UNMIA

StandWithUs is looking for student leaders for our prestigious Emerson Fellowship. Fellows will be responsible for running Israel programs, and educating others on campus.

Fellows will receive a stipend for their work. You will also be sent to a training seminar, and be eligible to be sent on leadership missions to Israel, or to intern in our Israel office next summer!

Applications are due by June 1st.

Apply now at Emerson Fellowship

Dani Klein
Campus Director, North America

On Tuesday, November 20, three UNMIA people went to the Peace and Justice Center to join Justice First’s discussion of Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace or Apartheid”. The crowd was small because of the Thanksgiving holiday, and there were four members of Justice First and an anti-Israel Jewish student from Arizona. Still, it was a hot discussion, as you might well imagine, and probably hotter because it was a small group. Justice First made an audio recording of the discussion, and you can probably contact them for a copy, if you are interested.

The Justice First co-leaders, Vicki Johnson and Mike, opened with a video presentation that Vicki had made for the discussion, and a handout featuring the main points and maps of Carter’s book, and a listing of the major factual errors in his book.

Rather than going into the debate and arguments of the evening, which were the sort that you would expect, this discussion brought up other issues that might be worth mentioning here…

The obvious question is, why go debate these things? Why go to discussions where the only attendees are devotees on one side or the other, and neither will change the other’s mind?

We constantly present factual …

We frequently hear that the Israel Lobby, Neo-Cons and Zionists in general stifle debate and don’t allow anybody to say anything bad about Israel in government, education or the media, a pretty amazing claim, given the facts. However, this lament is currently very popular in anti-Zionist circles. Following is an editorial by Amy Isseroff which does a good job of refuting this claim, especially where it relates to universities.

by Amy Isseroff of the Zionism & Israel Center

A widely recycled essay about “The New McCarthyism” charges that “a network of right-wing activists” is trying to curtail academic freedom by stifling views that are inconvenient for Israel and its supporters.

The author, Larry Cohler-Esses, cites a number of varied cases: Norman Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at De Paul university, Nadia Abu El-Haj whose bid for tenure has been attacked in numerous articles and a petition (but apparently has been approved regardless of the furor) and Debbie Almontaser, a New York City high school principle, who was fired after she had defended “Intifada” T-shirts, explaining that”stated that “intifada” means “shaking off” and the shirts represented women “shaking off” oppression.

Cohler-Esse’s shot gun approach raises many issues. It is never clear …