Above Radio Interview, “Arafat Personally Financed the ISM“: Josh Hasten of Voice of Israel interviews Lee Kaplan, Investigative journalist and founder of “Stop the ISM” (International Solidarity Movement), who explains that the late PLO chief, Yasser Arafat, personally provided the seed money to found the ISM, which is dedicated to destroying Israel. Kaplan also details the ISM’s structure and strategies, explaining how the group has inspired others to launch additional anti-Israel organizations.
UC Davis student government votes to divest from Israel: The cycle continues . . . Here’s how to stop it.
BY LEE KAPLAN
When I was a student in college, student government was pretty much considered a nerd’s game. The majority of the student body was occupied with studies, with work, even chasing girls. It wasn’t very hard to get involved in student government if you wanted that on your resume. Colleges across America all set up mini-student governments on campuses designed after the U.S. constitution’s political structure. This is considered de rigueur today in education to teach students how our government runs. That is, usually a student president is elected, a legislature or senate is created to generate bills, and a judiciary is created to be sure everything is legal.
Colleges have long spates of vacation that most industries don’t enjoy: Spring Break, Christmas Break, Summer Vacation, all of which last weeks. Meanwhile, the student “government” rolls on. If you are clever and have an agenda like divestment from Israel, you can schedule a vote for a particular project a day or two before vacation when most students are already gone or not paying attention. This makes passage a shoo-in. In cases where divestment votes failed, Palestinian students waited for the next lull in attendance and then swooped in to pass their divestment resolutions.
The administrators, particularly in taxpayer-supported colleges such as in the University of California system, always tell the students that their “government” is “autonomous.” This pumps up the students and prevents the natives from getting restless. This backfired once at UC Berkeley when I worked on that campus. The student government had been allowed to fritter away almost every dime of student activity money it had to run its “government.” A small clique of “nerds” who ran the government then did the unthinkable: they mortgaged the state campus building that housed their chambers to Bank of the West. Eshelman Hall is a ten-story building near the entrance to UC Berkeley that houses classrooms, offices, a legislative chamber, and other features and is worth millions. UC administrators immediately told the students what they did was illegal because it was. Eshelman Hall belongs to the University of California and the state. The students protested they were “autonomous.” Ultimately, the courts decided the students had no autonomy to mortgage state property, that their being autonomous was merely rhetoric. Still, a trial ensued that cost the taxpayers through UC Berkeley a pretty penny until the University prevailed. The University’s administration had egg on its face and had to face California taxpayers’ wrath if they allowed radical students at Cal to sell part of the campus infrastructure. This was the result of feckless adminstrators and educators looking the other way, as student radicals took over the reins of student government.
On January 29, 2015, a vote was taken by students at UC Davis, as the student government passed a divestment resolution (Senate Resolution #9) that called for the university to divest from American corporations (Caterpillar, Veolia, G4S and Raytheon) for “ongoing human rights violations in Palestine,” stating that “The investment portfolio of the University of California’s endowment and pension funds includes holdings in these corporations,” and claiming these corporations make the University of California “a complicit third party” in” human rights violations against the Palestinian people.”
In fact, Caterpillar has offices in Gaza and does business with both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. The BDS activists use it as a target because the Israelis usually demolish the homes of terrorists with tractors. Veolia only has a 5% stake in the Jerusalem Light Rail system that is very popular with Israel and Palestinian Authority Arabs who use it to travel cheaply to and from work. Shutting down the railway system would only hurt the Arab population in the region. G4S provides prison guard services for terrorists in Israeli prisons. Needless to say, if G4S can be forced to abandon its contract in Israel, the divestment activists hope Israel will not be able to control its terrorist prison population. Raytheon provides military equipment to the IDF that protects Israelis, Arabs and Jews from military threats such as from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and ISIS. The goal, of course, is to enable Israel’s enemies to attack that country. These four corporations, rather than hurting the Arab population inside Israel, actually do more to help it and national security. Terrorists kill Arabs also, but to Hamas and other terrorist groups that is irrelevant. They are fighting wars of annihilation against the Jews—ergo, Israel.
A member of the UC Davis student senate, Azka Fayyaz, captioned a photo on Facebook that “Hamas & Sharia law have taken over UC Davis,” as she exulted in helping to pass through the vote. Hamas is classified as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government, and it is illegal to provide material or financial support to it. Its charter calls for genocide against the world’s Jews.
