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On campus: Bibi is Hitler at Michigan U

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A required lecture for University of Michigan art students featured a speaker who compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

A slide that showed a picture of Netanyahu and Hitler with the words “Guilty Of Genocide” written across their faces was displayed by Emory Douglas as a part of the Penny Stamps Speakers Series Presentation of the Stamps School of Art & Design. Below the photo was the definition of genocide.

“During his tenure, Douglas created powerful images to depict the reality of racial injustice in America and to promote the [Black Panther] party’s ideologies,” according to the school’s website. “His distinctive style established the ‘militant-chic’ style decades before the aesthetic became popularized and sought to flip the cultural paradigm from one of African American victimhood to one of powerful outrage.”

Douglas “worked as the resident Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1967 through the 1980,” the website said.

The content of the lecture first came to public attention via a Facebook post on Friday by a Jewish University of Michigan student, Alexa Smith. The post included a photograph of the slide (pictured to the right).

“Yesterday I was forced to sit through an overtly anti-Semitic lecture,” she wrote, adding: “In what world is it ok for a mandatory course to host a speaker who compares Adolf Hitler to the Prime Minister of Israel?

“I sat through this lecture horrified at the hatred and intolerance being spewed on our campus. As a Jew who is proud of my people and my homeland, I sat through this lecture feeling targeted and smeared to be as evil as the man who perpetrated the Holocaust and systematically murdered six million Jews.”

Smith noted that two years ago, another mandatory Stamps lecture speaker, Joe Sacco, called Israel a terrorist state and claimed that Israeli soldiers were unworthy of being portrayed as human beings in his artwork.

“This time I will no longer sit quietly and allow others to dehumanize my people and my community,” she wrote. “The administration is repeatedly failing to forcefully respond to antisemitism, and so it comes back worse and worse each time. A line needs to be drawn and it needs to be drawn now.”

Michigan President Mark Schlossel and Provost Martin Philbert, in a letter to the campus community on Tuesday, said they were “sorry students were hurt by this experience.” They also said the image was “on a single slide among nearly 200 other slides” and that the lecture had not singled out Israel.

Earlier, the school’s assistant vice president for public affairs, Rick Fitzgerald, said in a statement  that “Douglas covered a wide array of subject matter within the overarching context of his work, which looks at the oppression of people across the globe by governmental powers.”

“The Stamps program is intentionally provocative and we are clear with our students about this. The school does not control or censor what speakers present,” Fitzgerald said.

Undergraduates receive academic credit for attending 11 of 14 scheduled Stamps events during the school year.

Last month, John Cheney-Lippold, a University of Michigan professor of American culture who supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, declined to recommend junior Abigail Ingber for a semester abroad in Israel. Subsequently, a second Michigan student reported being refused a letter of recommendation because of a professor’s adherence to BDS.

The president and provost, in their letter, said, “We have apologized to the students themselves and worked to ensure that they have everything they need to complete their applications,” adding that the university “strongly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.”

On Tuesday, Detroit News reported the the university disciplied Cheney-Lippold.