After an intense nine-and-a-half hour meeting, the Associated Students Senate voted not to pass a resolution to “Divest From Companies that Profit from Apartheid” in a secret ballot, with 8 supporting and 16 opposing.What is most interesting is that there was a similar resolution last year:
Hundreds attended and nearly 100 students and community members spoke at public forum to voice opposition or support for the divestment legislation, which focuses on divesting from five Israeli companies that the University works with. The meeting was held at Corwin Pavilion to accommodate the large crowd expected due to last year’s divestment hearings, during which Senate meetings ran well into the early morning several weeks in a row before the resolution was ultimately struck down.
A revised resolution aimed at divesting from companies that “profit from the military occupation of Palestine” failed to pass — despite a 12-11-1 vote — after it was reintroduced during Wednesday’s 11-hour Associated Students Senate meeting.In other words, last year the Israel-haters at UCSB managed to get a bare majority to vote for divestment but not enough to pass; this year it was decisively defeated by a 2-1 margin.
The burden of deciding the resolution’s fate ultimately fell to Internal Vice President Mayra Segovia, who was forced to determine whether or not the 12 senators in favor constituted enough of a majority to pass the resolution based on the A.S. Legal Code. Under Legal code, a simple majority is 50 percent of Senators plus one, not counting abstentions — meaning that passage of the resolution would have required a “yes” vote from 13 of the 23 senators present (rounded up from 12.5).
Can there be a better illustration that the tide is turning against the Israel-haters on campus? And this is in California!
Following the even more lopsided vote at SDSU also on Wednesday night, the vote against even having a committee looking at the topic in Dearborn earlier this month, the Cornell resolution failure, the University of Michigan failure last month, and the UCLA failure (and meltdown) in February, the haters don't have much to point to in their effort to portray BDS as gaining steam. They won in the University of Windsor by using illegal methods - and that was overturned. In one of their very few victories, they barely squeaked by a vote in UC Riverside. They also lost at Loyola, University of New Mexico and elsewhere.
Electronic Intifada doesn't even bother to cover all of these losses anymore. They'll have articles leading up to a vote, and then...silence. Or at best, claiming victory by even having the vote take place, so that antisemitism and Israel-hatred can be publicly aired at universities - because that's the entire point, isn't it?