCLA, specifically including graduation requirements. When the Legislative Assembly and the Undergraduate Council, with membership across the College and professional schools, voted on this requirement, no questions were raised concerning their undermining of College “autonomy.”

Requirement advocates argued that the Senate ladder faculty should delegate this major decision to the hundred representatives who participated in the Legislative Assembly meeting in November. But in this important matter, we do not know whether they, or the 29 “yes” vote plurality in the College, accurately reflected the will of the remaining 2300 Senate faculty members who have not yet been allowed to vote. It is now time to find out. We urge all faculty to consider the arguments on both sides of this requirement and to exercise their right to vote. The official diversity requirement website, which includes roughly 10 pages of pro arguments, is currently: https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/college-diversity-initiative.

For the other side of the issue, the unofficial website: www.realdiversity.org will present con perspectives on the diversity requirement.

Thank you for your consideration.

Professors David Aboody, William Allen, Leila Beckwith, David Bensimon, Dean Bok, Louis Bouchard, Herbert Davidson, Kym Faull, Peter Felker, Eric Gans, Walter Gekelman, Brad Hansen, Gary Hansen, Jascha Kessler, Carla Koehler, Gail Lenhoff, Daniel Lowenstein, Matthew Malkan, Joseph Manson, George Morales, Daniel Neuhauser, Steven Nusinowitz, Lee Ohanian, Judea Pearl, Claudio Pellegrini, Seth Putterman, David Rapoport, Benjamin Schwartz, Thomas Schwartz, Marc Trachtenberg, Stanley Trimble, Ronald Vroon, Romain Wacziarg, Shimon Weiss, Willima Zame, Benjamin Zuckerman [notably very Jewish]

Correction: Because of an editing error on the part of The Bruin, a sentence was included about the vote website having seven pro arguments and one con argument that was not intended by the authors. In addition, there was a 29 “yes” vote plurality in the College, not a 24 percent “yes” vote plurality.

Top Five Arguments

Source realdiversity via wayback machine

A response to popular arguments made in favor of the requirement:

1. “We need to respond to the Moreno Report” —True, but not relevant. The UCLA External Review investigating bias and discrimination on campus—the widely discussed Moreno Report—made many recommendations. The University has moved rapidly to adopt all of them. However, anyone who actually reads the Moreno Report will find that the entire 34-page report does not contain a single word about the curriculum, and certainly not about any Diversity Requirement. The known perpetrators of the more egregious offenses it considered were mainly staff and faculty.

2. “We need to reduce possible anti-semitism at UCLA”—This disingenuous argument is nearly backwards. The one widely publicized incident of anti-semitism by undergraduates occurred at a recent student government meeting. Since the members of USAC are fervent supporters of the Diversity Requirement, they have inadvertently demonstrated that Diversity courses do not work as advertised. Indeed, Jewish students are NOT asking for a Diversity Requirement, because they know it will not reduce anti-semitism.

3. “A NO Vote would send an unwelcome message”—Misguided. We all want an inclusive campus which encourages the open discussion of diverse perspectives–there is no dispute on that. But since this is not primarily an academic goal, some students may not be enthusiastic about being drafted to serve as symbols of our goodwill. Compulsory interference with their already complicated curricular decisions is the wrong way to send a message to others, and could produce more harm than good.

4. “Many other Universities have Diversity Requirements”—Completely False. 80% of the leading colleges in the country do NOT have a Diversity Requirement. (For the full list, see realdiversity.org )

5. “The Senate (full Faculty) should not be voting on this Requirement”—Incorrect as a matter of rules, as well as practical reality.
The Requirement advocates have a very limited use for democracy. They ignore multiple previous advisory votes of the College faculty which soundly defeated proposed diversity Requirements, including a decisive rejection 2 years ago.

In October, the College was essentially deadlocked on this, with 24% of its faculty voting Yes and 22% voting No. This was in spite of the fact that the entire discussion leading up to the vote was one-sided. Contrary to the Senate rules, the October ballot was accompanied only by “Pro” arguments. The Committee on Rules and Jurisdiction criticized the deliberate omission of any “Con” arguments; there was virtually no official way to even find out that any had been made.

Requirement advocates have worked very hard to prevent a Senate vote. Their assertion of “curricular autonomy”—that faculty outside of the College should be excluded from decision-making which primarily concerns undergraduates, is misleading. The main motivation given for the Diversity Requirement –“improving the campus climate”—is by definition a campus-wide issue, that calls for a campus-wide decision. The racial incidents that revived the push for a Diversity Requirement were not caused by undergraduates.

