Police Brutalize Nonviolent Protesters at University of Michigan

Sunday, December 03, 2006

I will probably write more about this later but for now it will suffice to say that I was present at the events reported and described below. The video below is very dark but the audio conveys some of what happened. Two police officers were pinning a protester face down to the floor. Shortly after the man said, "I can't breathe," he lost consciousness and when the police turned him over I saw a bloody wound on his forehead. He was later transported to a hospital emergency room and remained there for about seven hours.


The heavy-handed attack of the police was in violation of the University of Michigan's Standard Practice Guide 601.1, which reads, in part:

5. Within the confines of a hall or physical facility, or in the vicinity of the place in which a member of the University community, invited speaker, or invited artist is addressing an assembled audience, protesters must not interfere unduly with communication between a speaker or artist and members of the audience. This prohibition against undue interference does not include suppression of the usual
range of human reactions commonly displayed by an audience during heated discussions of controversial topics. Nor does this prohibition include various expressions of protest, including heckling and the display of signs (without sticks or poles), so long as such activities are consistent with the continuation of a speech or performance and the communication of its content to the audience.

6. Protesters have rights, just as do speakers and artists. The standard of "undue interference" must not be invoked lightly, merely to avoid brief interruptions, or to remove distractions or embarrassment. The University has an obligation to provide members of the community, and invited speakers and artists, with personal security and with reasonable platforms for expression; moreover, it has an obligation to insure audience access to public events. The University does not, however, have the obligation to insure audience passivity. The University cannot accept stipulations by invited speakers or artists of terms of appearance that are inconsistent with allowing full freedom of expression to the University community. Protesters and other members of the University community, for their part, have an obligation not to abuse their rights of expression to harass or intimidate speakers in ways that unduly interfere with free expression or communication (see Guideline 5). It is, of course, always within the rights of protesters to express their opposition to a speaker in appropriate ways outside of the hall or physical facility or area where a lecture, meeting, or performance is being held, or to organize alternative forums. ...

11. Officers of the University’s Department of Public Safety will act in accordance with the procedures outlined in this document. When non-University security forces are summoned, it is understood that they are not under the direct control of the University, but they should be made aware of University policies set forth in these guidelines.

Below are a couple of excerpts, with my commentary in bold, from an Ann Arbor News article:

3 protesters jailed after disrupting Iran lecture at U-M
Hecklers call visiting speaker 'warhawk'
Saturday, December 02, 2006
BY DAVE GERSHMAN
News Staff Reporter

Three Ann Arbor residents accused of disrupting a lecture on the Middle East were arrested at the Michigan League Thursday evening, campus police said.

Raymond Tanter, a professor emeritus at U-M and current faculty member at Georgetown University, was scheduled to give a lecture called, "Stalled international diplomacy and problematic U.S. military options for Iran.'' The event was organized by a student group, the American Movement for Israel. ...

Inside the building, Brown said organizers repeatedly warned a heckler over the course of an hour as Tanter gave his talk. Finally, organizers asked police to remove the most vocal and abusive protester, a 47-year-old woman, Brown said. The woman was arrested after she refused to leave.

I was seated several rows behind the group of protesters and arrived well before they were seated. At no time did their behavior exceed what is permitted under the University's Standard Practice Guide.

Police said several other people interfered with officers arresting the woman, and two of them were arrested. The names of the people arrested were not released, but the other two were a 49-year-old man and a 60-year-old man, Brown said. ...

Police plan to seek several charges against the three protesters, Brown said.

Henry Herskovitz, a frequent protester of Israeli policies in the Middle East, told The News that he was one of the people arrested. He called Tanter a "warhawk'' and said Tanter implied that Iran should be attacked - a claim Tanter denies. ...

If Ray Tanter is not a war hawk then I don't know who is (actually, Tanter is, apparently, a "chicken hawk" who preferred Indiana University to the battlefields of Vietnam). It is true that Tanter does not favor overt US or Israeli military attacks on Iran but he certainly bolsters the case for such attacks. He talks openly of the need for regime change and the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Moreover, during his presentation, Tanter advocated reversing the US State Department's designation Mujahedeen-e Khalq as a "foreign terrorist organization" so that they can receive more financing from expatriate Iranians and expand their covert war and terror campaign to destabilize Iran. This echoes Tanter's remarks in a recent interview for Ha'aretz, an Israeli daily:

"But attacking will not provide a fundamental solution to the problem. It will not eliminate Iran's nuclear program, but will only delay it. In order to bring about a halt to the nuclear program, there has to be a regime change there. Such a change is possible and can take place within a short period of time. From the moment that the Mujahideen-e-Khalq is removed from the U.S. State Department's list of terror organizations, they will bring about regime change in less time than it takes the regime of the ayatollahs to obtain nuclear weapons."