Lina Othman, a student member of the Students for Justice in Palestine at San Diego State, laid out a statewide plan for Hamas supporting students on all the UC campuses to network and take over the UC system at a convention of Al Awda in San Diego about two years ago. Al Awda is a front group for Hamas that calls for the obliteration of Israel. Using similar tactics, they have enabled Hamas supporters on all the UC campuses to take control of the student governments while the administrators do nothing about it.
On a reassuring note, not one college in the U.S. has ever divested from Israel, despite these “student government resolutions” having passed in campus student governments in defiance of any truth or logic. But they still continue at an unrelenting pace. Recently, the student regent from UC Berkeley appointed to the UC Regents Committee managed to get a one-year term there to push her goals.
And what did the Jewish community and Israel supporters do after this latest foray by the Hamas supporters on campus? As usual, they wrung their hands and sent emails to each other about BDS passing at UC Davis. They commented on how this was not conducive to peace in the Middle East. Some sent letters to the Chancellor at UC Davis, Linda Katehi. The result, of course, will be the same; the administration will state some platitudes about free speech and critical thinking and then ignore the situation until it blows over. Jewish support groups will express some indignation and then send emails to all the Jews to donate money to their 501 c 3 nonprofits to fight this.
But will they really fight it? Sure. They might buy a few posters to put around campus or hold a meeting, but they, too, will do nothing—until next time..
The fact is the student governments are set up to teach the students about democracy. But in this case, this isn’t democracy—it’s a misuse of campus resources the administration is too willing to allow and corrupts the educational process. Part of this resolution was based on false accusations that Israel is an apartheid state. This is part of the Goebbel’s-like plan of the Palestinians to “trick” Americans into supporting a terrorist group by making them think the only democracy in the Middle East practices the abhorrent racism present in 1980’s South Africa. The Palestinians are not a part of a democratic movement. They are a dictatorship that uses terrorism when it’s convenient to murder Jews. For the administrators to downgrade this obscenity as just an exercise in critical thinking that shows “opposing points of view” is to corrupt the educational process which they are supposed to promote as education on America’s democratic system of government.. It is incompetence on a grand scale in academia. And incompetents should be fired.
And therein lies the best way to stop this. Instead of sending emails back and forth to each other in a frenzy until enough time passes to let the matter die temporarily, a campaign must be started to call for firing of Chancellor Katehi for incompetence, as well as for those administrators who oversee the student government. It is against the law in the US to boycott Israel and interfere with businesses that do business with Israel. The problem is the administrations in Washington, both Republican and Democrat, do not enforce the law. The Department of Commerce even tries to claim that colleges are not businesses, so the boycott law does not apply to them. But this is a diversion to allow anti-Semitism to thrive on US campuses when colleges are claimed to be centers of education, not business, so not subject to anti-boycott laws. Today’s colleges are businesses the same as any multi-level corporation. They own patents, they post profit and losses, and they even have professional lobbyists in Washington. Their football and basketball programs make them businesses of the first order, where even student athletes are now talking about unionization with the courts agreeing.
Hamas in fact sends “students” to attend college in America, where they are assigned to get on the campus newspaper to control publicity and to join the student government to do exactly what was done at UC Davis. Originally funded by the Saudis through the SAAR Foundations in Virginia and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the beachhead to do this was picked up by Hamas and Palestinian flacks to be funded by campus activity funds. At the national Students for Justice in Palestine conference last year it was stated that the destruction of Israel would come through the American college system.
Students like Azka Fayyaz and Lina Othman should be made to register as agents for a foreign government. Student legislative bills that effect the total student population must be researched to prove if they are based on facts or propaganda. Administrators like Chanellor Katehi who enjoy chauffeur-driven limousines and six figure salaries higher than the governor’s salary should lose their jobs for not keeping track of this and allowing it to flourish.
Instead, the pro-Israel or Jewish student organizations will mumble about “peace” when their opponents call for murdering them and won’t make a squeak about lying propaganda that negates any serious regard for academic excellence. When the pro-Hamas students managed to get the pro-Hamas boycott activist Arab student on the Board of Regents, the ignorant and lazy Jewish student she replaced commented that he saw nothing wrong with it, that she was a lovely person. That is, a lovely person who would advocate annihilating his fellow Jews as called for in the Hamas charter.
When college administrators’ fear of losing their perks, when advocates for genocide against Jews are exposed for what they truly are, when American Jews rise up and demand accountability from our colleges and our government, only then will this nonsense stop. And it must be made clear that terrorist movements will not be tolerated in our educational system when they try to pass off their activities as mere discussion. And where are the resolutions to be voted on submitted by pro-Israel students that condemn the Hamas charter for calling for genocide against the Jews and the misuse of campus funds?
