[News] Lawyer who says Palestinians don't exist sues San Francisco university
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Jun 23 12:29:46 EDT 2017
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/lawyer-who-says-palestinians-dont-exist-sues-san-francisco-university
Lawyer who says Palestinians don't exist sues San Francisco university
Charlotte Silver
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/charlotte-silver> - 23 June 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A lawyer who denies that Palestinians exist is suing San Francisco State
University
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/san-francisco-state-university>,
alleging the administration there fosters a hostile environment for
Jewish students.
But faculty and civil rights lawyers say the lawsuit, filed on behalf of
six plaintiffs, is yet another attempt at censorship by conflating
criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
The complaint
<http://thelawfareproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SFSU-Federal-Complaint.pdf>,
filed in federal court in Northern California on 19 June, was prepared
by The Lawfare Project
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/lawfare-project>, a group that
describes <http://thelawfareproject.org/> itself as “the legal arm of
the pro-Israel community.”
Last year, the group’s director, Brooke Goldstein
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/brooke-goldstein>, was filmed
asking Israel lobby leaders in New York, “Why are we using the word
Palestinian?”
“There’s no such thing as a Palestinian person,” Goldstein asserted:
In the same speech
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lawfare-group-plans-massive-punishments-activists>,
Goldstein also revealed new strategies to undermine the movement for
Palestinian rights, including preparing legal challenges against US
institutions, among them specifically San Francisco State University.
“The goal is to make the enemy pay,” Goldstein explained.
The Lawfare Project says
<http://thelawfareproject.org/lp-files-lawsuit-sfsu/> that the lawsuit
was filed after the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights
announced it would be “scaling back” investigations of alleged
discrimination on campuses around the country.
Claiming that San Francisco State University is “among the worst of the
worst” campuses for Jewish students, the plaintiffs, three students and
three area residents, say administrators have “fostered, fomented and
systematically instilled an anti-Jewish animus” on the campus.
Criminalizing criticism of Israel
The 73-page complaint lists about a dozen incidents, some dating back to
the early 1990s – before many of the university’s current students would
have been born – in an attempt to paint of picture of systematic
discrimination.
Nearly all of those incidents involve disputes between pro-Israel and
pro-Palestinian communities on campus, including the disruption of an
event last year featuring the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nir-barkat>.
Israel’s municipality includes occupied East Jerusalem
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/east-jerusalem>, which no country
recognizes as part of Israel.
“The incidents they are complaining about involve activism for
Palestinian rights, which is political speech that is protected by the
First Amendment,” Dima Khalidi
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/dima-khalidi>, director of
Palestine Legal <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/palestine-legal>,
told The Electronic Intifada.
“The whole premise of their complaint relies on the conflation of
anti-Jewish animus and criticism of Israeli policies,” Khalidi added.
“That’s where the complaint is going to fail.”
“Unconstitutional and unwise”
The lawsuit invokes the State Department definition of anti-Semitism
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/state-department-definition-anti-semitism>,
which describes much criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.
The definition has no legal force, but Israel lobby groups have been
been pressing institutions and governments around the world, including
the US Congress
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/democrats-advance-palestine-censorship-ahead-trump>,
to formally adopt it.
But even Kenneth Stern
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/kenneth-stern>, the former American
Jewish Committee executive who authored the definition
<http://jkrfoundation.org/about/kenneth-s-stern/>, has vigorously
opposed
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/should_a_major_university_system_have_a_particular_definition_of_anti_semit>
its adoption into legislation, warning that it would be used by Israel
advocacy groups to police speech.
Stern told US lawmakers
<http://jkrfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Stern-Letter-links-corrected.pdf>
in December that legislating the definition would be “unconstitutional
and unwise” and would “actually harm Jewish students and have a toxic
effect on the academy.”
Dead end
In recent years, Israel lobby groups have urged the Department of
Education to investigate Palestine advocacy as a potential violation of
Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/title-vi-civil-rights-act> –
landmark legislation that requires administrators to ensure campuses are
free from a pervasive atmosphere of bias.
But in 2013, the strategy hit a dead end as the Department of
Education’s Office for Civil Rights threw out
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/victory-campus-free-speech-us-dept-education-throws-out-anti-semitism>
a slew of Title VI complaints against the University of California
campuses at Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Irvine, where there had been active
Palestine solidarity campaigns.
Khalidi says it is revealing that The Lawfare Project is now citing the
State Department definition in its lawsuit.
“This is about an effort to categorize any and all criticism of Israel
as anti-Semitic and crush a growing movement that is looking critically
at Israel,” she said.
Two incidents
While painting a lurid broad-brush picture of anti-Jewish hatred on
campus, the lawsuit is centered on only two specific incidents: a
protest of Israeli government official Nir Barkat’s visit in April 2016,
and the exclusion of the campus chapter of the Jewish student
organization Hillel from a “Know Your Rights” fair in February 2017.
