Duke University is hosting a Palestinian solidarity conference Friday organized by a group that refuses to condemn terrorism, urges the flooding of Israel with millions of Palestinian refugees to dissolve its Jewish character, and calls on the public to divest from Israel.
The Palestinian Solidarity Movement, allied with the controversial International Solidarity Movement, an organization that openly supports Hamas and calls for the destruction of Israel, is holding its conference to “put pressure on the Israeli government, partly by urging universities to sell their stock in companies with military ties to Israel.”
Attendees of the three-day event will listen to speakers explain their strategies for taking action against Israel, including lectures entitled, “Divestment: The Weapon of the Global Fight for Justice” and a talk on “How to effectively use the media and improved public relations to advance the Palestinian cause.”
The conference will be PSM’s fourth national gathering, following previous events at Berkeley, Michigan and Ohio State. Some PSM critics have charged those earlier events were hotbeds of anti-Semitism, with some attendees shouting, “Kill the Jews,” and “Death to Israel!”
Rann Bar-On, a graduate student who has identified himself as an International Solidarity Movement activist and is a member of the campus group sponsoring the PSM conference, said he thinks the event will foster a useful dialogue on campus.
Bar-On said PSM supports nonviolent action on behalf of the Palestinian people, but neither he nor the group would sign a statement prepared by Jewish groups condemning terrorism.
“We don’t see it as very useful for us as a solidarity movement to condemn violence,” Bar-On told The Herald-Sun last month.
And a statement on the PSM website says: “As a solidarity movement, it is not our place to dictate the strategies or tactics adopted by the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation.”
Last year’s original conference organizer, Charlotte Kates, reportedly said, “”Why is there something particularly horrible about ‘suicide bombing’ – except for the extreme dedication conveyed in the resistance fighter’s willingness to use his or her own body to fight?”
PSM spokesperson Fayyad Sbaihat dismissed Kates quotations as having been “taken out of context.”
Malachi Hacohen, a history professor at Duke, said, “I regard the PSM as a group that seeks to delegitimize the state of Israel by making outrageous comparisons with South Africa.”
The Movement’s divestment goals are similar to tactics some universities took in the 1980s and early 1990s to protest South African apartheid.
Renowned author and feminist Dr. Phillis Chesler, whose archives reside at Duke as part of a distinguished collection of intellectuals and activists, wrote a letter to Duke President Richard Brodhead, urging the University to reconsider hosting the conference.
“I understand that you and certain faculty members believe that [hosting the conference] constitutes your commitment to free speech and academic freedom. Ironically, Duke will be supporting a group – which is also known as the International Solidarity Movement – which does not believe in free speech or democracy and which endorses violence, mass murder, Jew-hatred and homicidal-suicide terrorism,” wrote Chelser.
“You might say America prides itself on extending its civil rights, including that of free speech, to racist groups and to their hate speech. Let me respectfully suggest that, post 9-11, America may no longer do so without risking grievous consequences both in terms of lives lost and truth abandoned.”
Brodhead said neither he nor Duke endorses the content of the conference any more than any other conference or speaker who comes to the university.
“You understand that I can’t make certain public statements,” said Brodhead. He felt that to do so could have a chilling effect on the willingness of others at Duke to take positions.
Brodhead did, however, condemn terrorism and terrorist acts saying, “My views on terrorism are clear. …”
John Burness, vice president for Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke, told WorldNetDaily, “We don’t look at the content; we provide an environment where people can make arguments and counter-arguments. We must have different viewpoints speaking.”
Meanwhile, some campus groups are taking action.
Duke’s Jewish Chabad group has brought to the campus the Bus 19 Memorial Exhibit, the shell of an Israeli commuter bus that exploded Jan. 29, 2004, when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated charges strapped to his body, killing 11 people, a few moments after boarding in the heart of Jerusalem. The bus will be displayed for the week and marks the first time the memorial has been brought to an American university.
“Its display at Duke reflects students’ pride and solidarity with the people of Israel and the sorrow for the victims and their families,” Rabbi Zalman Bluming, executive director of Chabad at Duke University, told WorldNetDaily. “It also conveys students’ condemnation of the ruthless tactics that have been used by Israel’s neighbors in this conflict to derail the possibility of peace.”
Also, the Duke Conservative Union has invited Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, which supports Israel, to speak, and will take out full-page ads in local newspapers to expose PSM’s ties to terrorism.
And sources tell WorldNetDaily the Jewish Defense League, a Jewish activist organization, plans to monitor the campus during the conference.
“It is shameful, but not terribly surprising, that Duke University is willing to host a terrorist-supporting group, as the ethos on many elite campuses is to want to give a privileged platform to the totalitarians. It just displays how deeply the rot has set into the American university,” Pipes told WorldNetDaily.
Beila Rabinowitz , director of Militant Islam Monitor, told WorldNetDaily “Duke University is undermining the war on terror by providing the PSM with a forum to disseminate their militant Islamist agenda.”