How much time are we talking about?

"I tend to accept the assessment of Israeli intelligence rather than that of the CIA, that Iran will have nuclear weapons within one to three years."

In point of fact, the CIA denies there is any "conclusive evidence" of a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons program, according to a recent piece by Seymour Hersh (see Hersh on CIA, Iran & Israel).

In any event, Tanter's bona fides as a war hawk are well-established from his former senior positions on the National Security Council and in the US Defense (formerly the "War") Department to his founding of the Iran Policy Committee, which is composed primarily of retired military officers with an ex-CIA operative as Executive Director.

Tanter, who teaches a course at Georgetown on terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, said he had to abandon the power point presentation and "wing it'' because of the protesters. He said he opposes using military force in Iran, but believes the United States needs to keep military options on the table to reinforce diplomatic solutions.

"I had an academic presentation, which I was not allowed to make because of the protesters," he said. ...

It is patently false that he had to abandon his "power point presentation." He never really started it due to computer problems not because of the protesters. After a lengthy delay he started his lecture without the use of the computer and when it finally started working he made no use if it, except to point at one slide.

Below is another interesting excerpt from the Ha'aretz interview.

But the regime in Iran and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were elected in democratic elections.

"The elections were democratic only de jure. The council for the defense of the Islamic regime rejected hundreds of candidates and allowed only its own candidates to participate in the elections. That's how Ahmadinejad was elected by default when the corrupt candidate, former president Rafsanjani, opposed him. It was a choice between a killer and a crook. Eighty percent of those eligible to vote did not participate in the elections. [In the recent US midterm elections 60% of those eligible to vote did not participate--PeaceMonger] We believe that the moment the organization is able to operate from Iraq it will gain public favor in Iran.

"People will go into the streets to demonstrate. That happened already in 1981, when half a million Mujahideen-e-Khalq supporters did that. The regime will order the demonstrators dispersed by force and suppressed. Those who will try to carry out the order are the Basaji, the armed street militia of the Revolutionary Guards. They will shoot at demonstrators, a civil war will break out, and then in the heat of the events the army will intervene, stop the bloodshed, remove the ayatollahs and take over."

But even then there will be no guarantee that Iran will stop trying to obtain nuclear weapons. We know that this is an Iranian national ambition, regardless of ideology and world view.

"Mujahideen-e-Khalq have already declared that they are not interested in manufacturing nuclear weapons. But no one cares if a democratic Iran has nuclear weapons. Who cares if Israel or India has nuclear weapons?"

So, Tanter clearly envisions that the Mujahideen-e Khalq's attacks will lead to "civil war" in Iran, followed by a military takeover which he apparently foresees as a "democratic Iran." Tanter doesn't mind nuclear proliferation as long as the nukes are held by pro-Israel and pro-US regimes.

Finally, for old times sake here are a couple of quotes from Tanter in an October, 2002, article in the Michigan Daily entitled "Hillel rally urges campus to take stance":

"One of the problems is that the military capabilities that America has - which are second to none in the world - are largely irrelevant to deterring terrorists," Tanter said. "So it is also true that the great military capacity of the Israeli defense forces cannot defer terrorists. So what do you do? You go after the terrorist organizations. And what do you do to the leaders? You destroy them. You kill them."

Regarding the war on Iraq, Tanter said it was "an antidote" and that there would be no backlash. "Arab people won't go crazy, Muslim people won't go crazy. They'll roll over because they hate Saddam Hussein."

In his lecture on Thursday, Tanter acknowledged supporting the 2003 US invasion of Iraq but claims not to support the US occupation, probably, because the Iraqi resistance didn't get the "no backlash" memo. He also stated that the Saudi regime is working directly with the Israeli government against Iran.

My thanks to S. for the video and thanks to B. for the Standard Practice Guide info.

Last revised: 12/04/2006

// posted by PeaceMonger @ 12/03/2006 09:07:00 PM
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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

UM Police Brutality Update

The Stop Crucifying Palestine blog has photos and reports on the police state tactics of last Thursday at the University of Michigan.

// posted by PeaceMonger @ 12/05/2006 12:52:00 AM 1 comments links to this post
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Professor: '... no one is willing to publicly defend our investment in Israeli apartheid.'

Letter to the Editor

The SG's preoccupation with Israel makes perfect sense

Posted: 12/5/06

As a faculty member, let me offer a few words in support of the SG's position on Palestine.

No one seems to disagree with the SG that there is a grave injustice in Palestine, that Israel is primarily to blame, that the university is complicit (through our stockholdings in U.S. companies that support the occupation), and that some tangible action should be taken immediately.

