Activism and BDS Beat 3 November 2012
While the ongoing debate over efforts to silence or stigmatize criticism of Israeli policies on University of California campuses has received a great deal of outside attention, a similar confrontation has been unfolding, somewhat more quietly, at Ottawa’s Carleton University.
On 10 October 2012, Carleton’s President, Roseann Runte, released a report by the University’s Commission on Inter-Cultural, Inter-Religious and Inter-Racial Relations on Campus. The Commission, launched in 2010, has the mandate to “to examine the status quo and to provide positive recommendations to contribute to a better context for dialogue and understanding on the Carleton campus and in the surrounding community.”
Like the report issued by the Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion at the University of California, the Carleton document links criticism of Israeli policies to anti-Semitism. According to the report, “The university community must acknowledge that some anti-Israel politics, activities and sentiments which occur on the Carleton campus are perceived as anti-Semitic, thus contributing to Jewish members of the Carleton community feeling less positive about the climate of respect at the university.”
Also like the UC report, the Carleton document proposes a variety of measures to limit criticism of Israel on this pretext, such as obliging student groups to comply with an ambigious “social inclusion” policy in order to reserve rooms for meetings and events.
A detailed and scathing critique of the recommendations of and methodology behind the Carleton report, as well as an open letter in opposition, for which campus activist group SAIA (Students Against Israeli Apartheid) Carleton is collecting signatures, provide excellent background and analysis that is unnecessary to replicate here.
A Hidden Agenda?
It is crucial to recognize that while the debates that have ensued following the respective reports have understandably focused on the direct efforts to restrict free speech, some activists aligned with the authors of the California report have indicated that silencing Israel’s critics is not the primary goal of anti-Palestinian activists mobilizing around the report.
“We’re not saying that hate speech shouldn’t be allowed,” said Ben Hass of UC San Diego’s Tritons for Israel, which has supported the UC report.
So what do they want?
“We want the administration to condemn it.”
Even op-eds ostensibly written in opposition to the report seem to subtly reinforce the idea that the debate is more about shaping how the public thinks about criticism of Israel. UC Berkeley’s J Street co-President Isaiah Kirshner-Breen makes a point of using his critique of the report’s association of political speech with “repugnant anti-Semitism” to mount an ideological attack on supporters of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), a nonviolent accountability mechanism favored by the vast majority of on-campus critics of Israel:
“I disagree with the BDS movement on a pragmatic and ideological level. Divestment advocates often fail to recognize the Jewish people’s right to a national homeland, and I don’t see such efforts as effective in creating the type of base necessary to influence the establishment of a two-state solution in the Middle East.”
As typical of J Street’s statements on the subject, the op-ed does not recommend any alternative means of holding Israel accountable for its policies and actions apart from asking nicely.
While the de facto coalition of organizations and individuals that has emerged in support of the UC report undoubtedly differ in terms of their aims and motivations, the fact that some are primarily interested not in silencing Israel critics, but in stigmatizing them, is highly significant.
By focusing primarily on challenging the specific measures that the UC and Carleton reports advocate to limit campus criticism of Israel, activists risk diverting attention away from challenging the conceptual linkage which anti-Palestinians hope to create between such criticism and genuine “hate speech” or anti-Semitism.
Fighting on Two Fronts
While activists are indeed challenging the “hate speech” framing alongside the direct assault on free speech rights, we must remain cognizant of the fact that this is not simply a battle over free speech, but a battle to shape the terms of the discourse.
While we must work to prevent these universities from enacting measures that would restrict the right of members of their communities to criticizes the policies of the State of Israel, we must not allow these efforts to distract us from the subtler battle over perceptions and framing.
With each and every step we take to challenge the recommendations contained with the UC and Carleton reports, it is vital that we simultaneously challenge their framing. Opponents of these reports must not allow ourselves to be cast as defenders of “controversial, but protected” speech. Rather, we must be hammering home the message that the groups and individuals whose voices are in danger of being silenced are advocates for fundamental principles of justice and equality that should hardly be “controversial” to anyone.
