MuzzleWatch

By Cecilie Surasky, @CecilieSurasky on Twitter

A few weeks ago, Brooklyn College stood up against a tsunami of whacked out, only-in-NY extremist-Israel politics and refused to either cancel or sever ties with a planned campus talk on the nonviolent Palestinian-led human rights movement known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). (Pictured: Jewish Voice for Peace board member Donna Nevel at Brookyln College Students for Justice in Palestine press conference.)

So it was just a matter of time before the pro-occupation crazies came back with something else equally guaranteed to waste valuable public resources and strike fear in the hearts of cash-strapped students.

This time, the notorious CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld of Tony Kushner incident fame, is back leading a call to sue Brooklyn College for aiding and abetting discrimination against Jews— if Brooklyn College doesn’t investigate and “change policies”.

What happened at the talk on BDS?

Turns out that in a room full of students, community-members and teachers; supporters and detractors; Jews, Muslims and Christians and others—4 students, who happen to be Jewish, were asked to leave by school security during the talk by Palestinian human rights leader Omar Barghouti and superstar philosopher Judith Butler (who is also Jewish.)

Weisenfeld and company are claiming these students were removed because they were Jewish, and they have an attorney threatening to sue the school using Title VI, the landmark federal race and ethnicity-based anti-discrimination legislation that was recently revised to allow Jews to sue. (More on that later.)

Brooklyn College’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter says, reasonably, the students were removed because they were disrupting the event for those around them and did not respond to requests to quiet down. (On any other issue, such removals are standard. In this case, it’s a lawsuit and a press blitz.)

Well, Brooklyn College’s counsel is investigating, as they must with such charges, but here’s the shandah about the whole thing. We know the charge that they were removed because they are Jewish is demonstrably false. In fact it’s ridiculous. Threatening to use Title VI in what is clearly a conflict around differing political views is just one more debasement of the Civil Rights Act, under which title VI is a provision.

As Naomi Zeveloff explained in the Forward article, Coming Up Empty on Title VI:

Historically, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was used during the 1960s to desegregate public schools in the South. It prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin, but does not include religion as a protected category. But in October 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a letter saying that Title VI would henceforth cover members of religious groups on the basis of shared ethnic characteristics, thus opening the door for Jews to file complaints. Several existing cases involving campus anti-Semitism were grandfathered-in then under the newly-redefined rules.

Title VI discrimination complaints can be filed in federal court as civil cases or, more commonly, with the DOE, where they are subjected to administrative review. But anti-Semitism cases put before a court may face a more uncertain review. Unlike the DOE, the U.S. Supreme Court has not, to date, ruled on whether members of religious groups fall under the law’s purview if they have perceived ethnic characteristics.

Which ever route a complainant chooses, in order to succeed, she must show that the institution in question was remiss in protecting a student from harassment due to her race or ethnicity — not just that an act of harassment occurred. A school found in violation can face a range of measures, including loss of its federal funding.

But here’s the kicker– proponents of Title VI inclusion of Jews as a protected category claim they are concerned about anti-Semitism on campuses—an obviously laudable concern. But the successful campaign to open the door to lawsuits from Jewish students was initiated by the pro-settler extremist group, the Zionist Organization of America (now in disarray and without a 501c3 for failing to file tax returns) and championed by various Israel lobby groups. The goal was to use Title VI as a way to criminalize political speech that is critical of Israel by in essence reclassifying it as hate speech.

That’s why, as Zeveloff reported, out of ten cases alleging anti-Semitism filed thus far under the newly expanded Title VI, not one pertaining to Israel has found success.

Last week, at the press conference that launched this latest wave of idiocy, Weisenfeld brought along neal Neal Sher – former Special war Crimes Prosecutor, US Dept. of Justice who said:

I wish to make clear that the paradigm where some groups were “exempt” from the protections afforded by Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act. These federal statutes afford Jewish students the same protection and rights to a safe and unhindered educational environment as their peers in other ethnic groupings. I am prepared to commence legal proceeding s against the City University of New York if guidelines are not adopted which would prevent the violations we witnessed recently at Brooklyn College of the civil and constitutional rights of Jewish students at a Brooklyn College event sponsored by its Political Science department.

Seriously? The room was full of Jews. 50% of the speakers were Jews.

It’s not enough for professional extremist bullies to try to waste everyone’s time and scare people into submission by fabricating enormous crises out of routine, everyday and sometimes uncomfortable life on campuses.

But just as shocking, they have to cheapen the charges of anti-Semitism so grotesquely, by throwing the label whenever possible and hoping it will stick, that they should be held responsible for desensitizing an entire generation to real anti-Semitism. Next time I try to talk about an encounter with real anti-Semitic attitudes and I am greeted with an eye-roll, I’ll know who is to blame.

Meanwhile, the Jewish Public Affairs Council endorsed Title VI and called on Congress to pass laws to strengthen protections, but to their credit expressed concerns about preserving First Amendment rights and freedom of speech.