The point of contention seems to focus on two issues: (1) That the SG has given undue emphasis to this issue, and (2) that they have not promoted "open and honest debate".

Regarding the first point: certainly there are many pressing issues in the world today, but one can make a good case that the conflict in Palestine is of greatest urgency. No other conflict is directly sustained by U.S. corporations - corporations of which the university is a part-owner. It has affected millions of people (3.8 million Palestinians in the occupied territories, plus millions of Jews and Palestinians worldwide), for nearly 60 years.

And it is globally recognized as a matter of utmost importance. Furthermore, this problem has far-reaching consequences: It was a major factor in both Gulf wars, it was at the root of the 9/11 attacks and the rise of al-Qaeda, and it is a source of great Muslim antipathy toward the U.S. and the West.

The situation in Palestine is, as President Jimmy Carter has recently emphasized, a new apartheid. But it is more insidious and more barbaric than the South African original. Unchecked, it leads to the kind of atrocities we saw this past summer in southern Lebanon: wanton destruction, killing of innocents, phosphorus and cluster bombs dropped on civilian areas.

Apart from issues related to environmental catastrophe, such as global warming, it would be hard to make the case that any conflict is more pressing than this one. And even granting that other issues are of 'equal' importance, there is likely little that students or the university can do to effect change. Take the crisis in Darfur: What, really, can we do to help that problem? The situation in Palestine is unique because we can take a simple and direct action - selling of stock - that will put financial and moral pressure on Israel to end its apartheid and seek a just peace.

Regarding the second point: To my knowledge the students have been fully open to debating this issue. The problem is that no one is willing to publicly defend our investment in Israeli apartheid. Letters from the odd alumnus are about all we see. On the faculty side, I have published op-eds in the University Record (most recently, 11/20), and they draw no rebuttals. I am also working to set up a "Difficult Dialogue" on divestment, but the campus opponents of divestment will not even respond to e-mail requests, let alone speak in public! I think they know that they have no real moral standing. There is simply no excuse for continuing to invest in, and profit from, oppression.

If there are some willing to publicly defend the status quo, let them come forth. Then we will have an "open and honest debate." Until then, divestment has the moral high ground. It is the right thing to do. The administration needs to hear this, from all of us, if there is to be any hope of positive change.


Regards,


David Skrbina

Philosophy

---

© Copyright 2006 Michigan Journal

Lectures tested freedom of speech

GUEST VIEWPOINT

By Orval Etter

Published: Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Pacifica Forum's affording Valdas Anelauskas a platform for eight lectures on "Zionism and Russia" has renewed ferment in Eugene and on its campus about racism, the "ugly claw of anti-Semitism," "hate," bigotry and freedom of speech. Who is mainly, even solely, responsible for this?

I. In my second childhood at 91, l'enfant terrible, l'ogre, c'est moi.

Why? To test Eugene's commitment to freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech in this town has a checkered past. The nadir probably came in 1917, when Allan Eaton, later a celebrity in art circles, was literally run out of town for questioning the U.S. war against Germany. Another nadir came 10 years ago, when a neo-Nazi was invited to address a forum on racism and members of the audience shouted him down.

The pinnacle of free speech came in 1963, when Arthur Flemming, the president of the University of Oregon and a well-known Republican, facing opposition from a broad spectrum of governmental and civic leaders, provided Gus Hall, head of the Communist Party USA, a platform to address a university convocation.

My personal high came 40 years earlier, on Sept. 26, 1943, when the managing editor of The Register-Guard devoted a full Sunday editorial to a 13-page letter that I had written him in defense of my commitment not to "participate in war or sanction military preparations." The letter did not convert him to pacifism, but he commented on it respectfully and made no effort to have me run out of town. Contrary to a remonstrance from one of his readers, he afforded a pacifist a platform during the height of World War II.

Fast-forward 60 years. I founded Pacifica Forum in the mid-1990s and was its usual chairman and its main program planner. It was a program more than an organization. It was remarkably anarchic. It had no constitution, no bylaws, no membership, no dues, no treasury, no elected or appointed officers.

It had three sponsors, all more or less pacifistic, but it was not intended to convert attendants to pacifism. Its statement of purpose asserted that it would "provide information and points of view" regarding "war and peace, militarism and pacifism, violence and nonviolence."

Its objective was not so much to persuade as to inform. After it encountered efforts in 2003-04 to shut it down, it added, under the sponsorship of the Campus Civil Liberties Circle, another main objective: to exercise and defend freedom of speech.

