Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forum'You Can Fool Some People Sometime': BS Gets BDS a Win at UC Riverside
As some of you might know, the student senate at UC Riverside voted on March 6 to divest from companies doing business in Israel. You'd think that the UCR students had risen up in outrage at supposed Israeli "apartheid". That is, after all, what "Students for Justice in Palestine" (SJP) --sponsors of the divestment motion -- want you to think.
But don't be fooled. The UCR senate did not pass the divestment bill because UCR students agree with the SJP. The senate passed the divestment bill, quite simply, because it was swindled. Because the SJP orchestrated it so that opponents of the bill did not get their say.
I know because I was there.
While the SJP boasted that it started to lobby the UCR senators -- one of whom is also an SJP "board member" -- a "month and half" before the motion came to a vote, opponents of divestment were kept entirely in the dark until a mere 20 hours prior. The SJP were given a week to prepare a PowerPoint presentation. Students opposed to the motion were not.
On the night of the vote, SJP officer Shadi Matar opened with a 14-minute presentation. As if being kept in the dark for weeks were not enough, opponents of the motion were given no right of rebuttal whatsoever. In fact, opposition was rigidly confined to 50 percent of the time allotted for public interventions -- that is, to whoever in attendance wanted to get up and speak. The rest went, again, to the SJP and its allies.
In the words of dissenting Senator Megan Crail, "there was not enough time or opportunity among Senators to discuss the resolution due to public forum, and there was not a presentation of the issue from both perspectives."
What's worse, the SJP reportedly admitted that it deliberately kept opponents of the motion in the dark until the last minute in order to pass the motion without any real opposition
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philippe-assouline/you-can-fool-some-people-_b_2934844.html
King_David
(14,851 posts)Amal Ali, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Riverside, said keeping the resolution under wraps was the only way to "level the playing field," noting that similar resolutions on other campuses had been quashed by well-funded major Jewish or pro-Israel organizations. "We are aware that the Jewish lobby is very powerful and know BDS is something they fight against," said Ali.
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