Staring Down the Devil at the University of Michigan

From the TOWER.ORG by MOLLY ROSEN U MICH STUDENT CLASS OF 2014

A first-hand account of how one of America’s elite schools became the latest flash point of anti-Israel activism and anti-Semitic intimidation.

When I first set foot on the University of Michigan campus four years ago, I felt like I was prepared for anything. I was determined to challenge myself and my beliefs. I was determined to learn from incredible professors and students. I was determined to make a difference. What I was not prepared for was a campus community polarized and paralyzed by a global political issue that had little to do with life at Ann Arbor.

I was not prepared to be told that, if I cared about human rights, I could not support Israel. I was not prepared to be told that my community was racist. I was not prepared to see my fellow students attacked with anti-Semitic slurs. And I was most definitely not prepared to be told that“anyone wearing the Israeli army uniform is a Ku Klux Klansman who does not deserve any place at any table in polite society because they are racist killers trying to break the back of Palestine, and they have succeeded.”

I heard these words for the first time as a newly elected student government representative in the winter of 2012. The University of Michigan’s Central Student Government (CSG) consists of a 50-person elected assembly with representatives from every undergraduate and graduate school. During the weekly assembly meetings, there is a section for Community Concerns, during which people have three minutes to address the assembly on any topic. I expected that this time slot would consist of students discussing new curriculum requirements or better dining facilities. Instead, it often consisted of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate speech. Every week certain individuals would urge students to take action against “the racist, Nazi state of Israel”; and every week I would sit there feeling utterly helpless.

So I decided to do something about it. I began asking questions outside CSG, learning about the issue on a deeper level and seeking out new perspectives with which I was unfamiliar. I took courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict, engaging with students of every background and political orientation, trying to make sense of the turmoil that grips the entire Middle East. The more I learned, the more I came to realize that the information many students were receiving outside of class was often de-contextualized, biased, and even hatefully skewed.

Clearly, a broader conversation was needed. Other students also recognized this void on campus, and together we founded a pro-Israel student organization dedicated to dialogue and civil discussion on the issue: I-LEAD.

As I-LEAD become more well-known among Jewish and non-Jewish students, the opportunities for dialogue only increased. I felt proud to be a part of such a positive campus that strived for coexistence despite our radically different political opinions.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. KEEP READING EXCELLENT ARTICLE HERE

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Inside University of Michigan's Israel Divestment Debate

A Campus Divided: Students at the University of Michigan called on their school to divest from companies that contribute to human rights violations against the Palestinians.

By Yardain Amron

Published March 30, 2014.

NOTE: an interesting inside view of the recent mishegas at Michigan. 

Pro-Palestinian students got trounced on an Israel-related stock divestment vote recently at the University of Michigan. The student government’s 25 to 9 vote against their proposal wasn’t even close.

Yet Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the student group that put forth the proposal, declared the defeat a terrific victory. And they may be right.

I sat toward the front of the campus ballroom where the March 25 vote was held, among Palestinians, some in keffiyehs and hijabs, but also many other students from a diversity of racial and ethnic groups. Towards the back, a smaller number of Jewish students waited wearing maize and blue — the University of Michigan’s school colors — to attest their opposition to divestment and support for a unified campus.

All 375 chairs in the ballroom gallery were filled and hundreds more students were refused entry because of fire code restrictions. About 200 students were placed in an adjacent screening room where they and over 2,000 others at home tuned in to a live-stream of the event.

What I was witnessing was the first true campus-wide discussion of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its alleged violations of Palestinian human rights. And it was a discussion that had grown to involve hundreds, and maybe thousands, of students. CLICK THIS TO KEEP READING

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/195510/inside-university-of-michigans-israel-divestment-d/?p=all#ixzz2xVMQni7G

“to ensure the safety of individual representatives”

by Diana Muir Applebaum 3/26/2014 from her blog

Yesterday evening, at the end of a week-long sit-in at the student union,  the student union, acting under special rules designed “to ensure the safety of individual representatives“, voted against urging the university to divest from corporations doing business with the government of Israel.

“To ensure the safety of individual representatives.”  Not to insure decorum, or open debate, or rancor, or invective.  “To ensure the safety of individual representatives.”  To insure the “safety” of student government representatives.  On an American campus.  In 2014.

I am not a journalist, nor am I writing from Ann Arbor.  One of the journalists covering this story, Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon drew attention to a Facebook post  that sheds light on why student government leaders and Jewish students at the University of Michigan may have reason to worry about their personal safety.  Two months before the vote an Ann Arbor student named Yazan Kherallah posted a selfie on his Facebook page.  Kherallah is a vocal, public supporter of the movement to divest form Israel at the university.  The photo showed Kherallah wrapped in a keffiyeh that concealed his face so that only his eyes are showing,  holding a pineapple in one hand and a knife in the other as though he was about to stab the knife into the pineapple (ananas in French.)   Kherallah’s message reads: “It’s on. Kareem Hakim Hassan Hamid Mazen Abbas Youssef Ahmad Bazzi Omar Attalla Hussein Fardous @the rest of team ananas”

Team ananas?

The reference is to the French Holocaust denier and Jew-baiting French political activist and anti-Semite, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.  The reference is to  Dieudonné’s Holocaust mockery song, Shoah-nanas.   The title blends Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, with the French word for pineapple, and is wildly popular with anti-Semites across the French-speaking world and beyond.  The video has circulated in several languages.   Here, at and following 4:13, you can see the jovial Jew-hater  Dieudonné  laughing, dancing and singing as an actor  dressed in the grey pajamas of  Nazi death-camp inmates – complete with yellow star – dances with pineapples.   Sample lyric, “You take me by the Shoah, I’ll take you by the pineapple.” CLICK THIS TO KEEP READING

BDS Resolution Defeated at University of Michigan

from the algemeiner March 26, 2014

NOTE: Did you watch the live stream? I did. The calm and well thought out 3 min speeches by those opposed were a joy to watch. The pro speakers, mostly Arab students, were strident, high pitched and filled with very old, stale talking points. I'm probably not fully objective but I know what I saw and heard. As always it was very hard to listen to the Jewish Student reading a letter signed by multiple Jewish students and professors in favor of the resolution. This on the heels of the Jewish Voice for Peace letter. Again: what is wrong with these people? Finally, most of the students talking against the resolution spoke from the heart about PEACE, COOPERATION, TWO STATE SOLUTIONS. We heard NONE of that from the other side...

A resolution to begin a process to divest from companies that invest or operate in Israel was defeated by the University of Michigan student government in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

The proceedings were broadcast via the internet, with more than 2,000 watching, in addition to the 350 students sitting in the capacity auditorium. After a six-hour session, which included speeches by dozens of students, for and against, two Jewish professors and the anti-Israel journalist and author Max Blumenthal, who used the forum to repeatedly pitch his new book, the Central Student Government voted down the resolution, 25 to nine, with five abstentions.

The vote was taken by secret ballot, as some members of the CSG had said they were intimidated by proponents of the resolution at its previous meeting, where a unanimous decision was taken to table a vote “indefinitely.”

The Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday that at least one pro-Israel student “received death threats and that others have allegedly been called ‘kikes’ and ‘dirty Jews’” by proponents of the resolution who called for a “sit-in” of the CSG’s offices until the resolution was put back on the agenda for Tuesday night. PLEASE read the rest of this article by clicking this