Brodhead should take clear stance

President Richard Brodhead and the reporters for this paper seem to think the Palestine Solidarity Movement’s 2004 conference went off last weekend without a hitch. In reality, the conference was one of the single most inappropriate events to ever occur at Duke University and the direct cause of the racially-charged atmosphere we are experiencing today.

Five weeks ago, this column said that the PSM conference would actually serve as a recruiting session for Palestinian terrorist organizations. The Chronicle failed to report it, but that’s exactly what happened last weekend, and to an even greater degree than anticipated.

According to conference attendees, International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf led a workshop with six other members of her organization called “Volunteering in Palestine: Role and Value of International Activists.” At the workshop, Arraf passed out ISM brochures, encouraged students to join the ISM and discussed ways to fool Israeli border police when traveling to the Middle East.

This seven-member ISM workshop officially disproves Brodhead’s contention that the PSM is a peaceful group with different goals than the terrorist-supporting ISM. The groups are directly related, and the PSM is little more than an ISM recruiting tool. Clearly, the ISM is a depraved group with no business at an educational institution, as their stated purpose in recruiting students to serve as human shields is publicity. As ISM co-founder George Rishmawi puts it: “When Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore. But if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice.”

The problems brought about certainly don’t end there. Any benefits from the PSM conference came at a price of over $50,000 in security, a lot of frightened students and a disturbing bomb threat that required the Bryan Center to be evacuated. Even our admissions office has been affected by Brodhead’s decision to allow the conference. Last month, Rabbi Steven Ballaban, the head of Atlanta’s Davis Academy, canceled his high school’s affiliation with Duke’s Talent Identification Program, saying: “I feel it is contrary to our mission to continue our relationship with Duke University as long as they host a group that supports the use of terror against families of our students, faculty and administrators.”

Now, our campus is as divided as it’s been in years, thanks to the hateful and personal language that’s been spewed by individuals on both sides of this debate. At the PSM conference, speaker Mazin Qumsiyeh referred to Zionism as “a disease,” another speaker called the 1967 war in the Middle East “the Jew War” and conference participants carried “Palestine 1948” maps that called Israel’s founding the “largest planned ethnic cleansing in modern history.” At a concert the night before the conference began, speaker Brigitte Gabriel referred to “the Arab world” as “barbarism.” And as far as student discourse goes, it’s obvious to anyone who reads these pages that the PSM conference brought about virtually nothing in the way of positive political dialogue, but plenty in the way of the offensive and hateful kind.

The PSM conference has been a black eye for our University, and Brodhead’s whitewashing of the situation has been highly irresponsible. When he decided in August to allow the conference, he called his decision an “easy” one. Then, when faced with direct, documented evidence that the PSM supported terrorism, stifled free speech and intended to recruit students to serve as human shields for terrorist organizations, Brodhead refused to respond to it, except for vaguely offering the ironic defense of “dialogue.” Now, with his letter to the editor last week, Brodhead has taken his most bizarre position of all: glowingly praising the PSM conference as a “peaceful and constructive event” yet condemning a student’s column for having “deeply troubled” him.

This may sound like a broken record, but if Brodhead can publicly denounce a college student’s opinion, then he can certainly denounce a Palestinian recruiting session run by individuals who endorse suicide bombing and refuse to condemn the killing of civilians.