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Sunday, March 02, 2014

Anti-Israel conference at NYU goes on despite protests

In a follow-up on a story I broke, JPost reports:
The American Studies Association hosted a large pro-Boycott, Divest, Sanction at New York University from Friday night to Saturday evening, sparking a backlash from NYU students, who wrote a letter of protest to the school’s administration.

The letter, co-signed by 26 NYU students and student leaders from both the college Democrat and Republican groups, was hand delivered to NYU President John Sexton and to NYU faculty member and incoming ASA President Lisa Duggan.

The ASA-BDS event, which coincided with Israeli Apartheid Week in New York and was titled “Circuits of Influence: US, Israel and Palestine,” was not widely publicized and was closed to the press.

When a reporter from The Jerusalem Post tried to register as a civilian earlier in the week, she was told the conference was completely full. Flyers for the event cautioned: “Please do not post or circulate the flyer.

We are trying to avoid press, protesters and public attention.”

“We are immensely disappointed with both the nature of this event and how it has been met with complete silence from the NYU administration,” the letter said, citing the fact that invitations to the event were extremely selective and the event itself features only pro-BDS, anti-Israeli speakers.

The students condemned the fact that the event coincided – “almost to the minute” – with Shabbat, a move that the letter called “seemingly deliberate... to prevent the presentation of other views in this complex issue.”

“Our concern is that New York University, a global leader in education, is permitting the occurrence of an event that is antithetical to the principles that the global academic community stands for,” the letter said, “if anything, the university condones the event with the administration’s disconcerting silence... While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is indeed complex and deserves intense debate, hosting events that unequivocally reject and refuse to acknowledge dissenting opinions is an appalling gesture of intolerance.”
I don't know yet if anyone physically protested the event or if anyone infiltrated it.

I found one person who tweeted some highlights.The first two are pretty funny:





This one is classic, as an Arab defines antisemitism for us poor deluded Jews:



This one had me scratching my head, though:



Is that speaker saying that Americans are victims of colonialism?

Well, in 140 characters it does sound pretty stupid, but here is how I imagine it was presented so that academics could nod their heads and then burst out in applause:

In the scale of continuum of colonizer to colonized, most peoples do not fall on the extreme axes, but somewhere in between. The exception, of course, are Zionists, who are colonizers in extremis. Yet colonization is not only of land, but colonizers can also occupy governments, businesses and collective consciousness. In that sense, perhaps the United States can also be considered colonized by the Zionist entity, as the Zionist narrative has invaded the government, the financial centers of power and the very mindset of the average citizen who is woefully ignorant of Zionist crimes and abuses. I call this colonialism of the mind "ethereal colonization." So in a very real sense, Americans and Palestinians stand together, as victims of Zionist colonialism, and we must work together to free ourselves from all forms of insidious occupation, the concrete and the abstract!

Now it makes sense!

If anyone finds any other tweets or social media posts about this conference ofexclusion, it would be fun to reproduce it more fully,
at