Free speech triumphs over pro-Israel bullies in US universities
Students have won major victories for free speech on US campuses lately as attempts by
Israel lobby groups to suppress Palestine solidarity activism continue to fall flat.
“Israel advocacy organizations driving the suppression cannot succeed in manufacturing facts, even if they try,”
Liz Jackson, an attorney with the organization
Palestine Legal, told The Electronic Intifada.
Last week, the president of the
University of Michigan defended Palestine solidarity activism on campus after student organizers were attacked for holding a protest against Israeli policies on the same day as a Jewish holiday.
In response to
accusations that the protest was an affront to Jewish students, the protest’s organizers, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE),
stated that the charges fall “under the much larger wave of speech suppression that seeks to derail any valid criticism of Israeli state policy of oppression against Palestinians as a false claim of anti-Semitism.”
University president Mark Schlissel
told The Michigan Daily, a campus newspaper, that SAFE “did what we want advocacy groups to do, and to me, they were advocating a political point of view.”
Schlissel’s statement follows a similar defense of student activism in New York City.
There, Israel-aligned groups and elected officials lost a long-waged battle to censor
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) after a six-month independent investigation yielded results that did not support their claims.
Free speech triumphs over pro-Israel bullies in US universities