Arif Rafiq’scondemnation of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) was offensive anddisturbing. The object of Mr. Rafiq’s criticism was an AJC statementundersigned by many university presidents including Stony Brook’s ShirleyStrum Kenny. The statement decries recent acts of violence and hate againstJewish students on college campuses. It is a matter of public record that many,if not most, of those acts were committed by anti-Israel activists.Nevertheless the AJC statement refers only to the acts themselves and,diplomatically, avoids mention of their perpetrators. The words PalestinianMuslim or Arab never appear. The statement can be read in its entirety at
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Frankly, I find itquestionable for someone to take exception to such inherently Americansentiments or to a minority group’s right to protect itself from acts ofviolent discrimination. Yet Mr. Rafiq’s tone is strident andconfrontational. He charges that the AJC statement ‘?introduces anunhealthy and foreign phenomenon’ and that it ‘?creates anotherroadblock preventing the improvement of Jewish-Muslim relations in the UnitedStates.’
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Recent months have witnessedsome truly shocking episodes of violence and intimidation against Jewishstudents on college campuses. In September, a speech by former Israeli PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia University in Montreal had to beactually cancelled because of violent destructive rioting by hundreds ofpro-Palestinian protestors. Concordia’s administration justifiably fearedfor the safety of its invited guest and his largely Jewish audience. At apro-Israel rally organized by Jewish students at San Francisco State Universitythis past May, pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators encircled the Jewishstudents, physically threatened them and shouted ‘?Go back toRussia!’ and ‘?Hitler didn’t finish the job!’ AtUC-Berkeley this past April, campus police arrested 79 pro-Palestinianprotestors who had stormed into a classroom building in an attempt to disruptHolocaust Remembrance Day commemorations by Jewish students.
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Planned organized mass hateacts such as these, and others like them, truly ‘?introduces an unhealthyand foreign phenomenon’ into our academic society. Yet, amazingly, Mr.Rafiq levels his charge not at this but rather at those who attempt to shinelight on such acts and bring them to the public’s attention. How bizarre.I would like to know if Mr. Rafiq thinks pro-Palestinian rioters tossingpennies at Jewish students and taunting them with threats of violencedoesn’t ‘?create another roadblock preventing the improvement ofJewish-Muslim relations’? I would like to know why criticism of suchimmoral and illegal acts presents such a problem for Mr. Rafiq.
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Of course Mr. Rafiq woulddeny having such a problem. After all, he points out that his opposition to theAJC statement is based merely on the fact that it doesn’t specificallymention (‘?blatantly ignoring’, Mr. Rafiq says) acts ofdiscrimination against Arab Muslim and South Asian Americans. He reminds usthat Muslim women wearing the hijab and Sikh men wearing a turban are also’?potential targets of hate crimes on campuses’. This may, on thesurface, have the appearance of a balanced position. Appearances, however, canbe deceiving.
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Mr. Rafiq’s calculatedcounterpoising of discrimination against Jewish Americans with that againstArab Muslim and South Asian Americans is specious and disingenuous. I wish tobe perfectly clear on this point: Acts of violent discrimination againstJewish-Americans are primarily perpetrated by anti-Israel activists, oftenconsisting of Arabs, Muslims and their sympathizers. Acts of violentdiscrimination against Arab Muslim and South Asian Americans are rarely, ifever, perpetrated by Jews. As Mr. Rafiq himself points out, the two kinds ofdiscrimination have entirely different bases. Anti-Arab and anti-Muslimdiscrimination is almost exclusively linked to anger generated by 9/11. Itpeaked immediately after the attacks and gradually subsided. This violentdiscrimination consists largely of random spontaneous acts by whackos andvarious fringe elements. In the wake of 9/11 there were no organized plannedmass hate activities against Arab or Muslim Americans; either by Jews ornon-Jews, either on college campuses or anywhere else. Mainstream Americansociety, including mainstream Jewish Americans, would simply not have stood forit, and rightly so. Bearing in mind that the 9/11 attacks were on American soiland were, after all, unprecedentedly horrifying, this fact stands as atestament to the fair-mindedness and basic decency of the American people.
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By contrast, acts of hate andintimidation against Jewish Americans are almost exclusively linked to theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict thousands of miles away. Consequently, those whoperpetrate such acts tend to be Arabs, Muslims and their sympathizers. Ratherthan being random spontaneous actions of whacko individuals, they frequentlytake the form of organized planned mass hate activities (as detailed earlier)which have as their object a specifically political goal: the delegitimizationof Jewish support for Israel.
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This is an importantdistinction conveniently overlooked by Mr. Rafiq. Since Jewish Americans haveno particular connection to post-9/11 discrimination against Arab Muslim andSouth Asian Americans, I personally see no obvious reason why suchdiscrimination (deplorable as it is) needed to be specifically singled out bythe AJC statement. By the same token, I had absolutely no problem with verysimilar statements issued by Arab and Muslim American organizations following9/11 decrying acts of discrimination against their communities. I fullyunderstood and supported those statements. It never
occurred to me at the timeto ‘?make a stink’ (as Mr. Rafiq has chosen to do) over the omissionin these statements of specific references to anti-Jewish discrimination. Afterall, there are many forms of discrimination in our society; against AfricanAmericans, gays, Native Americans, etc. Why doesn’t Mr. Rafiq condemn theAJC for not mentioning all of these by name? Why does he only object thatdiscrimination against Arab Muslim and South Asian Americans is not mentioned?Is Mr. Rafiq trying to insinuate that when some ignorant lunatic attacks a Sikhman because of his turban that somehow Jews should be made to account?
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Pretending to be for’?the improvement of Jewish-Muslim relations in the United States’,Mr. Rafiq is, in fact, actively pursuing the exact opposite by creatingcontroversy where none exists.
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SolomonWeiskop Ph.D.