The rules are clear: the Senate alone exercises ultimate authority over the most important academic decisions at UCLA, specifically including graduation requirements. When the Legislative Assembly and the Undergraduate Council, with membership across the College and the Professional Schools, voted on this Requirement, no questions were raised concerning their undermining of College “autonomy”.

Requirement advocates argued that the Senate ladder faculty should delegate this major decision to the hundred representatives who participated in the Legislative Assembly meeting in November. But in this important matter, we do not know whether they (or the 29 ‘Yes’ vote plurality in the College) accurately reflected the will of the remaining 2300 Senate faculty members who have not yet been allowed to vote. It is now time to find out.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160109162732/http://realdiversity.org/  

AMCHA Leila Beckwith Zionist Bombs Arabs at UCLA

In a nutshell

Beckwith’s RANT DEPLOYING THE BOGUS International Huckster Racketeering Alliance Definition of Anti-semitism, which Defines Any and All Criticism of Israel as Anti-Semitic

Submission: UCLA center violating law with anti-Israel bias

By Leila Beckwith Oct. 3, 2014 Daily Bruin UCLA

Beckwith’s RANT DEPLOYING THE BOGUS International Huckster Racketeering Alliance Definition of Anti-semitism, which Defines Any and All Criticism of Israel as Anti-Semitic

The Middle East is crucial to our national security interests, but it is imploding in internal turmoil and murderous inter-ethnic and inter-religious warfare. It is replete with failed states and barbarism. There are millions of displaced persons and hundreds of thousands of deaths. 

The United States’ efforts, the expenditure of our resources and the lives of our soldiers in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan have failed to bring stability, democracy or human rights. [thank you Ms. NeoCon with your outdated 2003 nonsense] 

Our policies are in disarray.

Yet, since at least 1965, the federal government, under the Higher Education Act, has given millions of dollars to American universities in order to secure accurate and deeply informed knowledge and understanding of international studies, including the Middle East, its ideologies, political movements and economic pressures.

The UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, designated by the federal government as a National Resource Center of Excellence, is one of the 129 international and foreign language centers receiving federal funding. The center received more than $1,300,000 from the Department of Education under Title VI of the Higher Education Act between 2010 and 2013. Part of that funding was to inform the public about the Middle East, and as Congress directed, to do so in a way that would be balanced and unbiased. As the law states, activities funded by Title VI grants would “reflect diverse perspectives and a wide range of views.”

However, a study just released by the AMCHA Initiative – “Antisemitic Activity and Anti-Israel Bias at the Center for Near East Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, 2010-2013” – indicates that CNES violated the law’s requirement to be unbiased and instead promoted anti-Semitic discourse and anti-Israel bias. 

In the study, all public events that were recorded on audiotape or videotaped occurring during 2010-2013, sponsored or co-sponsored by CNES, pertaining to Israel or the Arab-Israel wars, were analyzed for anti-Semitic discourse and anti-Israel bias using a definition of anti-Semitic activity derived from the U.S. State Department [BINGO–THE IHRA BULLSHIT DEFINITION ADOPTED BY TRUMP & NOW DISGARDED], as well as a definition of bias as pervasive criticism of Israeli government policies, society and/or people.

Despite the perfect storm of historical changes occurring in the Middle East – the Arab Spring leading to the Arab Winter, the Egyptian uprisings, Syria’s civil war, the Libyan government dissolution – CNES showed a disproportionate, excessive focus on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of the Middle Eastern countries considered by CNES, more than 1/4 of the public events were devoted to Israel. Of all the Middle East political conflicts, a majority of events – 61 percent – focused only on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

• Moreover, 93 percent of the events discussing Israel showed anti-Israel bias. A large majority, 75 percent, included anti-Semitic content. The discourse demonized and delegitimized Israel, with a significant minority condoning terrorism against Israeli civilians, as well as promoting boycott and divestment efforts.

• The bias is not surprising, as all three CNES directors had publicly expressed support for boycott, divestment or sanctions against Israel, including calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Such a boycott could constitute a violation of the requirement of CNES as a National Resource Center to maintain linkages with institutions of higher education in the Middle East.

• In addition, all three directors, despite directing a program that is intended to encourage study abroad in countries in the Middle East, have publicly opposed the University of California Education Abroad Program in Israel, on the highly dubious grounds that Israel discriminates against Palestinians and deprives Palestinians of the “right to education.”

