“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

Jewish Voice for Peace Support Michigan BDS. On false premise and very sad, old, wrong rhetoric

NOTE: We've all been wrong from time to time. That's life! Live and learn! But just look at this article and the list of supportive folks. Makes you wonder if they actually read what is being written in their names. And if so, how could such people be so utterly wrong? They have eyes but they cannot see. (Ps 135). This won't be the last we hear from Michigan BDS or JVP. Once again we are left asking, "What is wrong with these people?"

CLICK HERE TO READ IF YOU CAN STOMACH IT

some quotes from the letter:

The Israeli occupation destroys Palestinian homes; depletes aquifers essential to family 
farming in a fragile ecosystem; seizes sleeping children from their beds in the middle of the 
night for throwing stones at armor-plated bulldozers that rip their centuries-old olive trees from 
their family orchards before their eyes; and has forced women in labor to give birth on the 
ground at checkpoints, even in winter, causing the deaths of women and infants, in arbitrary 
exercises of total power and control over a captive population.

The resolution that should be before the Assembly 
seeks equality and fairness and is neither racist nor discriminatory; it is a demand for an end to 
oppression. The target is not the “Jewish people,” but official misconduct by the State of Israel.

Pro-Israel Students Called ‘Kike,’ ‘Dirty Jew’ at University of Michigan

University of Michigan spokesman: Death threats to pro-Israel students just ‘activism’

BY: Adam Kredo  
March 24, 2014 5:13 pm

The University of Michigan would not explain how it is responding to death threats and racial epithets that were reportedly issued by pro-Palestinian activists at students who oppose a resolution to divest from Israel.

University of Michigan police were first contacted last week after two pro-Palestinian activists shouted “threats of violence” at a student who refused to support their boycott initiative during a “sit-in” at the student government’s headquarters.

The Washington Free Beacon has further learned that the pro-Israel student received death threats and that others have allegedly been called “kikes” and “dirty Jews” by backers of the virulently anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to delegitimize the Jewish state through economic means.

The atmosphere of intimidation and violence could leave the University of Michigan vulnerable to legal action and political retribution on a national scale, according to multiple sources in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere who are monitoring the situation. CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING