Yesterday was the first day in a very long time that I can say I had an eye opening experience. Before yesterday, I did not truly understand why an event like the Dershowitz forum was and is so important. Having controversial speakers come to a campus I now know is vital. Doing so provides an opportunity for students to ask a figure a question, to say they saw a person speak, indeed to see into a person perhaps more than could ever be possible through a thirty second sound bite on CNN.
Seeing Dershowitz on our campus making provocative statements was wonderful as it challenged those with hard line views, confirmed the views of others, and perhaps even inspired those who were apathetic on the subject. Whether you agree with the man or not, what I cannot dispute that the forum provided the opportunity for serious academic discourse. And for some if not most students the star power driving that level of academic discourse was never before experienced.
Because of my revelation, it is extremely disappointing to me that we were not able to have the full level of discourse that should have been possible. Due to the actions of a small minority, some of which I believe were not even members of our university community, and the actions of Dershowitz I was forced to close down the forum before its scheduled end time. What is so disappointing is that it was not the protesters or even Dershowitz that lost out, it was the students who were working on papers on the subject, those that had never heard of Dershowitz who came to find out more, and those who wanted to learn more about where Dershowtiz stands.
I ask those who were disrespectful, not constructive, and frankly ignorant of what the forum's goals were to think about the rights of those students who lost out on the experience yesterday. In the name of their right to free speech the protesters: demanded free reign of the auditorium, shouted profanity after profanity at Dershowitz and other students, and were disrespectful to staff and public safety officers who were doing their jobs. I ask them directly how can you believe in free speech so vibrantly while you denied every single other person's right to hear Dershowitz speak. What gives you the right to supersede any other person's right to free speech?
Yesterday these protesters actions were academic terrorism as their actions disrupted the most cherished component of a college campus -- the concept of a marketplace of ideas. When one person or one group shuts that down we all loose. I say to those protesters that if you do disagree with someone thoughts you do so in way that allows others to decide what they think of their own free will.
I also ask this group of protesters to think about their actions. At best they came off looking like uneducated using chants and slogans to forward their case. What a poor representation of the quality of students this university develops. What is most disappointing was their lost opportunity to ask serious questions of Dershowitz and challenge him on his level.
Yesterday, was a day I know I will soon not forget. Thank you to Dershowitz, the protesters, and everyone else for these important lessons.
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Threats of violence and thuggery against pro-Israel students and faculty at UMASS --
ReplyDeletehttp://www.divestthis.com/2009/04/thuggery.html
"...The most recent example of this was U Mass in Boston where, after weeks of uninterrupted campus activity denouncing the Jewish state, Alan Dershowitz paid a visit to provide (God forbid) a different opinion. Now I know Dershowitz is a lightning rod, and no stranger to being hounded both on and off a podium. But the fact that a university would allow politically extremist students and faculty to have their say for day after day, week after week, but would then allow this same group to import Boston’s community of Israel-hating shrieking heads to ensure the other side can’t be heard is a sign of real danger ahead....
It is to our credit that we have not stooped to the vile tactics used by those whose only life purpose seems to be to denounce the Jewish state and its supporters, regardless of the consequences for peace, for Jews, for Palestinians or for civic harmony. Yet now that there is a determined effort to shut down dissenting voices on campuses through tactics that include threats and intimidation (while all the time claiming that the anti-Israel views they are currently shouting at the top of their lungs are somehow being “stifled” by an all-powerful Jewish cabal), we have to ask ourselves: what are we going to do about it? "
I wish I had found this blog closer to the date of the event, but that's life.
ReplyDeleteI went to Dershowitz's "forum" with the intent of protesting outside the building, but no one was congregated there when I arrived, so I elected to enter the auditorium instead. I mingled with some other activists I knew, and took my seat just before Dershowitz started to speak. I wasn't one of those in the back of the auditorium disrupting his entire presentation, and like many others, I found it tiresome after a while, despite broadly lining up in ideological terms with the more vocal protesters. Rather, I took fairly diligent notes on what I found to be nothing more than a melding of anti-Arab racist diatribe, irrelevant one-sided history lesson (convenient how he picked out Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, an easy target when it comes to Palestinian "leaders" in history if one is looking for evidence of prior bad acts), and "do-no-wrong" justification for the Gaza campaign from a notorious Israeli-right wing apologist.
In fact, in the entire hour, I noted only several abstract references to anything regarding a two-state solution. The only one that approached specificity was Dershowitz's acquiescence that East Jerusalem should serve as a capital for a future Palestinian state. Now, it may be unrealistic of me to expect him to go into further detail, but for all we know, his idea of "East Jerusalem" could just mean the Arab Quarter, with Haram al-Sharif being torn down and Solomon's Temple being "re-built" on the rubble. His dismissal of a one-state solution as something "dreamed up by academics" was not only steeped in fallacy, as it's sponsored by people of all socioeconomic classes and mostly in the Middle East (Muammar Gaddafi's son comes to mind), yet screams of hypocrisy, as Prof. Alan Dershowitz, Esquire is chiefly an academic himself, and acted in a completely academic capacity on April 1st.
I had several questions I was going to ask him in the minute I had been assured (by Prof. Dershowitz) that I would get -- I decided that would be the best form of protest at that time. I was going to ask him why he had accused the protesters of supporting human rights violations when he himself had recently wrote and subsequently defended a legal argument for law enforcement to obtain "warrants" to torture terror suspects (numerous human rights organizations and even fellow Harvard faculty members have blasted him for this). Of course, I was going to use the notes I had taken to call him on everything I could within my allotted minute, but of course I never got that chance, and none of us did, because after requesting to take the "hostile" questions first, you saw what happened...
... And that's what really set me off, and I think what set off most of the other "pro-Palestine" audience in the hall that day. He couldn't handle that question likening the current and recent Israeli regimes and their treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews -- not coming from another professor, and certainly not coming from another Jew. He absolutely erupted, labeling her an anti-Semite and even going so far as to call the professor a "disgrace to Judaism", and then proceeded to accost all of us for being students at a university where she is allowed to teach.
To a point, I agree with you, Mike. I booed Dershowitz when he first came in, and though I wasn't chanting with them, I supported the protesters in what they were doing at the start. As it progressed, though, I was getting tired of it, and I wanted to hear what Dershowitz had to say (though mostly so I had more ammunition with which to shatter him come the question and answer portion). In all honesty, though, he really didn't say anything of substance. A friend of mine who holds a position in the UMB SGA told me he wouldn't care if the KKK came to speak on campus, they shouldn't be drowned out by protesters. But the bottom line to me is twofold: for one, while there might be no limit to free speech, the knife cuts both ways, and if the speaker is spouting fallacy and veiled (or overt) hate speech, I'd be proud to be associated with those who drowned him or her out; the other part is that I'm sure Dershowitz didn't come cheap. As you and I both know, the school isn't in stellar economic shape right now, the UMass Board of Trustees just increased our fees for next year, and it's insulting to me that our administration paid this man to come on our campus and spread his racist garbage under the guise of a "two-state solution", and then chastised all those who spoke out at Dershowitz for his transgressions, including the way in which he publicly insulted a member of our faculty.
I'll wrap it up now. Sorry for the extra-long comment -- as you might tell, I'm pretty passionate about this. Thanks for writing this blog entry, Mike, there's precious little coverage on Dershowitz's visit to UMB, and that's a shame, because it really was an extraordinary event.