But one person who isn’t worried is Ken Marcus, the former federal staffer who helped push through the Title VI change, and then left the government to make a career out of… pushing Title VI:

“It is not just that it is failing. It hasn’t really been tried,” said Ken Marcus, a former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “I would say that the Title VI campaign is barely in its infancy.” Marcus’s new organization, the Louis D. Brandeis Center, focuses on civil rights and Jewish students. The OCR recently tossed Marcus’s complaint at Barnard.

They may have had no success so far, but the Brandeis Center is hiring more attorneys now in preparation for more lawsuits on campuses.

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First the good news:

Welcome back to the 21st century NYC LGBT Center!

The Center just posted a statement overturning their absurd two-year ban on allowing Israel-Palestine related programming, which led to the barring of renowned lesbian thinker Sarah Schulman. Now it’s time to write director Glennda Testone (glennda@gaycenter.org) a note of congratulations for finally ending this embarrassing ban— along with a request that Islamophobe Michael Lucas and others who fuel anti-Palestinian bigotry be responded to appropriately under anti-hate policies. ( Lucas lobbied for the ban in response to a Palestinian rights group’s attempt to rent at the center.)

Now the bad news:

Speaking of anti-Palestinian bigotry, within seconds of the NYC LGBT Center’s posting of their new policy, four NY elected officials, led by NYC Council Speaker Christine C. “I just can’t get enough free trips to Israel” Quinn, issued a NY Jewish Community Relations Council inspired statement supporting the decision but then reiterating their irrational and non-fact based terror of a Palestinian-led nonviolent movement to pressure Israel into respecting the human rights of the people it occupies! Weirder, it reads like a Saturday Night Live parody of surreal Israel-obsequiousness. I mean, it’s hard to imagine these pols similarly tripping over themselves to defend the United States from criticism. And why are they even commenting on another country? They are NY politicians. (photo above: 5-17-10 - Michael Miller, Matt Maryles, Christine Quinn, Jimmy Van Bramer, Dan Halloran and Asaf Shariv at the kickoff of Celebrate Israel Week.)

I’m usually suspicious of conspiracy theories, unless of course they involve Scientology!, but you really have to wonder if this all-out scorched earth campaign against a nonviolent justice movement is simply because Israel expansionists want Palestinians to go back to armed struggle and suicide bombing so Israel can crush them and just take the land in one fell swoop, with the world cheering them on. That’s really the only thing that can explain the insane backlash to pretty basic tactics that have been used by social justice advocates since.. forever.

Here’s the whole, difficult to read statement below from the NY electeds, sent to us from a parallel universe where a country that repeatedly flouts international law using one of the world’s great armies, and its bigoted proxies ( here, here and here), portray themselves as victims, while people who are working frankly just to level the playing field for Palestinians are called purveyors of hate. H/T NY QUAIA

(Phan Nguyen over at Mondoweiss has this must-read article detailing the NY JCRC’s free junket racket devoted to ensuring NY elected officials mouth hasbara lines about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, on demand.)

Joint Statement by NYC Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, NYS Assembly Member Deborah Glick, NYS Senator Brad Hoylman, and NYC Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer

Re: New LGBT Community Center Space Use Guidelines

“We support the new Space Use guidelines, terms and conditions being implemented by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center. Their decision to allow groups to have open discussion and to create a resolution process to address complaints of potential hate-related speech is the correct approach. Under the Center’s new guidelines, all parties will have access to rent space to organize around LGBT issues, and the Center will remain a safe space, where hate-related speech will not be tolerated. This will allow the Center staff and board to promote its core mission of providing health and wellbeing services to our community, in addition to providing a safe and secure forum for issues relevant to NYC’s LGBT community.

That said, we want to make abundantly clear that we categorically reject attempts by any organization to use the Center to delegitimize Israel and promote an anti-Israel agenda. We adamantly oppose any and all efforts to inappropriately inject the Center into politics that are not the core of their important mission.

We vehemently oppose the absurd accusations by some groups that Israel is engaged in so-called “pinkwashing”. We find this charge offensive and fundamentally detrimental to the global cause of LGBT equality. These accusations should be understood as just one part of the arsenal of those who seek to completely discredit the state of Israel altogether. In fact, Israel’s highly laudable record in advancing LGBT rights deserves praise, not scorn. Given the very poor record of much of the world on LGBT issues, we should be celebrating Israel’s – or any country’s – LGBT equality advances. We must always encourage countries with strong records of achievement for our community to be rightly and publicly proud so they may set an example for others. We continue to believe that the boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) movement against Israel is wrongheaded, destructive, and an obstacle to our collective hope for a peaceful two-state solution.

We applaud the Center Board and staff for taking this important step. We now hope everyone will respect the Center as a safe space for open and safe discussions. We hope the Center can move forward and serve the LGBT community as it has always done.”