Students disrupted the Barkat event with chants, forcing his audience to
huddle around to hear his speech. Leslie Wong, SFSU’s president,
immediately condemned
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-are-university-heads-racing-slander-protesters/17061>
the protest and announced an investigation.
That investigation upheld
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/free-speech-triumphs-over-pro-israel-bullies-us-universities>
the students’ right to protest and found that campus police and
administrators acted in accordance with how they had handled protests in
the past.
The investigative report also affirms that “the protestors did not
create a credible threat to public safety” and that they “did not engage
in any threatening physical conduct or raise any direct threats that
could be interpreted as incitement to imminent lawless action.”
Yet the lawsuit claims that by not intervening to stop the protest as it
happened, the administration violated the audience members’ First
Amendment right to hear Barkat.
This video, posted online by a pro-Israel group, shows Barkat speaking
to students gathered around him, while chants of “Free, Free Palestine”
can be heard from protesters in the back of the room:
In the second incident, plaintiffs claim Hillel was barred from a Know
Your Rights fair on campus because of its Jewish identity. The
university is still investigating the incident.
Responding to the lawsuit, San Francisco State University affirmed its
dedication to free speech, diversity and inclusion.
But its statement repeats the allegation that the protest of Nir Barkat
was anti-Semitic.
“The disruption of the event featuring Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat in
spring 2016 and bias incidents that were reported this year were ugly
reminders that anti-Semitism, like all forms of discrimination, is real
and our community has work to do.”
This new position contradicts the university’s own earlier
investigation, which found that the protest targeted Barkat’s politics,
not his Jewish identity.
“In the end, the record demonstrates that the protest was directed
towards the Mayor of Jerusalem based on his politics, and not towards
any of the audience members,” the investigation concluded.
Equating Jews with Israel
Barkat oversees the ongoing forced displacement
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/palestinians-face-biggest-expulsion-years-settlers-jerusalem>
of Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem to make way
for Jewish settlers.
In 2016, Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West
Bank, including Jerusalem, hit a new record
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israeli-home-demolitions-break-records-shatter-lives-2016>.
Yet the lawsuit frames the protest against Barkat as an attack on Jewish
students on campus, not as political speech against a foreign
government’s objectionable behavior.
The complaint alleges for instance that protesters “had every intention
of making the Jews in the room feel intimidated and that they reveled in
threatening them.”
Such assertions manufacture the anti-Semitism the lawsuit claims to
expose, by identifying all Jews with Israel and Israel with all Jews.
This is absurd on its face, not least because Israeli settlements are
illegal under international law
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/us-lets-security-council-pass-resolution-against-israeli-settlements>
and are opposed not only by Palestinians and dozens of governments but
by also by many Jewish groups and activists, including Israelis
<http://peacenow.org.il/en/about-us/who-are-we>.
The lawsuit also describes the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)
movement for Palestinian rights as “inherently anti-Semitic.” It
attempts to link BDS activists to “terrorist” organizations.
It even claims that murdered Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali’s
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/naji-al-ali> iconic character
Handala – a child holding a key who represents Palestinian refugees’
desire to return home – is “an established anti-Semitic symbol.”
The image of a key is often used by Palestinians as a reminder of the
houses they left behind in the Nakba
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nakba> – the 1948 ethnic cleansing
of Palestine. But to the plaintiffs, “the key represents the destruction
of Israel as a Jewish state.”
The spirit of 1968
Another target of the lawsuit is San Francisco State University’s
historic <http://www.sfsu.edu/news/2008/fall/8.html> College of Ethnic
Studies.
“Unfortunately, part of the legacy that evolved from [the College of
Ethnic Studies] has been an extremely disturbing pattern of blatant
anti-Jewish animus at SFSU,” the complaint claims.
The first of its kind, the College of Ethnic Studies was founded in 1969
after the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front waged
the longest campus strike in US history, starting the year before.
It quickly became a model for Black and ethnic studies programs across
the country.
In 2007, in the same spirit, San Francisco State University founded the
Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative. Professor Rabab
Abdulhadi <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/rabab-abdulhadi>, who
teaches in the department, is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, along
with the dean of the College of Ethnic Studies.
The university’s statement responding to the lawsuit does not mention or
defend the college.
Abdulhadi has been the repeated target
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/racist-group-launches-national-offensive-us-campuses>
of Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian attacks by Israel advocates.
“These right-wing, pro-Israeli groups are well funded but tiny,”
Abdulhadi told The Electronic Intifada. “They don’t represent a
consensus of the Jewish community.”
“They are trying to stop the scholarship and activism on campus,” she
added. “They are attacking the spirit of 1968.”
--
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