Kesher Talk

Letter to the Editor. The Jewish Week published this report on the Columbia conference on Academic Integrity and the Middle East. I just sent them this letter:

To the Jewish Week,

There are many inaccuracies in the article about the Columbia conference on Academic Integrity and the Middle East. I was in the main auditorium.

The man who said he had been shot by the IDF did not "rise to ask a question," as your reporter claims (implying that he waited until a Q&A session). He interrupted Chesler's speech when she said something about the IDF taking more precautions to be fair than any other army in the world. His was the first interruption of any speech, and that set the tone.

Chesler did not equate "anti-Israel activists on Duke University’s campus" with the KKK and the Nazis. She specifically equated the International/Palestinian Solidarity Movement - which holds its conferences at different campuses every year - with the KKK and the Nazis. Read their platform and reports from their conferences and tell me they don't sound like KKK or Nazi rallies.

As for Chesler's other statements, she gave examples to support them, and you can find them in the news on any given day. She was just telling the truth. I assume if your reporter had heard a European Jew warn Americans against the rise of the Nazis in 1936, she would have concluded that person was being "emotional."

I don't condone conference attendees threatening reporters, but I do empathize with them. As I saw both of the protestors leave the hall (yes, there were only two of them), I thought to myself, "The media is going to follow them and make them the story," because that's what often happens, and the audience knew it.

As the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group (http://www.iabolish.com/) and personal rescuer of 2500 black African slaves of Arab Islamists, Charles Jacobs is a giant in the human rights world. The Africans who spoke that day told of their personal experiences with Arabs enslaving them, trying to eradicate their own indigenous version of Islam, or persecuting them for being Christian, all of which can be verified by reading the news. Your reporter summed up their testimony with half a sentence and no direct quotes, while the treatment of the reporters and Jacobs' comments on academia got several paragraphs. Was the audience wrong about the reporters?

Your reporter states "Beery was booed." There were a few sporadic boos, and several people respectfully took issue with his statements, along the lines of what Jacobs told the Forward: "It's more than [the student's] story now . . . Their story is harassment and intimidation. The story now includes not how what's being taught is taught, but what is being taught, and who has captured these departments."

If Beery wants to be concerned for mature adult politically savvy professors who are quite capable of taking care of themselves, that's his business, but the conference description and list of speakers made it clear that the conference was about the larger issue, which is as pivotal in our times as the isolationist antisemitism of the 1930s was then.

SPME will be making videos available of the conference, and everyone can make up their own mind who said what. In the meantime, you can read Chesler's speech here:
http://web.israelinsider.com/Views/5139.htm

Judith Weiss

UPDATE: Mary emails me with a comment that Blogger wouldn't let her post:

Also in the same article:

Immediately following the speech by Jacobs, in which he introduced a small band of black Sudanese to talk about their torture by Arabs, the documentary was screened. As the film, which has gone through a number of edits, ended, a few students featured in it spoke.

The black Sudanese didn't talk about their "torture by Arabs" - they talked about an Islamist Sudanese government that had legalized slavery. They talked about a government that declared Jihad on all infidels and subsequently killed millions of people.

Was that reporter taking tokes in the bathroom during their speech?

posted by Judith @ 3/15/2005 12:14:00 AM