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When I was growing up in Philly, my mother always complained that if we had to live in the heart of a city, it should be New York. New York lived in our dreams as the land of the intellectual vanguard, the world’s playground of creative expression and at times, principled leadership.

But no more—the actions of the leadership of New York’s famed LGBT community center are an inexplicable embarrassment, a medieval-era violation of virtually every principle of free thought and queer social understanding: Gay City News just reported that the center has refused to allow the renowned writer Sarah Schulman to speak about her new book, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International because of its topic. (I suppose if she actually just showed up with the books, they’d have to burn them.)

What’s worse, they seem to have folded entirely under the pressure of a hate-monger with deep pockets, right-wing funder and outspoken pornographer Michael “I hate Islam with all my heart” Lucas— instituting a seemingly lifetime ban on Israel/Palestine related anything.

We’ve written extensively about the roots of the controversy here and here, and Lucas’ views and involvement.

The ban was announced 2 years ago by center director Glennda Testone after Lucas, who thinks of himself as Israel’s best friend, boasted that in just 8 hours he got the Center to give the boot to a “Party to End Apartheid” fundraiser. That would be Israeli apartheid, to be clear. (It’s fine to have a difference of opinion, but there’s nothing criminal or discriminatory about the word apartheid, a word BTW frequently used in Israel and Palestine.)

But let’s be clear— the ban isn’t on just any person or group that cares about Palestinian liberation-and presumably an Israeli dating group could meet there without a problem. It’s in effect a ban on the precise people the center is meant to serve, like Palestinian queers who can not separate their dating lives from their occupation or refugee or inequality-filled lives, and Jews and others like Schulman who have absolutely no problem understanding how queer liberation and Palestinian liberation are linked.

As Sarah Schulman told us, “The Occupation is so indefensible and depraved that its supporters censor rather than risk arguments they cannot justify.”

Amazing, Brooklyn College could stand up to a whole swath of NY elected officials threatening to take away their funding if they didn’t didn’t stamp down on free speech for Palestinian rights, but the LGBT center folded in just 8 hours to the threats of a bigot and presumably his equally deep-pocketed friends.

No standing on principle. No attempt to resolve the situation. Just shameful folding to hate.

Worse, looking at Lucas’ (pictured below) track record, openly hating one religious group, if they are Muslim, does notdisqualify one from renting space or dictating policy at the Center. On the other hand, being a hugely influential queer thinker with an anti-racist analysis makes one worthy of an apparently lifetime ban if one dares speaks the P word.

What on earth does this say about New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center and how deeply has the LGBTQ establishment has lost its compass if this goes unchallenged?

On April 11, the LGBT Center is having its big fundraising dinner. Would be great to see attendees boycott until the ban is overturned, or at least be reminded of the shameful embarrassment of the ban. If the issue were money, the irony is that many of us would gladly donate to make up for the loss, and the LGBT center would be a hero.

Meanwhile, do like Judith Butler did and write executive director Glennda Testone (Glennda@gaycenter.org) a smart and principled note about why she has to overturn the ban.

-Cecilie Surasky

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If you are quiet and can hear a loud cracking noise in the distance, that’s the sound of the Hasbaraniks losing one of their favorite stock charges against the “big, scary, bad” Palestinians. To quote Hillary Clinton when she was held captive to local interests and regularly said stuff she didn’t believe a U.S senator in NY, Palestinian textbooks don’t, “give Palestinian children an education, they give them an indoctrination.” This oft-heard charge about Palestinian textbooks filled with horrific portrayals of Jews has been a lynchpin component of the Israel-as-innocent-victim narrative which AIPAC and company promote everywhere from churches to Congress. All to keep the dollars and protection flowing.

Well, and wait for the deliciously panicked backlash on this, the first scientific study of Israel and Palestinian textbooks, funded by the U.S. State Department, concluded that the stories about all Palestinian textbooks calling Jews pigs and so forth, are just that, stories. As Bruce Wexler, the Yale psychiatry prof who led the study told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “The type of testimony that’s been presented to Congress and to our national leaders has been one person reading selected passages from the books. As a medical doctor, I don’t make decisions based on that type of information.”

And just as important, though not news to any of us who have friends or family with kids in Israeli schools—Israeli textbooks are a serious mess.

It’s hard not to wonder what Freud would say about all this—the Israel-aligned lobby has for years been justifying daily and violent Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians by making the world believe that Palestinians dehumanize Israelis in their textbooks. In fact, the entire campaign of going before Congress, on TV etc.. and repeatedly reducing all Palestinian children to a few lines in some random horrid textbooks is demonization of the worst kind. (Note other demonization offenders like Hasbara line #6, “They don’t love their children the way we love ours.”) And now there’s proof!

The super science-y study with thousands of data points concluded that, as Naomi Zeveloff reported in the Forward, “for the most part, neither Palestinian nor Israeli schoolbooks demonize the other people or refer to them as subhuman.”

