April 2
GUEST: Nora Barrows-Friedman, associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, and the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014), talks about Bard College's disciplinary proceedings against students who spoke out against a racist speaker on campus.Bard students cleared of false charges
We have written a lot on this blog about Students for Justice in Palestine. We have had a number of students on Activist Radio, all with about the same point of view. Their college administrations were hostile to the idea of Palestinian rights.
There were several ways that colleges have tried to muzzle freedom of speech on campuses. First, SJP students were called rude and lacking in academic civility when they talked about Israel as an apartheid state. Next came the coverup, programs that the college supports that prove its benevolent view towards Muslims. Finally, individual students were threatened with disciplinary action and suspension. Vassar expelled a Black student for posting a cartoon on the internet that the college deemed to be antisemitic. In fact the entire SJP group was banished from campus for a year, despite the fact that no one else had ever seen the cartoon. The cartoon itself was problematical since it attacked all forms of racism in America, starting with a KKK member dressed in white holding black slaves in a cage. The charge of antisemitism was questionable at best.
Bard has taken a different route. The college has educational exchanges in the West Bank: how could the administration be biased against Palestinians? Two students who spoke out against Islamophobic comments at a public forum were under disciplinary review, yet all Bard could talk about was its praiseworthy links to Palestinian educational institutions. Eventually, all charges were dropped, in part because local community groups were supporting the students and their right to speak out.
Like our Congress, college administrators seem to be bought and sold by the Israel Lobby. Rather than protecting their students from outside assaults by rightwing Zionist organizations, the colleges have chosen to acquiesce to some of their well heeled alums in threatening students advocating human rights on campus.
