No thanks for Zionist ‘chaperones’ –Wesleyan declares itself an Open Hillel

from Mondoweiss 4.5.14

NOTE: from the ever ANTI ZIONIST and not exactly Jew-Friendly Philip Weiss comes the bloviating statement from seriously misguided students. Feel free to disagree with me, but teach me why I am wrong... 

Readers, we got this press release two days ago and are late getting it up, but it’s wonderful news from Connecticut. And Adam Horowitz informs me that an Open Hillel petition has started at Brown. What exciting news from the young Jews, even as the world is falling down around our ears. In case you missed it, the Open Hillel movement has already captured two campuses, Swarthmore and Vassar, and is making inroads at Harvard and Berkeley. The movement has at least 558 members, according to this listserv application. –Phil Weiss. 

Press Release: Wesleyan Jewish Community Student Leaders stand with Open Hillel

April 2, 2014
Middletown, CT

We, student leaders of the Wesleyan Student Jewish community, have followed with great interest and concern the controversy that has swirled around Hillel International’s Standard of Partnership for Israel Activities, which prevent Hillel from partnering with, hosting, or housing anyone who,(a) denies the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders, (b) delegitimizes, demonizes, or applies a double standard to Israel, (c) supports boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel.

These policies have resulted in the barring of speakers from organizations such as Breaking the Silence and the Israeli Knesset from speaking at Hillels without censorship, and has resulted in Jewish Voice for Peace and other Jewish organizations not being welcome under the Hillel umbrella or in the Jewish community that gathers in those spaces. 

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'Despising' Judith Butler and the future of Zionism

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University. His new book is One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States, co-edited with Ambassador Mathias Mossberg.  From AlJazeera.com  NOTE: I find this article deeply disturbing.  Maybe its me, but I sense a snarky undertone.  There is no doubt that stifling debate is ultimately morally and intellectually dangerous, but that's based on the assumption that the debate will consist of folks who are being intellectually and morally honest.  Read this closely and feel free to comment below. The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier clearly believes himself to be a good man. One of those who put principles before emotions and politics. One who will fight for the right of even the most bigoted people and views to have a public hearing. Say, Nazis marching in Slokie, Illinois in the 1970s. Or rabidly anti-gay Christians protesting outside soldiers' funerals during the Iraq war. Or an anti-Zionist Jewish scholar lecturing about Franz Kafka's literary work at a Jewish museum. Okay, perhaps the last example isn't quite on the order of the first two, is it? Apparently, for Wieseltier, and for much of the American Jewish establishment, it is. So much so that even the thought of allowing a Jewish academic who believes in a democratic Israeli state in which Palestinians and Jews have the same political, economic and civil rights is cause for existential angst and anger. The scholar in question is Judith Butler, the literary critic and philosopher whose criticism of Israel and support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement have recently defined her in the public eye far more than her seminal research on feminist, queer, literary theory and political philosophy. The pressure on Butler and the Jewish Museum of New York, where she was scheduled to deliver a talk on March 6, was so great that Butler cancelled it. Too critical of Israel? CLICK THIS TO KEEP READING

No minority should feel alienated on campus | Samuel Philip Steinbock | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel

No minority should feel alienated on campus | Samuel Philip Steinbock | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel

NOTE: Don't lose hope: the attacks by BDS appear to be energizing the pro Israel crowd. Good will come of this. 

Palestinian Activists Violently Threaten Pro-Israel Students

from the Washington Free Beacon 3/21/2014

NOTE: This won't be the last article we read like this. I'm afraid the situation is just starting to get worse. Time for level heads to come together and push back on this #BDS insanity. 

BY: Adam Kredo  
March 21, 2014 4:00 pm

Pro-Palestinian activists on the University of Michigan campus have had the cops called on them for threatening pro-Israel students and staging a sit-in over the student government’s refusal to back an anti-Israel initiative to divest from the Jewish state.

University of Michigan police were contacted Wednesday evening after two pro-Palestinian activists allegedly threatened a student who refused to support their boycott initiative.

The threatening rhetoric used by these pro-Palestinian activists is part of wider campaign by the University of Michigan’s pro-Palestine group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), which is part of the virulently anti-Israel Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement (BDS).

The pro-Palestinian faction’s violent rhetoric has sparked an atmosphere of fear among pro-Israel students and led at least one to ask that the police launch an investigation into these threats.

SAFE, which describes itself as “a Palestinian solidarity group at the University of Michigan,” has been staging sit-ins at the university’s student government chambers and elsewhere, according to insiders and the group’s Facebook page.

On Wednesday of this week, SAFE apparently staged one of its sit-ins in the university’s student government chambers. That is when SAFE activists started shouting threats at those who do not support BDS, according to a police report and University of Michigan Police official. CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING

French minister: Anti-Zionism is new anti-Semitism

from JTA 3/20/14

NOTE: Not sure if this sounds better in French but is sounds darn good in English! 

(JTA) — French Interior Minister Manuel Valls called anti-Zionism “an invitation to anti-Semitism” at a rally in Paris commemorating four Jews who were murdered in Toulouse in 2012.

Valls made the statement during a speech on Wednesday – the two-year anniversary of the murder at a local Jewish day school of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler;  his two sons,  Arieh, 6, and  Gabriel, 3; and Miriam Monsenego, 8.

The old anti-Semitism of the French extreme right, Valls said, “is renewed: It feeds off hate for Israel. It feeds off anti-Zionism. Because anti-Zionism is an invitation to anti-Semitism.”KEEP READING

Read more: http://www.jta.org/2014/03/20/news-opinion/world/french-minister-anti-zionism-is-new-anti-semitism#ixzz2wVRHIig6