Strange Bedfellows
Arab student leader distributes article by former KKK Grand
Dragon blaming Jews for September 11 terror attacks
On October 1 the president of New York University’s Arab Students United (ASU) distributed an e-mail to her student group’s list-serve under the words “educate yourself and others.” The material she wanted her group to learn from? An article written by former Klu Klux Klan Grand Dragon-turned politician David Duke.
In the article, Duke writes, “The primary reason we are suffering from terrorism in the United States is because our government policy is completely subordinated to a foreign power: Israel and the efforts of worldwide Jewish Supremacism.”
The article was brought to the attention of TorchPac, NYU’s pro-Israel student group, which condemned ASU’s action. “It’s not acceptable at a university that people should use hate to promote political goals–it’s not acceptable anywhere,” TorchPac Vice President Gregg Kramer told New Voices.
ASU president Nadeen Al-jijakli, however, made no apologies for the substance of the article. “I read the article by David Duke and I’m not going to deny that I agreed with some of its content,” she told the Washington Square News student newspaper. “If I had known his history I would not have sent it out. If the article was written by somebody else I would’ve still sent it out. I feel like the article is valid. I don’t feel like whether the article is anti-Semitic is something I need to explain.”
How Scary!
The Taliban comes to campus
One wouldn’t think that a regime that topples walls on homosexuals and doesn’t allow women to leave their homes unescorted by a close male relative would go over well with American college students.
But at the University of Southern California, the Web site of the Muslim Students Association is peddling (still!) a tape of a speech by a Taliban emissary given to the group in March. (Judging from the speech’s transcript provided on the site he received a pretty warm welcome.)
The Web site touts the video by saying, “Listen to what the Ambassador of the Taleban has to say regarding [among other things]…[t]he truth behind the destruction of the Buddha statues.” (Emphasis added.) The statues in question are two monumental Buddhas, each over 100 feet tall and more than 2000 years old, that were destroyed by the Taliban this past spring. In his speech, the emissary attempted to rationalize the Taliban’s fury toward these inanimate objects. Unfortunately there were no monumental Buddha statues in attendance to present their side of the story.
Say What?
Zionist Organization of America rep embarrasses Zionism
Who are the real Palestinians? According to Zelig Krymko, speaking as campus coordinator for the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), they’re not Arabs but Jews.
“Jews are the true Palestinians,” Krymko told an audience at Rutgers University Hillel, according to The Daily Targum student newspaper. “We refer to [Palestinians] as ‘Arabs who are occupying our land.’ It’s not their country.”
Krymko made this remark during a two-hour presentation in which he gave his perspective on the historical and contemporary situation in Israel.
Rabbi Esther Reed, assistant director of Rutgers Hillel, evidently wasn’t pleased with Krymko’s presentation. “We had expected a more moderate perspective on the situation,” she told The Daily Targum. “I was disappointed in that I had a certain expectation and it was not what happened.”
Morton Klein, national president of the ZOA, told New Voices that Krymko no longer works for the organization. Regarding Krymko’s statement about Palestinians, Klein said: “Even that remark, even though technically it’s largely true, it’s not the way we would have put it necessarily.”
Berkeley’s Fettered Speech Movement
Censors, hackers, and thieves attack student newspaper
The University of California at Berkeley’s student newspaper recently discovered how far the campus has strayed from the ideals of its Free Speech Movement heyday. On September 18, The Daily Californian ran a political cartoon by award-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell dealing with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The cartoon depicted two bearded men in robes and turbans standing beside a book marked “flight manual.” They appear to have just materialized in hell, and one excitedly proclaims, “We made it to paradise! Now we will meet Allah, and be fed grapes, and be serviced by 70 virgin women, and…”
That same day over 120 protesters, who deemed the cartoon offensive to Muslims, occupied the paper’s offices. They demanded representation on the paper’s editorial board and refused to leave unless the paper agreed to print an apology. The paper refused to apologize, noting in a statement that the cartoon “falls within the realm of fair comment.” Protesters had to be arrested and removed by campus police. The next day, hackers posted a false apology on the paper’s Web site.
Bell responded to his critics in an article in The Daily Californian. He said that while he sympathized with Muslim students’ anxieties and condemned anti-Muslim attacks by “un-American bigots,” the protesters had “misinterpreted” his cartoon. He wrote that his cartoon was “a commentary on only those 18 terrorist hijackers.” He explained:
[Bin Laden] and his followers believe that those who murder others and, in the process, “martyr themselves” in the defense of Islam, will reach Paradise when they die. However, Islam’s central tenets are ones of peace, and although I’m no expert on the religion, I am aware that both murder and suicide are cardinal sins in Islam, and those who commit those sins do not go to Paradise, or to Allah. They go to Hell. That is what the cartoon was about. That is all the cartoon was about. Those 18 terrorists and bin Laden’s organization, rather than serving the religion they pretend to practice, are betraying it, and if Islam is true, they will achieve the opposite of what they set out to achieve.
The characters are wearing turbans because that is how Osama bin Laden dresses. That is how his followers dress in the videos we’ve seen them in. It is accurate. Those who are offended at the concepts presented in the cartoon should be offended instead by bin Laden. You should be offended that his actions made a cartoon like this necessary.
But Bell’s critics were not placated. Three student government senators, citing Bell’s cartoon, introduced a bill urging the student government to make the rental rates it charges the newspaper for office space contingent upon whether the publication takes actions to “rectify its complete insensitivity to the needs of the campus.” The student senate later dropped the bill’s rent provision, but passed a measure condemning the paper for running the cartoon and calling for sensitivity training for its staff.
More recently, approximately 1000 copies of the paper were stolen from their racks following its publication of a paid advertisement by the libertarian Ayn Rand Institute entitled “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism.” (The ad also ran in the The New York Times and Washington Post.) The papers were replaced with fliers that condemned the ad and Bell’s cartoon.
“We must take a stand against the continuation of a systematic policy of eliciting and reinforcing hatred and racism from our student newspaper,” the fliers stated. “Until the Daily Cal shifts policy we will not allow business to continue as usual.”
Later that day, someone placed copies of the First Amendment in the paper’s racks, with its reference to freedom of speech and press highlighted.
