Meryl is once again all over the aftermath of the SFSU incident I’ve discussed here.
Well, the administrative hearings against the three accused – two General Union of Palestinian Students students and one Jewish grandmother – are wrapping up, and it appears that Grandma isn’t settling.
Now, a cautionary note: I wasn’t there. Pretty much everything you read is from someone with an axe to grind. But there are a few basic facts we can pin down. A bunch of pro-Israeli students booked space for a lunchtime demonstration. There were a bunch of pro-Palestinian counterdemonstrators who were pretty aggressive physically and verbally. A few of the pro-Israeli demonstrators got verbally aggressive back.
Now from my point of view, the culpable party here is the University. I have a friend who is a police officer at a major university (not SFSU…), and it’s pretty clear that end-of-semester parties sometimes get out of hand. So it should not have taken a rocket scientist to realize that the potential for a clash was there. And it should not have taken someone with too many advanced degrees to figure out that there might be trouble, and that enforcing civility and distance would be a good thing to do.
The University did neither.
Then, embarrassed by the (Blog led, thanks to Meryl) bad publicity, they engaged in an orgy of ass-covering, resulting in a task force report that my five year old could have written, based on his experience in AYSO and T-ball.
Now the pro-Palestinian students have settled their cases, privately, and the Jewish student is refusing to settle.
She’s accused of using defamatory language, in calling one counter-demonstrator a “bitch” in Arabic, and suggesting to another that he go have carnal relations with his camel. There is a third statement that she disputes (she admits to these two).
I thought then that busting a token pro-Israeli student was the worst kind of pandering; I think that using bad language (which would get your ass thrown out of one of my son’s T-ball games, but is certainly the kind of thing I’ve been called in parking disputes) is fundamentally a different kind of activity than disrupting someone’s free political speech and uttering the kind of threats that both the pro-Israeli and mainstream media attributed to the Palestinian students.
The SFSU administration is totally off base on this. Meryl published the email of President Corrigan of SFSU. After some thought, I’ll refrain from publishing it because I don’t think burying him in emails will help, but you make the call.
Instead, I’d suggest that you send a message to SkyBox Davis, or write a letter to the editor to the S.F. Chronicle.