Israel Matzav

Silencing dissent in America

In her weekly column in the weekend JPost, Caroline Glick suggests that former US ambassador to Israel Dore Gold ought to buy himself a flack jacket for his appearance at Brandeis University on Thursday.

Caroline quotes from an email that I saw this past week from one Jonathan Sussman, a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society - a group that pursued violence against the American government in the '60's and that sponsored Obama buddy Bill Ayers' appearance on Brandeis' campus. By the way, Ayers was a founder of SDS - he's far left in the 1970 wanted poster at the top of this post). Here's the email in full (except that I have deleted the email addresses and links and modified the expletive):

From: "Jonathan M. Sussman"
To: sds
Subject: Goldstone Forum Action Planning - Wed. @ 10!
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:32:19 -0400 (EDT)

Hey!

As many of you know, Brandeis will be hosting a forum next Thursday, 11/5, to discuss the Goldstone Report, a report from the United Nations which determined that Israel used excessive force in its occupation of Gaza. Believe it or not, this was poorly received within the Zionist community. Thus Brandeis is hosting a forum between the report's author, international jurist Richard Goldstone, and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold. Full details here: http://brandeis.edu/now/2009/october/goldstonegold.html.

Many of us are concerned that this forum is inherently slanted, as it contrasts 'nuetral' international opinion with a wildly pro-Zionist message, excluding voices from the Palestinian community. In light of this, activists across campus will be meeting this Wednesday, 10/28 @ 10 PM in the Village C Lounge to discuss a possible response. Possibilities include inviting Palestinian speakers to come participate, seeding the audience with people who can disrupt the Zionist narrative, protest, and direct action.

Please come and help us coordinate a response!

F**k the occupation,
Jon


ETAILS ANNOUNCED FOR NOV. 5 CAMPUS FORUM ON CONTROVERSIAL U.N. GAZA REPORT
Oct. 21, 2009


A Special Forum: The Challenge of the U.N. Gaza Report

[NOTE: MEDIA WISHING TO COVER THIS EVENT MUST REGISTER BY EMAILING
nealon@brandeis.edu NO LATER THAN 5 P.M., TUESDAY NOV. 3

Event Date: Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009
Time: 5-7 p.m.
Location: Brandeis University, Levin Ballroom, Usdan Student Center

Featured speaker: Justice Richard Goldstone, head of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, and chairman of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis, and Respondent: Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, will exchange views on the Gaza report’s findings and discuss its assertions that Israel and Palestinian fighters committed war crimes during three weeks of fighting in the Middle East last winter. The report said there is evidence of war crimes on both sides and that the Israelis made disproportionate use of force.

This will be the first time that Goldstone and a senior Israeli figure publicly discuss the report, which is the focus of international controversy. Israel and its supporters have charged the report is deeply flawed in mandate and content, and fails to take into account Israel’s security situation. The findings have been endorsed by the U.N. Human Rights Council and many leading Palestinians.

The forum is cosponsored by Brandeis’s International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.

Free and open to the public; limited seating. Doors will open at 4:30 p.m. The discussion will be streamed live on the Brandeis University Web site, and also will be available on the Web site for later viewing.

Click here to read the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.

Click here to read the official Israeli response.

Click here to read the Ethics Center's “Ethical Inquiry” research on proportionality.

Caroline points out that although Sussman is 'small fry' ("A brief Web search indicates that Gold's would-be silencer divides his time fairly equally between publishing rambling, Communist verses to paramours and calling for the overthrow of the US government."), he is symptomatic of a much larger problem on US college campuses today.

The problem is that Sussman's planned "direct action" against Gold is not an isolated incident. On college campuses throughout the US, Israelis and supporters of Israel are regularly denied the right to speak by leftist activists claiming to act on behalf of Israel's "victims," or in the cause of "peace." In the name of the Palestinians or peace these radicals seek to coerce their fellow students into following their lead by demonizing and brutally silencing all voices of dissent.

This, by the way is true regardless of where the speaker fits on the pro-Israel spectrum. Earlier this month former prime minister Ehud Olmert - who during his tenure in office offered the Palestinians more than any of his predecessors - could barely get a word in edgewise above the clamor of students at the University of Chicago cursing him as a war criminal.

While many commentators claim that the situation on college campuses is unique, the fact is that the attempts of leftist activists on campuses to silence non-leftist dissenters regarding Israel and a host of other issues is simply an extreme version of what is increasingly becoming standard operating procedure for leftist activists throughout the US. Rather than participating in a battle of ideas with their ideological opponents on the Right, increasingly, leftist activists, groups and policy-makers seek to silence their opponents through slander, intimidation and misrepresentation of their own agenda.

Caroline looks at the J Street Jewish anti-Israel lobby as being symptomatic of the problem and argues that J Street is out of sync with the Jewish community.

Just how profoundly out of synch these positions are with the American Jewish community was made clear with last month's publication of the American Jewish Committee's 2009 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion.

According to the survey, a majority of US Jews oppose the Obama administration's call for the prohibition of Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. Similarly, the vast majority of US Jews rejects the call for Israel to surrender parts of Jerusalem to the Palestinians; believes the cause of the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the Arabs' desire to destroy Israel rather than the absence of a Palestinian state; and supports Israel's right to defend itself against Palestinian terror. A whopping 94 percent of American Jews believe the Palestinians should be required to accept Israel's right to exist as a precursor to any viable peace. Finally, a solid majority of American Jews supports either a US or an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear installations.

I hope Caroline's right. And it's time for the rest of us to stop being terrorized by the likes of Sussman and J Street.

Especially for those of you in the US, read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:15 PM