Of course there were a few notable but statistically insignificant exceptions - I love the charmingly retro depiction in an Ultra-Orthodox text of a destroyed Palestinian village, now home to a settlement, as a “nest of murderers.” Wow! (Sadly for us and the OMG factor, the study did not also analyze language to describe Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries, women, gays, and Goyim) And a Palestinian book referred to an Israeli interrogation room as a “slaughterhouse.”

It also turned out, neither Palestinian nor Israeli textbook maps are particularly good about showing, um, reality, but one thing you won’t see in a hearing on Capitol Hill or in an American Jewish Committee brochure, the Israeli schoolbooks are significantly worse: 58% of the Palestinian books don’t mention Israel, it’s all Palestine, but 76% of the Israeli books don’t mention the Palestinian territories— it’s all Israel from the River to the Sea. (Remember when newly minted Israeli Minister of Education Yuli Tamir was greeted with open arms howls of derision when she announced that textbook maps of Israel would actually include the Green Line? That was an idea that went nowhere fast. And of course there is today’s defacto administrative form of annexation via cartography, the new Israeli practice of stamping West Bank visitors’ passports with Judea and Samaria.)

There were more harsh depictions of Jews in Palestinian textbooks (84%) than harsh depictions of Palestinians in ultra-Orthodox (73%) or Israel books (49%). That said, given the fact that Palestinians are still living under occupation and in refugee camps, getting illegally evicted from their homes and losing their orchards, it’s hard to imagine a more surreal demand than asking them to portray their occupiers more nicely.

Because of the central role the textbook argument plays in Israeli government propaganda, look for the science-minded Wexler to get a mini-version of the Dershowitz-perfected Goldstone treatment. It will start with attacks on the methodology and move to personal smears. In fact, the Israeli government has already disavowed the report—which is just so predictable and sad. In a world that made sense, you’d think they’d greet the study with a sigh of relief.

—Cecilie Surasky

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A lot has been written in the past few days about the attempts to shut down an event this coming February 7th, at which leading Palestinian rights activist Omar Barghouti and world-renowned scholar Judith Butler (who is also a member of JVP’s Advisory Board) are scheduled to give a talk about Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on the campus of Brooklyn College.

We add below the remarks given by Donna Nevel from Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews Say No! at a February 5 press conference.
We also encourage you to go to www.firealandershowitz.org/ and sign our petition against this kind of bullying.

Remarks by Donna Nevel

I am Donna Nevel from Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews Say
No! I am pleased to be here today to have the opportunity
to speak out in support of Students for Justice in Palestine
and all those at Brooklyn College and across the city
concerned with ensuring that bullying and intimidation do
not succeed in denying students and others the right to
engage in critical examination and inquiry of important
political ideas.

What we have seen happening here is yet another example
of an attempt to suppress and vilify voices critical of Israel
and Israeli government policies, a pattern that has become
far too common in this city and nation-wide.

It’s bad enough that Alan Dershowitz and Dov Hikind have
engaged in a smear campaign. We’ve come to expect
that. But city council members who threaten to take away
city funding merely because they disagree with the views
expressed on a college campus should be ashamed of
themselves and should be held accountable for trying to
interfere in this way. And they must not prevail.

About the topic that has become so controversial and
caused so much condemnation- It needs to be made clear
that Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is a non-
violent response to the Israeli government’s violation of
basic principles of human rights and international law. It is,
in my view, those violations that should be condemned, not
strategies such as BDS that are designed to put an end to
those violations, and the injustices that they inflict on the
Palestinian people.

In the eight years since hundreds of Palestinian civil society
organizations called for BDS — similar to the boycott/
divestment movement against South African apartheid —
it has garnered strong international support. And for good
reason.

It is a common ploy to suggest that criticism of Israel is anti-
Semitic. It is a ploy that trivializes the long and ugly history
of anti-Semitism.

I want to mention that there were over 2,000 signatories to
the Jewish Voice for Peace petition supporting the event and
the President’s decision not to capitulate to those pressuring
the university.

We are heartened that Brooklyn College is resisting the
calls to abandon what higher education should be—a place
for learning, and challenging, and critical thinking, where
students are pushed to imagine and to envision how they
can participate in making the world a better place for all
peoples and for all communities.

With the pervasiveness of Islamophobia and anti-Arab
racism and the targeting of communities of color in NYC,
and with the attempt to silence those whose views on Israel
do not mirror Israeli government or US policy, colleges
standing strong against political opportunism and attempted
coercion are more important than ever.

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The announcement of a prestigious international academic prize doesn’t typically generate endless sturm und drang on the pages of major newspapers around the world, threatening to turn into an international incident. But when that prize is given by a German city, and the recipient is Judith Butler, one of the great thinkers of our time– who also happens to be a vocal critic of Israeli policies—apparently it signifies the end is near.

Within minutes of announcing that Judith Butler, who can best be described as the Mick Jagger of left academia, had won the prestigious Theodor Adorno prize for her extraordinary and wide-ranging body of critical theory work, the hapless judges of the Frankfurt prize were besieged with complaints by those who said it should be revoked immediately.

Writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal,  Richard Landes and Ben Weinthal claimed the decision to give Butler the award would threaten Germany and Israel’s “special relationship”, and compared it to

Germany’s circumcision bans, Berlin sending submarines to a newly belligerent Egypt, and ugly revelations of German behavior in the Munich Olympics terror attack.

Elsewhere in Opposite-landia, the weird through-the-looking-glass world created by those who would defend Israel at all costs, right-wing critics claimed Judith Butler is anti-Semitic.  Judith Butler loves Hamas. Judith Butler is too political. Judith Butler isn’t political enough . Or my favorite, Judith Butler is ignorant.

But the truth is Butler became a lightning rod because one of the world’s best-known philosophers, who happens to be Jewish, is also deeply engaged in questions of Judaism, Jewish ethics and Zionism. Her lifelong investigation of these questions, in the spirit of Arendt and Buber who inspired because they walked their own paths—led her to keep one foot solidly in Jewish culture while placing the other in solidarity with precisely the people much of the Jewish world want us to forget, Palestinians.

Equally unforgivably, her intellectual and personal journey led her to support a movement that mainstream Jewish institutions are desperately trying to claim as anti-Semitic: the Palestinian-led, nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. (My use of the the word desperately is deliberate. As more and more individual Jews and Jewish organizations support some form of boycott or divestment to pressure Israel into being accountable to international law and basic Jewish ethics, the argument that doing so is essentially anti-Jewish reveals itself for the emptiness that it is.)

Butler wrote her own defense:

I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. I received a Jewish education in Cleveland, Ohio at The Temple under the tutelage of Rabbi Daniel Silver where I developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought. I learned, and came to accept, that we are called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its alleviation. But to do this, we have to hear the call, find the resources by which to respond, and sometimes suffer the consequences for speaking out as we do. I was taught at every step in my Jewish education that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice. Such an injunction is a difficult one, since it does not tell us exactly when and how to speak, or how to speak in a way that does not produce a new injustice, or how to speak in a way that will be heard and registered in the right way. My actual position is not heard by these detractors, and perhaps that should not surprise me, since their tactic is to destroy the conditions of audibility.

WWTD? What would Theodor Do?

Back in the late 80s as an undergraduate at Brown, my world couldn’t get enough of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. And when the Matrix films came out, we were all certain the Wachowski (then) Brothers had stayed up late nights imbibing Marcuse and Adorno, and probably something a bit stronger, to come up with their too-close-to home dystopian trilogy.

Reading Adorno helped us understand the signs of fascism and our own willing imprisonment. I suppose his criticisms of mass culture helped herald the rise of the corporatocracy.

Adorno was a big Schoenberg fan. He didn’t go for treacly harmonies, for much the same reasons my mother used to refuse to let us watch the Brady Bunch, though the cynical MASH was OK. Adorno liked dissonance. It revealed the dark truth behind harmonious bourgeois culture. I suppose it was the only thing that made sense to someone who witnessed, and escaped, the Nazi Holocaust. (Real differences aside, it could be said that it took the war to help Adorno and others like him see the underlying brutality and dehumanization that colonized peoples of all kinds have always known firsthand at the hands of “the civilized”. Just ask the Congolese about King Leopold. Or just ask…women.)

This is the realm in which Judith Butler and her work dwells that makes her so utterly inspiring–especially to those of us who aspire to justice in Israel and Palestine while remaining firmly grounded in our Jewishness.

There is Butler’s personal willingness to try to embody the best of the Jewish texts she studies. And her willing look at the dark underbelly of “civilized” cultures (think Pamela Geller ads) which declare some people grievable and others entirely unworthy of grieving. (In that sense, the United States and Israel have more than a special relationship, they are conjoined twins, awash in self congratulatory language about democracy and civilization that obscures the foundation of structural violence that in both cases, has never really ceased.)

Adorno is often quoted for sayng that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. But he also wrote:

“The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating.”

Hold that thought. Let us all, like JB and so many countless others, refuse to cooperate. We must refuse to be that person laughing at a Tel Aviv café while just miles away a captive population in Gaza is bombed ceaselessly, or to simply ask someone to pass the cereal moments after reading again that the US military drone dropped a bomb on a group of civilians, this time a group of women and girls.

Let us refuse to cooperate with the mythical Jewish consensus that to be a good Jew, one must not mourn Palestinians as one mourns Jews, and one must not hold Israel up to those same standards.

This Yom Kippur, I’m going to think about the times I didn’t refuse.

I hope also that some of the people who called Judith Butler and so many like her anti-Semites, simply in order to maker them “inaudible,” will consider the gravity of their actions. But I’m not holding my breath.

(Oh, and by the way, Judith Butler did get that prize after all. And the room of 700 cheered.)

