Monday, March 18, 2013

Students accuse US of 'ulterior motives' in ticket distribution

Three days before President Barack Obama's much anticipated speech to Israeli students, Student Union chairman criticizes U.S. Embassy for excluding Ariel and other universities • "Such discrimination is unacceptable," he writes.

An Ariel Student Union poster turns Obama's "Yes, we can" campaign slogan into a question about their exclusion from his speech in Jerusalem.
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Photo credit: Courtesy
Israel Student Union chairman Uri Reshtik sent a letter of protest to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on Sunday over President Barack Obama's planned speech to Israeli university students.
Obama has decided not to speak to the Knesset, as many visiting heads of state have done, but to deliver a speech to about 1,000 students at the Jerusalem Convention Center this Thursday.

In Reshtik's letter, he praised Obama's decision to speak to Israeli students and young people, but said that the decision to invite students from only 10 of Israel's 60 universities and colleges is "discrimination based on ulterior motives. Such discrimination is not respectable and not acceptable."
Obama's decision generated outrage when students at Israel's newest accredited university, Ariel University, which is over the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 border), discovered they had not been invited by the U.S. Embassy.
Last week, Habayit Hayehudi MK Yoni Chetboun sent a letter of protest to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro. "I can't understand the decision," Chetboun wrote.
The Bar-Ilan University Student Union also sent a letter to the ambassador over the issue.
Reshtik concluded his letter by asking the U.S. Embassy to reconsider its decision on the distribution of tickets, and offered the assistance of the National Student Union in any future efforts.

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