Student Fees Fund UCI Anti-Semitism Week
Joe Wolf | May 10, 2010 | Comments 8
The Muslim Student Union (MSU) typically receives approximately $6,500 from student fees to host their annual Anti-Semitism Week on the UC Irvine campus, while students face yearly increases in tuition and fees. Especially shocking is that the university administration does not allow pro-Israel groups to reserve meaningful space on campus to confront MSU’s politically-driven Islamist ideology.
On Ring Road, near the flagpoles, many anti-Israel students (most of whom are Muslim) will yell for the destruction of the only secular democracy in the Middle East. Given past events, it is likely that the most extreme students will dress in solidarity as terrorist fighters, bearing garments worn by Hamas and Hezbollah jihadists. If the past repeats itself, Muslim students will openly threaten Jewish students in front of indifferent police officers.
In May 2008, a Jewish student was followed to her car and surrounded by six MSU members. In the presence of a police officer they jumped onto the hood of her car and photographed her face, vehicle identification number and license plate. This criminal act was justified by the UCIPD as the “culmination of a tit-for-tat ethnic squabble.”
As in years past, your $6,500 will likely fund posters that spread the false quote of the first Israeli Prime Minister stating that Jews must use terror tactics to chase out Arabs during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Your $6,500 will fund a speech by Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who in 2007 gave a talk on our campus titled “UC Intifada.” Malik Ali is a top leader of the As-Sabiqun movement, whose goals are to “enable Islam to take complete control of our lives, and ultimately, the lives of all human beings on Earth.” If you attend his speech this week you might hear that “the Israelis were in control of 9/11, [which] was staged to give an excuse to wage war against Muslims around the world.” Additionally, don’t be surprised if Malik Ali says “there will be peace when [the Jews] are gone and when we are in control again.”
Your $6,500 will allow Norman Finkelstein (a man who was denied tenure at a tier three university) to lecture students at a tier one university on why he stated “my chief regret is that I wasn’t even more forceful in publicly defending Hezbollah.” Your $6,500 will enable Hatem Bazian to make statements such as “there is no evidence of a major [ancient] Jewish civilization” when he discusses the roots of the conflict, despite archeological evidence to the contrary. If this wasn’t enough, you can also listen to others explain social inequalities in Israel, despite the fact that Muslim Israelis have the same rights as Jewish Israelis and that these 1.2 million Muslims have more rights than Muslims in any Arab state.
Your $6,500 will promote a fabricated view of Israel’s actions. Despite desperate pleas, the UCI administration has refused, as in years past, to allow pro-Israel groups to reserve adequate space on campus during these events to dispute exaggerated claims. In addition, while the administration has a history of condemning specific acts considered hurtful by other groups, they refuse to condemn any speech if it is deemed anti-Semitic.
The climate of a university campus deteriorates after false claims are presented without the ability for their sources to be challenged. Considering the nature of these events and the lack of administrative response, it is no wonder why UC Irvine, one of the highest ranked research universities in the world, is one of the most viral brewing grounds for hatred in our country. To see shocking first-hand examples, search YouTube for “Welcome to UC Irvine” and “UCI Intifada.”
The basic truth is that Israel has been trying to achieve peace ever since it was founded 62 years ago (an event referred to by MSU as “Nakba,” meaning “catastrophe”). Every military policy Israel implements is in self-defense from some of the most horrific human rights violators in the world who openly boast about their use of civilian human shields. As Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, stated in 2006, “if Israel were to put down its arms, there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no more war.”
The Hamas charter calls for the murder of all Jews worldwide. However, don’t expect MSU to acknowledge the vile nature of a terror organization for which they cheer.
As long as the administration condones hate speech by speakers such as Amir Abdel Malik Ali (by refusing to condemn controversial statements), the safety of the student body remains highly uncertain given how often he preaches, “sooner or later, today’s Muslim students will be the parents of Muslim children. And they should be militants.” Unfortunately, unless you take action, your student fees will continue to fund hate and terror at UC Irvine. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Joe Wolf is a third-year physics Ph.D. student. He can be reached at wolfj@uci.edu.
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Sorry, but you’ve failed to post anything but biased internet sources. Due to the staggering amount of problems with your logic in this article, all I can say is this: Learn to research.