-Cecilie Surasky

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Canada’s Gay and Lesbian Newspaper, Xtra reports on 9/11/12:

Toronto City Council’s executive committee has asked the city manager to rewrite the city’s anti-discrimination policy to prohibit criticism of Israel, which would directly affect funding for Pride Toronto.

Council requested the review in June because some councillors say Pride Toronto’s $123,807 city grant should be contingent on the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) in the Pride parade.

The executive committee vote was a stunning 9 to 1.

We’ve been covering the ups and downs of this remarkable story about efforts to ban two simple words: “Israeli apartheid.” This example of trying to legislate a permanent protective shield around only one country in the world is a dramatic example of similar efforts happening across N. America and Europe driven by groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the American Jewish Committee.

The recent passage of HR35 by the California State Assembly, a resolution that grotesquely conflates criticism of Israel, and pro-human rights activism, with anti-Semitism, exemplifies this disturbing trend.

Most cynical of all- these efforts to run roughshod over free speech rights claim to protect Jews. In fact, they are about protecting the rightwing government of Israel, often from Jews (and of course many others). Meanwhile, no other country in the world, not even the United States, enjoys such protections. Or at least straight-faced efforts to legislate such protections.

And why this debate is only happening around the LGBT Pride Parade is another question altogether-which you can find answered at this ground-breaking conference on Homonationalism sponsored by CUNY in NY.

(more…)

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We said that restrictive funding guidelines written by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of San Francisco, and implemented by the Bay Area’s Jewish Community Federation, would be used as a form of good old fashioned banishment of those who don’t toe the line on Israel. In this letter just released today, see how the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE) was pressured to cancel an entire panel, “Reclaiming Jewish Activism: Re-discovering Voices of Our Ancestors,” organized by members of Workmen’s Circle and Progressive Jewish Alliance. The Jewish Community Federation is a major funder of BJE.

The problem? Not the topic. Just one of the panelists’ associations. Rae Abileah, who works with Code Pink and is a member of the youth wing of Jewish Voice for Peace, happens to be one of the Bay Area’s most inspiring and heartfelt young Jewish social justice activists. She was going to talk about her great uncle, the Israeli peace activist Joseph Abileah.

The great news is that socially and politically diverse SF-based Congregation Sha’ar Zahav has no such problems with the panel (or, to cut to the chase: funding) and is sponsoring the panel there on May 24.

While the JCRC/Fed will argue this is not a message to all young Jews, just to Rae and her many colleagues and friends, it’s clear that this move will resonate far and wide among young people who wonder rightly if there is a future for them inside the Jewish communal world. The letter (full version embedded below) says:

From our discussions, we understand that the event was cancelled by the Jewish Community Library, in consultation with its parent organization, the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE), and with the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), consultant-advisor to the local Jewish Community Federation Endowment. Federation funds support many BJE programs.

The Federation’s 2010 revised funding guidelines, which prohibit grant recipients from associating with organizations and individuals who oppose its strong support for Israel, apparently triggered the cancellation. Of specific concern was panelist Rae Abileah’s work with an organization that opposes occupation profiteering and supports the boycott of products made in illegal Israeli settlements. Ms. Abileah is not officially representing her organization but speaking about the work of her great-uncle, a spiritual Zionist nominated by fellow musician Yehudi Menuhin for numerous peace awards.

Six decades after McCarthyism’s assault on progressives and their values, we reassert that censorship by association is dangerous and unconscionable: that it subverts truth, unity, and democracy. Need we point out the chilling effect of the Federation’s exclusionary funding guidelines –adopted in response to criticism of its support for the 2010 Jewish Film Festival, after screening of a documentary about Rachel Corrie — on dialogue about Israel within our community.

Here’s the whole letter. Click on first button at bottom of image for a full screen view.  Hover over other buttons to find those that allow you to share or download. Or go here.

Inspired by the attempts to police thought here in the Bay Area, Jewish Daily Forward editorial cartoonist Eli Valley has an old cartoon that refers to the “Frisco way- toe the line or say hello to the blacklist.” h/t Richard Silverstein. Seems appropriate.

-Cecilie Surasky, Muzzlewatch

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Breaking news/a good day for free speech: despite extensive efforts by the new Amcha Initiative to get Israeli historian Ilan Pappe booted from Cal State University campuses, where he is scheduled to speak next week, the presidents of Cal State Fresno, Cal State Northridge, and Cal Poly have taken a strong, unanimous stand in support of free speech on college campuses.

If you’re near any of these campuses, please go hear Ilan Pappe speak the week of February 20th. He’s a brave, important scholar whose analysis and insights are invaluable to understanding Israel and Palestine. He’s speaking at Cal State Northridge, Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and Cal State Fresno.

