September 15, 2004

We Sing of Terrorists and

We Sing of Terrorists and “Dialogue”

Recently, a correspondent from our Durham (NC) office sent us word about a brouhaha that is erupting on the campus of Duke University. It appears as if Duke is the happy host of the Fourth Annual Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference, which will occur in October.

The Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM), for those of our readership who aren’t acquainted with this upstanding organization, is the student arm of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-terrorist outfit that attempts to bring foreign students into Israel so that they can block Israeli measures to stop suicide bombers, in hopes that said students will die, and generate lots of publicity for the ISM and the Palestinian cause.

A rather savory bunch, n’est pas? Well, one might think so, if one listened merely to the administration of Duke University. Although critics have reasonably claimed that the PSM conference will serve as a breeding ground for anti-Semitism and incitements to violence, the aptly named president of Duke University, Dick Brodhead, believes that the conference will bring “education through dialogue.”

Just what kind of “dialogue” can the kids at Duke expect from the conference? A student group called the Duke Conservative Union has answered this question with an advertisement in the Duke daily newspaper, The Chronicle.

This advertisement reveals, among other alarming things, that former PSM lecturer Hatem Bazian stated that

in the Hadith, the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews. They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you’re on the east side until the trees and the stones will say, oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!

A fine bit of “dialogue,” indeed! What a great educational opportunity this conference will offer! Kudos to the aptly named Dick Brodhead for his great powers of educational discrimination! If we were a bit more cynical, we’d suggest that the aptly named Dick Brodhead was more concerned with the Saudi funding given to his university than any prattle about “education through dialogue.”

But wait, dear reader: It gets even more ridiculous. The Chronicle, in an article on the brouhaha, offers the PSM defense of the conference. One Fayyad Sbaihat, who has the illustrious post of national spokesperson for the PSM, opines that the quotations found in the Duke Conservative Union advertisement are “taken out of context.”

This led us to wonder: In exactly what context could “oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him” be placed and cease to seem, well, rather insidious? We can think of only one: “It would be really stupid to say: oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!”

If this is the level of “dialogue” that the PSM will bring to Duke’s campus (when it is not inciting terrorist violence), it seems to us as if the aptly named Dick Brodhead, like Lucy, has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

Posted at September 15, 2004 12:01 AM | TrackBack