Although millions of tax dollars under Title VI of the Higher Education Act have been accepted by UCLA, the troubling anti-Israel bias of CNES has distorted its scholarly and educational mission, and has violated its federal funding requirements. By engaging in an obsessive focus on the one stable nation that has established civil rights for its ethnic, religious and gender minorities, CNES failed to analyze and predict the disturbances and chaos in the Middle East. Misled by personal political biases of the directors and other faculty, CNES has failed in its mission to understand and inform the public about this turbulent area that continues to be a crucial threat to the security of the U.S.

As a citizen, taxpayer, professor emeritus of UCLA and faculty member for more than 30 years, I am outraged.

Beckwith is a professor emeritus and the co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit organization that combats anti-Semitism on college campuses across the United States.

➤Return to Top of Page

Pro-[NAZI-fascist AMCHA]-Israel group claims bias in UCLA department

By Jeong Park

Sept. 28, 2014 | Daily Bruin

A Jewish advocacy group based in California is alleging that some UCLA professors and a research center operate with an anti-Israel, and possibly anti-Semitic, bias. Professors named by the group, however, say the group is conflating the criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

On Sept. 17, the AMCHA Initiative, which regularly investigates the University of California for perceived anti-Semitic behaviors, released a report claiming that the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies demonstrates an anti-Israel bias in the events it holds and the speakers it hosts.

The report claims that 93 percent of Israel-related events the center held between 2010 and 2013 had an anti-Israel bias. It also alleges that the center focuses too much on Israel in its programming, with 61 percent of events focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Following the report, nine pro-Israel groups, including Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists and the Zionist Organization of America, signed a petition calling for Congress to investigate the matter.

The petition says the center is violating Title VI of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which calls for federally funded institutions to reflect diverse perspectives in their programming. The center has received about $1.5 million from the Department of Education under Title VI from 2010 to 2013, according to documents the AMCHA Initiative acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Department of Education could not be reached for comment for this article.

On Sept. 3, the AMCHA Initiative also released a list of professors it believes have an anti-Israel bias and claims are possibly anti-Semitic. Among the 218 professors on the list are six UCLA professors.

In response, UCLA released a statement saying it is dedicated to complying with federal laws and respecting the free and open exchange of ideas.

The university also said that speeches and events from Israeli or pro-Israel individuals are part of the university’s regular programming, pointing to centers such as the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

Leila Beckwith, co-founder of the Initiative and a professor emeritus of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said the initiative is trying to protect Jewish and pro-Israel students from being ostracized. Beckwith said professors who signed a widespread petition in support of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel were included on the list.

To Beckwith, signing the petition may make professors anti-Israel, but it does not make them anti-Semitic. She said those who sign the petition are ostracizing Israeli faculty and universities, but there is an important distinction between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israeli policies.

“We don’t know if professors are showing bias in the classroom,” she said. “We are saying that it is likely that these faculty, given their own statement, will not present an objective, fair picture of Israel in their classrooms.”

But some of the professors accused of having an anti-Israel bias or conducting anti-Israel activities said they think AMCHA’s actions infringe on their rights to free speech. They said they think they are speaking realistically about the conflict and that AMCHA is trying to suppress viewpoints that differ from the initiative’s goals.

Gabriel Piterberg, director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies who is also on the initiative’s list, said he thinks the report against the center ignores the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The reality is unbalanced,” Piterberg said. “It’s the reality that there is an asymmetry of power … reflected in the (center’s) programming.”

Piterberg said the center hosts numerous events about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the conflict’s constant presence in current affairs and the high interest it generates among scholars and students.

Aamir Mufti, an associate professor of comparative literature at UCLA, also listed, said he signed the BDS petition as an individual and has not imposed his political stance on students.

“If you are even a reasonably good teacher, you make an effort to … set a discussion so people from opposing views can speak up their voices,” he said. “(People supporting the initiative) don’t frankly seem to understand the difference between the role of a person as a private citizen and a faculty member.”

Arielle Yael, director of public relations for Bruins for Israel, said she thinks the list provides students with critical information.

“I want to be taught by a professor who seeks to empower me, not a professor who seeks to pull me onto his anti-Israel bandwagon,” Yael said.

But other students said they think that the list is not helpful, and instead harms free speech on campus.

Omar Zahzah, a graduate student in comparative literature and the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, said in an email that he thinks AMCHA is an extremist group and that it is trying to silence pro-Palestinian individuals.