My article is almost entirely focused on how student fees fund a student group that invites speakers who expose the campus to hate speech. In addition, many of their speakers and many MSU members openly support terrorist organizations: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm
See the response by Chancellor Drake to what happened on May 13th:
Incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8OJvR7hAT8
Response: http://www.chancellor.uci.edu/100515_response.php
As for the police report, I personally know both the woman involved and the witness to the event, who was also threatened in front of police officers with no response. There was no twisting involved. To see further examples, visit http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/uc-irvine-still-enforcing-sharia-law/
The three of you are mostly focusing on one paragraph in my article. I was given a strict word limit, and thus I was not able to expand further on my comments towards Israel. If you would like to learn more about the history of the state and the region, I would recommend looking through this booklet, which provides many sources (pages 14-17 discuss much of the controversial issues):
http://www.emanuel.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=4376
If you would like to read more about the conflict from a site with additional sources, visit:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mftoc.html
Yes, Israel has made mistakes. But why are they the sole focus of attention? Many of these groups that claim to be pro-Palestinian are actually anti-Israel. If they were truly pro-Palestinian, then they would recognize and spend an proportional amount of time on the largest threat to the safety and security of the Palestinian people: the Arab world and the terrorist organizations for which they so proudly cheer. Below are some examples.
http://www.hudsonny.org/2010/03/what-about-the-arab-apartheid.php
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may162010/palestinian-return-fl.php
http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article54490.ece
I hope that these links provide you with additional information that you find to be of use.
Kind regards,
Joe Wolf
well said, JS
The logic that justifies Israel’s actions based on its being “the only secular democracy in the Middle East” would justify slavery and Indian genocide because in the late 18th century the U.S. was the only secular democracy in the world.
Really, I cringe for the physics department. How embarrassing.
Let’s organize an annual “Arab Apartheid Week,” which would highlight the decrepit state of human and political rights throughout the Arab world.
There is a solid case to be made that the Arab states remain the last great outpost of despotism and tyranny on earth, and people need to be reminded as much. Indeed, the Arab world today is a living encyclopedia of outmoded forms of government, from sultanates such as Oman and emirates such as Qatar, to thuggish dictatorships such as Syria and dynastic monarchies along the lines of Jordan. It may be a political scientist’s dream, but it is a nightmare for the hundreds of millions of Arabs chafing under oppression and tyranny.
Basic and fundamental freedoms such as personal autonomy and individual rights are routinely trampled upon, and ethnic and religious minority groups suffer extreme discrimination and
intolerance. Just ask Coptic Christians in Egypt, Baha’is in Iran or Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia for starters.
This was borne out most recently by a report issued by Freedom House, the independent Washington-based group that advocates for freedom worldwide. Its annual survey, “Freedom in the World 2010,” would make for eye-opening reading for all those who cry “apartheid” whenever they see a flag with a Star of David.
Consider the following findings:
Of the 18 countries in the Middle East that Freedom House surveyed, only one is considered to be “free.”
And just who might that be? Yep, you guessed it: Israel.
Not a single Arab country – not one! – did Freedom House consider “free.” Three Arab states – Morocco, Lebanon and Kuwait – were labeled “partly free,” while 13 other Arab states as well as Iran merited the dubious distinction of being branded as “not free.”
In effect, then, this means that of the approximately 370 million human beings currently residing in the Middle East, only 2 percent enjoy true freedom – namely those who live in the Jewish state.
So much for “Israeli apartheid.”
NOT SURPRISINGLY, in a press release announcing the report’s publication, Freedom House concluded that “the Middle East remained the most repressive region in the world.” It is this message that Israel and its supporters need to begin highlighting. By casting a spotlight on the subjugation, oppression and tyranny that typify nearly the entire Arab world, we can open some eyes out there and educate the Western public as to who really shares their democratic values.
As Prof. Bernard Lewis has written, the Arab states are little more than “a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.”
An annual Arab Apartheid Week, held on campuses and at community centers, could be an effective vehicle for driving home this fundamental truth.
Doing so will reframe the debate. More importantly, it will help Westerners to finally begin recognizing the Arab regimes for what they are: a dangerous mix of despotism and dictatorship.
Joe Wolfs America would be one where any Israeli hasbara character can claim anything and everything against Moslem Americans. But the Moslem Americans dare not open their mouths.
Thanks Joe. By twisting a police report, claiming Israeli leaders never advocated ethnic cleansing although many of them clearly did you are showing your own bigotry.
$6,500 of our tax dollars goes to funding the annual Muslim Students Union “Hate Israel Week”? And I thought that Norman Finkelstein flies into Irvine every year for the weekly “Bash Israel Bash” just for the fun of it.
This piece, aside from being embarrassingly biased, shows a remarkable lack of research. You cherry-pick examples of unreasonable hatred toward Israel as if all criticism were somehow unfounded. You have absolved Israel of wrongdoing by quoting their own statements and the transgressions of a terrorist cell on the other side of the fence.
Hopefully the physics program holds you to a slightly more exacting set of standards for logic and research — were you to write this way in support of a scientific position you would be laughed out of the peer-review process.
Many on either side of this conflict are pure zealots, and I think both have shown a shocking lack of regard for decency as well as rational discourse. This piece would sound at home on an inflammatory pamphlet, though it has somehow been published in this paper as something more than an angry letter to the editor.