WHY IS BOSTON COLLEGE HONORING TOP ISRAEL LOBBYIST ABE FOXMAN?
The Electronic Intifada
May 7 2014
Charlotte Silver
The Electronic Intifada
7 May 2014
On 4 April, the administration of Suffolk University in Boston sent
an email to the entire student body announcing that Abraham Foxman,
a top pro-Israel lobbyist, would address some of the college’s 2014
graduation ceremonies.
The university’s announcement billed Foxman, national director of
the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) since 1987, as “a worldwide leader
in the fight against bigotry.” However, many of the students had a
decidedly different take on Foxman.
“After reading what he has said about minority groups — specifically
Muslims — I was upset. I wanted to do something,” Batool Raza told
The Electronic Intifada.
Raza, who grew up in Pakistan and moved to the United States in 2006
in order to attend college, will graduate from Suffolk University Law
School this May. Foxman is scheduled to address graduates in arts,
law and business, as well as to receive an honorary degree on 17 May.
A small group of students led by Amy Willis, president of Suffolk’s
chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, drafted a petition opposing
the choice of Foxman as commencement speaker.
The petition highlights three principal reasons why the authors believe
Foxman is not an appropriate speaker for commencement: his opposition
to the US’ recognition of the Armenian genocide, his encouragement
of widespread surveillance of Muslim communities in the US, and his
objection to the opening of an Islamic community center close to the
site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
In 2007 the US Congress considered a resolution that would recognize
the killing of nearly 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire
between 1915 and 1923 as genocide. Abraham Foxman opposed the bill,
arguing it would be “counterproductive” to Turkish-Israeli relations,
asserting that during wartime, “things get messy” (“Jewish group
recognizes Armenian genocide,” Los Angeles Times, 23 August 2007).
Foxman has repeatedly advocated for and defended the indiscriminate
spying on Muslim communities in the US following the 11 September
2001 attacks. Most recently, he and the ADL exploited the 2013 Boston
Marathon bombing as an opportunity to promulgate the pseudo-scientific
“radicalization theories” that have justified the sweeping surveillance
of and spying on Muslims in the US (“The four lessons of the Boston
marathon bombing,” Jewish Journal, 10 April 2014).
Speaking to a reporter with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Foxman said,
“Should we follow the ethnic communities? Should we be monitoring
mosques? This isn’t Muslim-baiting — it’s driven by fear, by a desire
for safety and security” (“Even after Boston, there is more anti-Jewish
than anti-Muslim sentiment in US, says ADL’s Foxman,” 28 April 2013).
“A little too controversial”
While canceling commencement speakers is not common, in recent years
a number of universities have rescinded invitations to controversial
speakers.
On 3 May, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice joined the
growing list, opting to bow out from speaking at Rutgers University’s
commencement after students protested her role in the US invasion
of Iraq. After announcing that she would not address the graduating
class, Rice stated on her Facebook page: “Rutgers’ invitation to me
to speak has become a distraction for the university community at
this very special time.”
Sammy Nabulsi, the elected president of the Student Bar Association at
Suffolk, said he understood that the choice of commencement speakers
can be contentious but “Foxman’s a little too controversial.”
After the petition began to circulate and trigger debate on campus,
Nabulsi saw what this meant to the graduating class.
“That’s when I took a more formal stance: I asked the president and
board of trustees to disinvite him as a speaker — or at least not
give him an honorary degree — because it’s dividing the student body.”
The petition has received almost 1,000 signatures.
Nabulsi, a Muslim and Palestinian-American law student, is also
graduating this year. He argued that Foxman’s discriminatory beliefs
were a “slap in the face” to the student body and the school’s
tradition of embracing diversity.
He explained that one needn’t go further than the university’s website
to see that the school prides itself on encouraging diversity. Yet
he added that “diversity” is more than just a marketing ploy. “Dean
Camille Nelson made diversity a big initiative when she came on a
few years ago,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
Suffolk Law School was founded in 1906 as a “working man’s college,”
providing evening classes so that men and women of all socioeconomic
classes, races and religions could attend after work.
