Khaled Abu Toameh
During a recent visit to several university campuses in the U.S., I
discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah.
Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide
bomber.
I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel's
"apartheid system" is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.
I was also told that top Fatah operative Marwan Barghouti, who is serving
five life terms in prison for masterminding terror attacks against Israeli
civilians, was thrown behind bars simply because he was trying to promote
peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Furthermore, I was told that all the talk about financial corruption in the
Palestinian Authority was "Zionist propaganda" and that Yasser Arafat had
done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of
schools, hospitals and universities.
The good news is that these remarks were made only by a minority of people
on the campuses who describe themselves as "pro-Palestinian," although the
overwhelming majority of them are not Palestinians or even Arabs or Muslims.
The bad news is that these groups of hard-line activists/thugs are trying to
intimidate anyone who dares to say something that they don't like to hear.
When the self-designated "pro-Palestinian" lobbyists are unable to challenge
the facts presented by a speaker, they resort to verbal abuse.
On one campus, for example, I was condemned as an "idiot" because I said
that a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas in the January 2006 election
because they were fed up with financial corruption in the Palestinian
Authority.
On another campus, I was dubbed as a "mouthpiece for the Zionists" because I
said that Israel has a free media. There was another campus where someone
told me that I was a 'liar" because I said that Barghouti was sentenced to
five life terms because of his role in terrorism.
And then there was the campus (in Chicago) where I was "greeted" with
swastikas that were painted over posters promoting my talk. The
perpetrators, of course, never showed up at my event because they would not
be able to challenge someone who has been working in the field for nearly 30
years.
What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people
I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to
"resist the occupation" even if that meant blowing up children and women on
a bus in downtown Jerusalem.
I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a
university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or
where someone shouted abuse at me.
Ironically, many of the Arabs and Muslims I met on the campuses were much
more understanding and even welcomed my "even-handed analysis" of the
Israeli-Arab conflict. After all, the views I voiced were not much different
than those made by the leaderships both in Israel and the Palestinian
Authority. These views include support for the two-state solution and the
idea of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in this part of the world.
The so-called pro-Palestinian "junta" on the campuses has nothing to offer
other than hatred and de-legitimization of Israel. If these folks really
cared about the Palestinians, they would be campaigning for good government
and for the promotion of values of democracy and freedom in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip.
Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point
where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians,
namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the
armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent
Palestinians over the past few years.
The majority of these activists openly admit that they have never visited
Israel or the Palestinian territories. They don't know -and don't want to
know - that Jews and Arabs here are still doing business together and
studying together and meeting with each other on a daily basis because they
are destined to live together in this part of the world. They don't want to
hear that despite all the problems life continues and that ordinary Arab and
Jewish parents who wake up in the morning just want to send their children
to school and go to work before returning home safely and happily.
What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the
Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state.
It is not really about ending the "occupation" as much as it is about ending
the existence of Israel.
Many of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas officials I talk to in the
context of my work as a journalist sound much more pragmatic than most of
the anti-Israel, "pro-Palestinian" folks on the campuses.
Over the past 15 years, much has been written and said about the fact that
Palestinian school textbooks don't promote peace and coexistence and that
the Palestinian media often publishes anti-Israel material.
While this may be true, there is no ignoring the fact that the anti-Israel
campaign on U.S. campuses is not less dangerous. What is happening on these
campuses is not in the frame of freedom of speech. Instead, it is the
freedom to disseminate hatred and violence. As such, we should not be
surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip
or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from
university campuses across the U.S.
http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/03/on-campus-the-pro-palestinians-real-agenda.p
hp
No comments:
Post a Comment