In the attempt to censor Pappe, who is a Jewish Israeli, UC Santa Cruz Hebrew lecturer Tammy Rossman-Benjamin, under the aegis of her new group, “The Amcha Initiative: Protecting Jewish Students,”  recently sent a letter to the president of the CSU system against Pappe and his CSU hosts. The letter is a prime example of doublespeak, emphasizing – using bold font and capital letters - that “are NOT asking that these three events be cancelled or that Ilan Pappe be censored.” (emphasis in original)

What, then, were they asking for? For the Cal State campuses and Cal Poly to “rescind all … sponsorship and support” from the Pappe events. What does that mean, exactly? Removing the events from campus and preventing the faculty from hosting Pappe in their official capacity. So no, that wouldn’t exactly be censoring Pappe – he could still speak off-campus, we presume – but it would surely be censoring the faculty who invited him, making a mockery of the freedom of intellectual inquiry and free speech that are so essential to college campuses.

There’s more to this story, too. The Amcha letter claims that Pappe’s event is propaganda, not education, and cites the political activism of the faculty who invited him (including the Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at CSU-Fresno) as evidence. This claim that political people can’t be interested in education, or that people can’t simultaneously be committed to a political cause and to rigorous scholarship is both insulting and revealing. Revealing because it suggests on which side of the scale Rossman-Benjamin, an educator paid by the state of California, would fall.

And today, Rossman-Benjamin’s efforts failed. The presidents’ statement is strong and clear. In it, they state that “Universities are places where debate, discussion and free ideas are welcome and encouraged. … Academic freedom and freedom of speech are … cornerstones … of a functioning democracy.”

That’s right – free speech, higher education, functioning democracy are all deeply intertwined.

And moreover, they say, “Universities are charged with teaching students how to think for themselves….We seek to instill in students the tools to fairly and intelligently assess all data and views, as well as the personal integrity and values to come to a rational and reasonable conclusion.”

Exactly. They trust the learning process. They trust that students are intelligent and capable and have integrity, and can learn how to assess data and opposing, conflicting viewpoints.

That is, their educational philosophy is the opposite of Tammy Rossman-Benjamin, who has been the most visible leader behind a growing campaign to eliminate from college campuses virtually any criticism, however mild, of Israeli human rights practices.

In 2010, Rossman-Benjamin succeeded in getting Israeli peace activists kicked off of UC Santa Cruz campus. In March 2011, she – together with the SF Jewish Community Relations Council and the ADL - failed to do the same for a conference on Palestinians legal rights at UC Hastings (though they did get Hastings to pull its “name and brand” from the proceedings.

Also in March 2011, Rossman-Benjamin filed a complaint against UC-Santa Cruz, her employer, with the federal Office on Civil Rights, under the newly revamped anti-bullying guidelines (Eyal Mazor wrote a report on these guidelines for Muzzlewatch here. Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint alleges a “hostile environment” for Jewish students at UC-Santa Cruz and fills 29 pages with reports mainly about human rights activists speaking on campus. According to this complaint, any criticism of Israel is “anti-semitic” and “inciting hatred” against Israel – which, according to Benjamin, automatically means against Jewish students, too. We expect the Office of Civil Rights to dismiss this complaint: despite Rossman-Benjamin’s statement in the Forward suggesting that investigation itself proves the validity of her claim, if a complaint is filed, the OCR must investigate, like firefighters responding to a fire.

Which brings us back to the Amcha letter on Israeli historian Ilan Pappe- it says that hosting the Jewish Israeli historian on campus “cannot help but create a hostile environment for Jewish students” at these three campuses. That language sounds a lot like a threat, or maybe a promise. Are these campuses next on Rossman-Benjamin’s list for an Office of Civil Rights Title VI complaint?

And here’s the great letter from the Cal State Presidents:

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Berkeley, CA’s Middle East Children’s Alliance broke the news yesterday that the exhibit of children’s artwork from Gaza that they had worked on for months with Oakland’s Children’s Museum of Art was suddenly canceled by the board before the planned September 24 opening reception. The show featured drawings by children about Israel’s infamous Operation Cast Lead, the military assault of December 2008-January 2009 that led to the deaths of some 1,400 Palestinians, over 300 of them children.

(Check regularly at mecaforpeace.org for updates and planned actions- they won’t be taking this lying down.)

MECA said in a statement:

The Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland (MOCHA) has decided to cancel an exhibit of art by Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip. The Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), which was partnering with MOCHA to present the exhibit, was informed of the decision by the Museum’s board president on Thursday, September 8, 2011. For several months, MECA and the museum had been working together on the exhibit, which is titled “A Child’s View From Gaza.”

MECA has learned that there was a concerted effort by pro-Israel organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area to pressure the museum to reverse its decision to display Palestinian children’s art.

Barbara Lubin, the Executive Director of MECA, expressed her dismay that the museum decided to censor this exhibit in contradiction of its mission “to ensure that the arts are a fundamental part of the lives of all children.”

“We understand all too well the enormous pressure that the museum came under. But who wins? The museum doesn’t win. MECA doesn’t win. The people of the Bay Area don’t win. Our basic constitutional freedom of speech loses. The children in Gaza lose,” she said.