Opaque
In response to the petition, the school’s administration reaffirmed its
selection, quoting President Barack Obama’s praise for Foxman’s legacy
of rejecting hatred (“Suffolk Law students protest choice of ADL leader
as commencement speaker,” Boston Business Journal, 17 April 2014).
Willis, the initiator of the online petition, has had no luck in
meeting with the administration to discuss it.
The university did not respond to the The Electronic Intifada’s
request for comment.
According to Nabulsi, the process of picking speakers is kept
intentionally opaque. The university’s board of trustees is divided
into small committees that choose possible speakers and send out
invites. Nabulsi has encouraged Damian Wilmot, who leads the committee
responsible for selecting the law school’s speaker, to allow student
opinion to influence the decision-making process.
Foxman has been instrumental in leading the ADL to become an
organization as committed to censoring criticism of Israel as it is
to defending Jews from defamation.
For example, Foxman led the chorus of howls against the One State
Conference held at Harvard University in 2012. Writing in The Boston
Globe, Foxman claimed that the conference organizers’ true aim was
to “make anti-Semitism more acceptable” by cloaking it in concerns
about Palestinian rights (“Israelis, Palestinians under one flag,”
29 February 2012).
Last year, the ADL published a list of the “top ten most influential
and active anti-Israel groups in the United States,” describing them as
“fixated with delegitimizing Israel.”
Nakba denial
Questioning Foxman’s views and tactics is hardly a marginal position.
In 2010, The Jewish Daily Forward detailed the rightward direction
Foxman had taken the ADL with a skeptical eye (“As some retire from
ADL, will Abe be next?” 27 October 2010).
But the petition by Suffolk students refrains from criticizing Foxman’s
anti-Palestinian statements as well as his denial of the Nakba (Arabic
for catastrophe) — the ethnic cleansing undertaken by Zionist forces
at the time of Israel’s establishment in 1948.
In a 2008 opinion piece, Foxman writes, “Adopting the narrative
underlying the Nakba terminology leads in a direction away from
responsibility for building a nation and toward illusion and blame,
twin illnesses which have haunted the Palestinians for decades. What
is referred to as a catastrophe in 1948 was largely self-inflicted
by the Palestinians, with the support and encouragement of the Arab
world. There would have been no war and no refugee problem had the
Palestinians accepted the UN two-state solution of 1947” (“Negating
the Nakba narrative,” The New York Sun).
Amy Willis of the campus chapter of the National Lawyers Guild said
that while she has received a lot of support from individuals, no
other student group was willing to endorse the petition institutionally
due to the perceived sensitivity of the issue.
Indeed, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published comments by Matthew
Smith, a law student at Suffolk University and a member of the
school’s Jewish Law Students Association, alleging that supporters of
the petition had “inappropriately referenced Foxman’s Jewish heritage”
as a reason to disinvite him from speaking at the commencement ceremony
(“Suffolk University defends choice of Foxman as commencement speaker,”
23 April 2014).
But the cautious wording of the petition belies the fact that the
university has a newly-formed and undeterred Students for Justice in
Palestine (SJP) chapter — members of which say they have experienced
a favorable response on campus.
Yasmeen Hamdoun, the current president of the SJP chapter, said the
group’s first events last fall attracted a substantial number of
curious and open students and very little backlash.
Laila, another member of SJP who declined to give her last name,
wrote to The Electronic Intifada: “We came to the conclusion that
lots of people want to learn about and support Palestine, and they
just don’t know how, or in what way. Ever since then, large numbers of
people have shown up to all of our events, and based on the discussions
toward the end of each event, we realized that lots of people (more
than we think), rallied behind our cause.”
Hamdoun said the group plans to launch a campaign for boycott,
divestment and sanctions against Israel once its base has expanded.
Charlotte Silver is a journalist based in San Francisco.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/why-boston-college-honoring-top-israel-lobbyist-abe-foxman/13363