From Haaretz: Recent events at Brown University reflect a frightening new stage to the BDS movement: targeting Jewish students and institutions that don’t explicitly distance themselves from Israel.
Janet Mock was born in Honolulu in 1983 to an African-American father and native Hawaiian mother, and is a soaring star in LGBT circles—almost a pop icon of the transgender community, if you will. As I discovered last week, she’s in high-demand as a speaker on college campuses. “Moral Voices,” a social justice group that operates under the auspices of Brown University’s Hillel, secured her as a speaker for a March 21 seminar entitled “Redefining Realness.” The event was well-publicized, and — as evidence of its expected popularity — was slated to take place in Brown’s largest lecture hall.
But, unbeknownst to the program’s organizers, Hillel’s right to sponsor events had apparently been revoked by a handful of student activists. A group calling itself “Brown Students” published a petition on Change.org urging Mock to disavow Brown/RISD Hillel’s sponsorship, since its umbrella organization—Hillel International—is pro-Israel on most issues.
I take pity on my readers, and will therefore reproduce only the most critical part of the tortured document:
“Hillel as a corporation has consistently defended and even advocated for the Israeli state’s policies of occupation and racial apartheid. Israel’s violent policies center on colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of native Palestinians. Further, the Israeli government has been ignoring (and actively perpetuating) waves of anti-African violence in the past few years, recently including the mob shooting and lynching of an African asylum seeker and anti-African state-supported police violence.”
The petition’s authors also coughed up the highly-original pinkwashing charge — that Hillel is exploiting Israel’s positive record on LGBT rights in order to distract people from how evil the Jewish state is.
The students were not protesting anything about Janet Mock; just that Hillel doesn’t have any right to host “one of their own” – a transgender woman of color – if it supports Israel. The petition attracted only 159 supporters — not all of them even Brown students — but as Mercutio said, “‘tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.” Janet Mock cancelled the event. In an email, her representatives explained that “the focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to the proposed event, and her visit was received with controversy and resistance rather than open dialogue and discussion about the issues closest to Janet’s work.”
The fingerprints of Students for Justice in Palestine were all over this from the start, and SJP’s proud confession in Monday’s issue of the Brown Daily Herald leaves no doubt that the petition was its handiwork.
The Janet Mock incident was just one episode of the anti-Israel scourge that has racked Brown this semester. Hillel hosted its highest profile event of the year on January 28, when former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharanksy and Hollywood legend Michael Douglas came to speak about their “Jewish Journeys.” Needless to say, that program didn’t sit too well with the dark forces of anti-Israelism, whose faithful picketed the talk in an attempt to disrupt it. Then came the coup de grâce: Students at the Jewish and LGBT frats discovered anti-Semitic and homophobic vandalism graffitied on their walls last week. There’s no evidence implicating SJP in this, but when punishing the world’s only Jewish country becomes a permanent and obsessive feature of campus life, what happens next cannot be dismissed as an unhappy coincidence.