“The initiative is an extremist group dedicated to undermining academic freedom,” Zahzah said.

For now, the Center for Near Eastern Studies does not plan to change any of its programming, and Congress has not yet responded to AMCHA’s petition.

https://dailybruin.com/2014/09/28/pro-israel-group-claims-bias-in-ucla-department

Letters to the Editor

By Daily Bruin Staff

Nov. 20, 2006 9:00 p.m.

Anti-Semitism not new on UCLA campus

In our time at UCLA, Holocaust revisionists, raving xenophobic fanatics and other propagators of anti-Semitic hate have been  invited to speak on campus.

We have watched students say “the Jews are the criminals” at a Meyerhoff Park rally for immigrant rights, an  issue for which the Jewish community consistently shows strong support.

We have witnessed Jewish student leaders caricatured as Nazis on Bruin Walk and seen swastikas and words of hate scrawled across the doors of our apartments, our dorm rooms and UCLA’s Jewish co-op.

While we support Professor Emeritus Leila Beckwith’s stance against anti-Semitic hate on campus (“Don’t  ignore hate crimes,” Nov. 15), sensationalizing these incidents risks aggravating the problem.

In confronting the gross misconceptions that cause anti-Semitism, our community stands committed to open dialogue and honest engagement.

Andy Green

Chairman, ASUCLA board of directors

Joseph Miskabi

President, Hillel at UCLA

Jenn Lorch

President, Jewish Student Union

Dalia Eliav

President, Persian-American Jewish Organization

Noah Saeedy

Co-chairman, Mishpacha

Editorial lacked strong resolution

As a UCLA alumna, I felt that the editorial published Friday
(“UCPD’s use of force disturbing, unacceptable,”
Nov. 17) did not make a strong enough statement about the use of
force by police on campus.

In merely calling the action “unacceptable” and
“disturbing,” the editorial tone is conciliatory and
muted.

In a case like this, I would have hoped that the editorial would
call for two things.

First, it would insist on immediate action against the police
officers. They clearly abused their authority in this
situation.

Second, it should have called for the banning of Taser use on
college students.

I hope I am not the only one calling for these measures and that
others will take a stronger stance.

Looja Tuladhar

Class of 2005

USAC president must focus on larger issues

Last week, members of a diverse coalition of student groups
worked hard to educate their peers and engage them in the UC Board
of Regents meeting.

However, instead of applauding these efforts, Undergraduate
Students Association Council President Marwa Kaisey chose to
criticize the group for their outreach methods (“Chalk
graffiti ugly, disrespectful,” Nov. 17).

We recognize that chalking is a nuisance, but with only about
100 black freshmen at UCLA and the Taser incident in Powell
Library, President Kaisey should focus on resolving these
crises.

Instead of simply addressing petty concerns such as chalk
messages, she should be an advocate for the student body.

The job of the USAC president is to prioritize students, not
complain about them.

Jeannie Biniek

Class of 2006

External vice president,

USAC 2005-2006

Jenny Wood

Class of 2006

President, USAC 2005-2006

UCLA corrects Propaganda Lies about what protestors chanted

Correcting misinformation related to campus events

October 27, 2023 | UCLA Newsroom

There is misinformation spreading about a particular chant attributed to people who participated in nationwide rallies held on campuses, including at UCLA. Rally footage of people chanting this particular phrase was captured at the University of Pennsylvania and the video soon went viral because it was misheard as “we want Jewish genocide.” In response, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and USA Today issued corrections of what was actually said, which they report is: “we charge you with genocide.” 

From USA Today’s reporting: An Oct. 17 Instagram post includes a video of protesting students purportedly shouting an antisemitic chant amid the Israel–Hamas war. “‘We want Jewish genocide,’” reads the text superimposed on the video, transcribing what it claims the group was chanting. “This is my Alma Mater. This is the University of Pennsylvania. They are cheering for my death & the death of all Jews.” The transcription is wrong. The group was chanting “We charge you with genocide,” a phrase that’s been repeated at pro-Palestinian rallies around the country. Both the student group that organized the rally and the school’s student newspaper said there were no chants advocating the genocide of Jewish people.

Similarly, at UCLA, there is footage of people chanting the same phrase as part of this nationwide rally. Our staff who were present at the event confirmed that what was chanted by the group was the phrase that the ADL and USA Today reported on.  

Oct. 11, 2023