Letters to the editor

Posted

Don’t fight Jewish

students’ battles

To the Editor:

Neither Kenneth Ryesky’s letter nor Bayla Brenner’s article addressed the substance of the Brooklyn College controversy or offered any meaningful solution to the issue of BDS on campus. 

Censoring the event, as both the article and the letter suggest, would have been wrong, and in fact, completely contrary to Ryesky’s claim, there have been many right of center speakers at Brooklyn College, including verbal flamethrower David Horowitz in 2011, who used his lecture at the college’s library to call Palestinians “morally sick,” refer to Muslims as “Islamic Nazis” and ask whether there were any good Muslims in the United States.  Letters like Ryesky’s suggest that some simply want to censor those views they disagree with. 

Much as I do not doubt there are many professors at Brooklyn College with pro-Palestinian views, college President Gould made clear that sponsoring a lecture and endorsing it were two different things, and that there was no reason to believe the Political Science department would not sponsor a pro-Israel lecture.  Indeed, the Department made good on that promise this week, agreeing to sponsor a lecture on campus by Elliott Abrams on his new book, Tested by Zion, about the Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

We ill serve Jewish students on campus when we fight their battles for them and encourage them to duck the views of those they disagree with.  That’s not what college is about, and it makes for ill-prepared pro-Israel advocates who are unable to defend Israel properly in the public sphere.  Likewise, the ill-advised campaign of some to censor views like those expressed by the BDS movement has the counterproductive result of giving BDS proponents, who remain a small, radical minority, undeserved publicity, and carries the risk that the same argument will be used to shut down events we favor.

Michael Brenner

Woodmere

EXCLUSIVE TO THE JEWISH STAR

 

To the Editor:

 You have my permission to print my memorandum to the chancellery and to Hillel leadership below, as a response to Mr. Brenner. He is PURPOSEFULLY denying the tactics of the leftist / Islamist alliance. He is as thoroughly familiar with these tactics as am I. He is engaged in purposeful obfuscation. I will not allow it.

Ergo: let’s lay it ALL out in the open:

Written to Hillel

leadership

 The inadequacy of the Hillel response in MOST campuses has me truly concerned. Among those events I’ve heard about nationally from trustees I know, the recent Palestine Students for Justice (the same  Hamas / MSU / ISNA-connected dreck we had at Brooklyn –) was pusillanimously handled by Brockman, the FSU (Florida State University) Boca Hillel guy.

With every pronouncement we ( we – Jewish-affiliated organizations) make, we begin with “While we believe in freedom of speech, academic freedom…..” as if we need to apologize, or as if we’re reciting hatzi-kaddish before mussaf. Do these leftists / Islamists talk about YOUR freedom of speech? Do they allow it, or do they disrupt it throughout America?

We are not dealing with “debaters”. These are Brownshirts. These people engage in disruption, exclusion, harassment and sometimes violence . They must be handled differently; the rules of academia and law does not apply to them. I wouldn’t say this at a press conference, (I’m branded already) but bad things happen when people are treated differently and have no recourse. When I resided in the South Bronx in the late 1960s ( we were poor and could not afford to move), defenseless elderly Jews were targeted for robberies and beatings. THAT, to remind you, was the origin of the JDL. When the law – and academia – decides who is entitled to protection and equality, excluding some for “political correctness”  (or fear of Islamist violence)  come to the conclusion that we have to act unapologetically until there are brave administrators who will firmly clamp down on their outrageous and offensive behavior. I am hoping that it will be the one chancellor in America – other than the YU Prez, obviously – Matt Goldstein who will find a way to send a national message with some enforced restraint.

I have asked for some form of “prior restraint.” Groups which have a history of such tactics – demonstrable from other campuses – should be excluded. Further, No groups engaged in non-academic conferences  should be funded by ANY public dollars. ALL should pay for facilities use with NO administrative sponsorship.

 n n n

 

Sent to Rick Schaffer, General Counsel at CUNY:

Dear Rick:

I am respectfully requesting that an acknowledgment be made, following a quick review by the chancellery and the Graduate Center, that there are no university tuition, tax-levied or public funds of any sort allocated to fund a so-called “Pinkwashing” Conference, sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Studies Center at the Graduate Center, scheduled for April 10-11, 2013. Further, I am requesting that the “Pinkwashing” aspect not be an official  function of the Graduate Center as it is outside the realm of any academic inquiry.

“Pinkwashing” is a nouveau term coined by anti-Israel  / BDS activists to promote the imagined theorem that the Government of Israel protects the rights of gays, lesbians and transgender individuals and their rights to public affirmation, parades and so forth is an attempt by the Israeli government to “conceal their crimes against the Palestinians.” In other words, blood libel accusations are made to affirm other blood libel accusations.

Coming from supporters of misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic, gay-stoning regimes, this is most ironic. While they are free to be as ironic as they desire, they are not free to engage in pure political propaganda with zero academic merit at public expense. It is my earnest hope that we can correctly assert that this is not so and that this can be documented under inquiry.

Even amongst enemies of the Jewish State, there have been no accusations of any such Israeli government policy to utilize gay civil rights as a cover for anything else. Further, there exists no evidence of any Israeli government edict, directive or correspondence of such a hypocritical connection.

Recent events of non-academic political propaganda, sponsored by units of the University and prohibited under the principles of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) since 1916 bring shame and mockery to the University and not some imagined acclaim of pursuit of the “free and open exchange of ideas and of opinions.” Further, as in the case of the Brooklyn college BDS conference, the seats are already filled and the attendees screened for conformity to the views of the organizers (see seat non-availability notice on the conference website).

The chancellor’s and the chairman’s legacy should not be sullied by this unadulterated, non-academic trash, but in the very least, we should be able to certify the use of no university funds of any kind, nor in-kind services in this matter.

I thank you and believe that it is time that discussion at board gatherings be dedicated to such matters.

 Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, Trustee

The City University of New York

535 East 80th Street

New York, NY 10075

Editors Note: Coincident to our receipt of the letter from Mr. Brenner, we contacted Mr Weisenfeld who recently held a press conference on the topic. He felt the previous two letters adequately addressed Mr. Brenner’s thoughts.