Tags
- Carleton University
- University of California at Berkeley
- academic freedom
- free speech
- University of California
Comments
the importance of reframing Zionism
Permalink Pal Cine replied on
Precisely! It should be noted, furthermore, that pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist perspectives are perfectly objective positions to which critical consensus has been reached by scholars and intellectuals worldwide. These perspectives do not constitute hate speech; on the contrary, it is Zionism which has been propagating prejudice, bigotry, and hatred toward Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims since its inception. Zionism is an ideology that needs false facts supplied by propaganda in order to appear legitimate. Thusly reframing the terms of the free speech debate can help expose and debunk Zionism's essentially baseless foundations.
Free speech battle on university campuses
Permalink Palpaloma replied on
yes, academic responsibility is also to further intellectual recognition of powerful propaganda in the service of oppression in political debats and to help those students to detect their brainwashed arguments as such. Students go to university to learn how to participate in the ravaged human enterprise for a less hostile and hatred world. How can fundamental principles of justice and equality be put into question on campuses? Zionist propaganda should be banned from campuses.
Statement by Isaiah Kirshner-Breen
Permalink Abraham Greenhouse replied on
It’s been pointed out to me that Kirshner-Breen’s defense of the right to promote BDS may constitute a significant victory within the Berkeley context, and that my use of the phrase “ideological attack” seemed to cast doubt on his motivation in making the statement.
While I fundamentally disagree with J Street’s positions on most subjects, particularly on BDS (the national organization has actively organized to thwart even limited boycotts of settlement goods), there’s no reason to assume that Kirshner-Breen was being anything less than completely honest about his beliefs.
The important thing is to recognize that even language employed in defense of the right to criticize Israel can reinforce the conceptual frame that anti-Palestinians are seeking to establish: The phrase “fail to recognize the Jewish people’s right” does seem to suggest that BDS supporters harbor some form of bias, and this does to some extent reinforce a general association between criticism of Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry.
Free speech battle on university campuses
Permalink Palpaloma replied on
The phrase "fail to recognize the Jewish people's right" is in itself a screening phrase because this recognition has been de facto established in 1948. Nobody can go back to that date. BDS is a movement of recognition of the Palestinian people's right which has been denied since 1948. There is an academic necessity to debunk the zionist propaganda as real anti semitic because it reclaims its distortion in the name of all Jews! And the suffering it causes are the seeds of hatred.
Struggle at Carleton
Permalink Peter Gose replied on
I was involved in producing the Carleton open letter discussed above, and can assure readers that we did consider the framing issues in question. We did not humbly ask for toleration of our views, but exposed the Report's multi-levelled sleaziness, and several of our supporters have publicly taken on the anti-Semitic slur levelled at our work as anti-Semitic itself, for the way it identifies all Jews with Israel's crimes against Palestinians. The charge is ridiculous, and needs to be revealed as such, preferably through satire, instead of ignored as if it were too powerful to confront head-on. Of course we care about "fundamental principles of justice and equality" but what will it take to bring about their application to the Palestinian situation? "Framing" is too facile an answer, since it suggests the transformations of understanding we seek could be achieved merely by a more strategic use of language. "Struggle" is a better one, since it recognizes committed action as a potential link between the minor oppressions we experience on North American campuses to the major oppressions going on in Palestine. No amount of clever talk on its own is going to change this situation. We need to act convincingly as well, and that is always going to mean confronting the situations we are actually in, instead of trying to change the subject. Hasbarah is what the other side does, not us.
Struggle at Carleton
Permalink Palpaloma replied on
you are very brave people, in the forefront of new global conscience!
I am somehow peripheral to you because I am located in Central Europe (Austria)
but in a struggle of global importance the words for justice and dignity are the
same in each part of the world. And this is our common struggle against distortion (the oppressor is the victim) obscurantism, falsification (the voice of critics are anti semitic) intolerance (apartheid laws and separation walls), hatred (settler children stoning palestinian children) and the unfairness of personal attacks instead of real debate.