[rad-green] In going after UCLA, the Trump administration is attempting to chill free speech about Israel

*https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-23/in-going-after-ucla-the-trump-administration-is-attempting-to-chill-free-speech-about-israel
<https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-23/in-going-after-ucla-the-trump-administration-is-attempting-to-chill-free-speech-about-israel>*





*Los Angeles Times          January 23, 2020In going after UCLA, the Trump
administration is attempting to chill free speech about IsraelBy David N.
Myers and Chaim Seidler-Feller *
*[image: Students stand in front of UCLA’s Royce Hall on March 5, 2014, to
protest a university decision not to divest from companies that conduct
business with Israel.]*
*Students stand in front of UCLA’s Royce Hall on March 5, 2014, to protest
a university decision not to divest from companies that conduct business
with Israel.(Los Angeles Times)*

The “longest hatred,” as one historian called anti-Semitism, is in the
midst of a resurgence. Murderous acts of violence against Jews in recent
weeks come on the heels of an alarming rise in anti-Jewish incidents
worldwide over the last five years.

A good deal of recent attention has focused on college campuses, which have
been identified as sites of anti-Semitism. Some observers have suggested
that fierce criticism of Israel, including support for the BDS (Boycott
Divestment Sanction) movement, is the equivalent of a hateful and racist
act. But as real as the attacks on Jews have been, it’s important not to
extend the label of anti-Semitism to all criticism of Zionism and Israel.

At our campus, UCLA, we received news last week that the U.S. Department of
Education was investigating an episode from the spring of 2019, when a
guest speaker in an anthropology class made sharply critical remarks about
Zionism, including the assertion that Israel engaged in atrocities and
ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. A Jewish student in the class
confronted the visitor after the lecture, alleging that her claims amounted
to anti-Semitism. As the guest and student went back and forth, the host
professor did not moderate the Q&A session nor intervene in the heated
exchange.

In October 2019, a conservative Israel advocacy organization, Stand With
Us, wrote to the federal Education Department alleging that the student was
the victim of “discrimination and harassment … as a result of her perceived
Jewish ethnicity.” Three months later, on Jan. 9, the Education Department
announced that it would proceed with an investigation of the case through
its Office of Civil Rights.

The investigation is among the first to be undertaken in the wake of
President Trump’s executive order on anti-Semitism, issued on Dec. 11. The
order did two things: First, it extended the protection against racial or
national discrimination of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to Jews,
even though Jews may consider themselves members of a religious group. And
second, it relied on a definition of anti-Semitism that, as Trump’s
son-in-law and aide Jared Kushner put it, “makes clear what our
administration has stated publicly and on the record: Anti-Zionism is
anti-Semitism.”

We can understand the discomfort of the student in the UCLA class last
spring. It is not easy for people identified with Zionism and Israel to
have charges of racism or white supremacism cast upon them. And we can
readily understand why the student might have expected her professor to
play a more active role in managing the classroom conversation.

But we should not use this case to upend some of the most important
principles of the university, especially the right to free and open
expression, even when it makes people uncomfortable. UCLA’s own
administration undertook an examination of the case and determined that it
did not rise to the level of discrimination or harassment. From our own
review of the classroom videotape, we agree.

We should be honest: This case is really not about a single incident. Stand
With Us and its partner in litigation, the Zachor Legal Institute, have a
larger agenda. They want to treat as discriminatory — and even anti-Semitic
— claims that Israel treats Jews and Palestinians differently, that its
occupation of the West Bank is illegal and has come to resemble apartheid
or that Israel should be a state of all of its citizens rather than a state
of Jews. They also want to curtail expressions of support for the BDS
(Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) movement. In short, they want to chill
free speech about Israel on college campuses.

We, for our part, oppose BDS and believe firmly in the right of Israel to
exist. But we don’t think that those who disagree with us should be branded
as Jew-haters or subject to federal discrimination claims.

This attempt to chill speech around Israel-Palestine is part of a larger
conservative attack on U.S. universities, which are being accused of
brainwashing impressionable young students. It is also alarmingly
consistent with a national and even global pattern to roll back basic
pillars of liberal democracy. We see the tendency in the U.S., Russia,
Poland, Turkey, India, England and Israel itself, where government leaders
have created a political ecosystem in which dissenting voices are silenced
and harassed.

What is so wrong-headed about the focus on American college campuses as
sites of anti-Semitism is the deflection of attention from the truly grave
threats around us today. In this regard, we can’t fail to notice the recent
wave of attacks on Jews by African Americans in the New York area. But the
main source of toxic anti-Semitism in the U.S. today is the white
nationalist movement whose attacks have nothing to do with anti-Israel
sentiments. It is that ideology and its delivery system — the internet —
that must occupy us. A group of undergraduate researchers working at the
Luskin Center for History and Policy at UCLA have been studying the
proliferation of white nationalism in Southern California
<https://luskincenter.history.ucla.edu/2019/10/25/white-nationalism-in-southern-california-a-report-from-a-lchp-research-team/>,
and it is truly alarming.

Yes, there are some critics of Israel on campus whose words have lapsed
into anti-Semitic stereotyping. We should condemn them when they do and be
vigilant in calling out the hostility that these pronouncements may
nurture. But we should also be clear-eyed in recognizing that these campus
actors are not the ones attacking and killing Jews; nor are they trying to
foment a race war in America as white nationalists are.

Let us not be deterred from addressing the real and present danger — and
from joining forces with people of goodwill to fight the forces of racism
and anti-Semitism that remain alive in our society today.

*David N. Myers is a professor of Jewish history at UCLA and director of
the Luskin Center for History and Policy. He is president of the New Israel
Fund. Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller served for 40 years as campus rabbi at
UCLA and is a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.*

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