“The only winners here are those who spend millions of dollars censoring any criticism of Israel and silencing the voices of children who live every day under military siege and occupation.”

Recognizing that the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council has an established track record of targeting Palestinian cultural expression, I wrote directly to JCRC Executive Director Doug Kahn to find out if they were involved in the board’s sudden decision to cancel the show. Indeed it seems they were, though perhaps not alone. This was his response in full:

East Bay JCRC, working closely with the Jewish Federation of the East Bay, shared with the leadership of MOCHA our concerns about the inappropriateness of this exhibit given the fact that MOCHA – an important and valued community institution – serves very young children.

(MOCHA has only stated that they received complaints “from Jewish groups as well as others in the community.”)

However, it doesn’t seem likely that this is about concerns for children’s sensitivities to war imagery. As the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out in its coverage of the incident today, MOCHA has a significant track record of showing the artwork of children living under war, including WWII, without incident. These images apparently aren’t substantively different.

This is, however, about giving voice to Palestinians-in this case children- who endured a simply extraordinary attack on an illegally captive population of 1.5 million people otherwise known as Operation Cast Lead.

The Israel government and its proxies pulled out all of the stops to undermine criticism of the Operation which drew nearly universal condemnation and triggered massive protest marches around the world. An unprecedented smear campaign was launched against a respected Jewish South African jurist named Richard Goldstone who led a UN task force examining Israeli and Hamas war crimes.

The canceling of the art show should be seen in the context of the Goldstone smear campaign, as well as previous successful efforts by a handful of Bay Area Jewish communal organizations to determine what Palestinians can and cannot say. (In contrast, exhibit organizer, the Middle East Children’s Alliance, enjoys significant Jewish support, and the Bay Area chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace is one of many exhibit co-sponsors.)

In 2007, the JCRC pressured San Francisco State University to change the content of a mural dedicated to the late great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. It’s worth looking at the mural and then reading the JCRC’s critique to understand the depth of their fear of imagery that is so essential to Palestinian memory of fleeing or being expelled from their homes to make way for the then new state. It is odd, to put it mildly, to read Jewish communal professionals so closely aligned with the Israeli Consulate offering in depth art critiques of Palestinian symbolism in a policy-making capacity.

The JCRC was also involved in a deeply messy battle, along with the Anti-Defamation League, over the content of a San Francisco mural painted by young members of the nonprofit H.O.M.E.Y. which works with at-risk kids in San Francisco’s mission district. Not surprisingly, the groups’ insistence that they represented the vast majority of Jews in the Bay Area-an area known for its commitment to independent thought and open artistic expression– triggered significant Jewish opposition. And of course the JCRC is behind the highly controversial restrictive funding guidelines that essentially bar (or should I say threaten to bar) critics of Israel , including BDS proponents, from speaking prominently on panels of institutions funded in some way by San Francisco’s Jewish Federation.

But something tells me that this cancellation of Gazan children’s art, some of which you see here, may well cross a line for a lot of fence-sitters. While I reject the argument of parity that only applies to Palestinian stories, it certainly would have been wiser to lobby the MOCHA board to either work with MECA on adapting the exhibit or to hold an exhibit-like the Israeli government and others have - of artwork by the children of the Israeli city of Sderot rather than cancel the Gazan exhibit.  And to be fair, perhaps they were lobbied to do that but the board chose to wash their hands of the entire issue. We don’t know. I myself would have attended exhibits of children’s art from Gaza or Sderot, and brought my young son. But instead, we have what amounts to yet more erasure. The Israeli government has in essence locked the over 60% of Gazans who are children behind a wall and thrown away the key and forgotten entirely about them. Now the rest of us are supposed to forget about them too.

In the meantime, this must feel like deja vu all over again for MECA. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported about this incident in late 2005:

MECA had teamed up with the Berkeley Art Center and Alliance Graphics to present an exhibit last November and December called “Justice Matters: Artists Consider Palestine.” In their works 14 Palestinian and American artists addressed Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine.

The artists, MECA and the Berkeley Art Center were attacked by the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and other people who claimed to represent the mainstream Jewish community. According to Jos Sances, curator of “Justice Matters,” “there was even an effort to close the show down and have the city withdraw its annual support for the Berkeley Art Center.”

Fourteen rabbis (one for each artist?) visited Berkeley’s mayor to condemn the exhibit. The artists were charged with glorifying violence and terrorism, perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes and even lying about their own history.

On the other hand, there was support from the community and e-mails to the Berkeley Art Center included comments like: “A powerful, scathing experience. Thank you for it” and “It was very thought provoking to see the other side.” Even an Israeli offered ”my admiration for your courage in showing this important protest art.”

MECA’s Barbara Lubin says the mayor of Berkeley stood up to pressure and the show went on. The level of denial about Israeli human rights violations has dropped so dramatically in many Jewish communities in recent years—synagogues everywhere across the country are split — that I wonder if 6 years later most of those rabbis would have the same response to challenging art. I suppose we’re about to find out.

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