Fast forward to 2006. At a talk on David Irving's recent imprisonment in Austria, his having been denied a platform in Portland during the 1990s, I met Valdas Anelauskas, a Lithuanian writer who had lived in the Soviet Union. I invited him to speak to Pacifica Forum on "Zionism in Russia." Finding his lectures well enough documented to deserve follow-ups, I invited him, over some resistance, to deliver what would turn out to be eight lectures on his general theme.

Jewish and other monitors attended the lectures and took a dim view of them. Some voiced the view, widespread in Eugene, that certain topics are so reprehensible that they should not be offered a public platform.

That view I cannot accept.

All the while, no Pacifica Forum attendant, including me, seemed to agree totally with Anelauskas, and one regular attendant and I delivered talks expressing points of view contrary to his.

Among attendants, I now encountered more resistance to booking him further.

By now, however, his appearances had become so intertwined with the basic issue of free speech that I decided to put that issue to an acid test: He would be invited to address Pacifica Forum, even though no attendant, particularly me, was likely to agree with everything he said.

The community passed the test: No one, not even the Anti-Hate Task Force, barred Anelauskas from entering the room. No one tried to shout him down. Campus security was not alerted. The campus newspaper carried a report the next day. The UO administration, perhaps remembering its president 43 years earlier, did not intervene.

Unfortunately, Anelauskas talked so long that he could not be questioned on the spot. Pacifica Forum will afford opportunity for questioning him to all who request it, and he can be reached at valdas@efn.org.

The Anelauskas test is hardly comparable with the Gus Hall test. The former was in macrocosm, the latter has been in microcosm.

Both, however, have the same essentials: unfettered opportunity to deliver a message not politically correct in much of the community, or even totally agreeable to the provider of the platform.

Stay tuned. Pacifica Forum will continue to meet on the ground floor in McKenzie Hall at 4 p.m. on Fridays. Members of the Anti-Hate Task Force, particularly, always will be welcome.

Orval Etter of Eugene (orvaletter @netscape.net) is the founder of Pacifica Forum.

The End of Academic Freedom and the Israel Lobby

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The End of Academic Freedom and the Israel Lobby Terri Ginsberg and Rima Abdelkader survey the wreckage of a once proud tradition of American academic integrity.This is what I wrote last week on the subject:

' Academics at Risk Please Donate to MESA A report on the Iraqi professors' panel at the Middle East Studies Association meeting that just wrapped up in Boston. Their stories of everyday life on Baghdad campuses are heartbreaking.There is also a McCarthyite and frankly racist campaign being waged by far rightwing Zionist groups in the United States to corrupt the academic hiring and tenuring process. Yellowbellied or corrupt academic administrators who bow to it should be thrown out by their outraged faculties.To help the Middle East Studies Association defend academic freedom and keep blogs like this one going, donate to the Committee on Academic Freedom. The cart works in $10 increments, so if you change the "1" in the "quantity" box to "3" (e.g.), you would be donating $30.Pennsylvania's legislature was conned by the Neocon master of Disinformation and the Big Lie, David Horowitz, into wasting taxpayer money to investigate if professors mistreat their students because of the latter's politics. The commission found that such instances are "rare" and that nothing further need be done. D'oh. There is not any way to know how students vote, and why would you bring that in to grading their paper on Moliere's plays? Pennsylvania voters should consider whether Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong, R-Lancaster, deserves to sit in their legislature if he is going to waste their hard-earned money on these silly wild goose chases. Isn't there a Pennsylvania (or better, Lancaster) bloggers' network that can bring Armstrong's record in this regard before the public? [Ooops, see the comments. The good people of Pennsylvania have already dumped him in favor of someone who can think straight!].Mark Lynch discusses issues in academic blogging (the rightwing reaction to which has often threatened academic careers and freedom of speech), in the course of commenting on a blogging panel at the Middle East Studies Association this weekend in Boston. Participants included Lynch, Josh Landis of Syria Comment, and Helena Cobban of Just World News, as well as As'ad AbuKhalil, Leila Hudson (no longer blogging?) and myself.The general tone of the participants' comments suggested that academic blogging has severe drawbacks and, with regard to Middle East bloggers, has not produced a 'second generation' after the crop of 2002. One reason in my view is that academics who blog on the Middle East are relentlessly harassed and cyberstalked by Likudnik crazies and other sorts of wingnut. You have to have very thick skin and, I think, you have to just not care about the career ladder or social climbing of other sorts to risk it. In my case, I think it helped to have been an army brat. You're always being transferred to another base and you can't count on friendships lasting very long, so you just become self-reliant. And, of course, the ethos of the army encourages you to stand up to bullies. But I take Mark Lynch's point that it isn't everyone's cup of tea.There is something wrong with our society if simply sharing one's expertise for free is actually punished. We should do something about that. Please give money to MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom (scroll down). '

posted by Juan @ 11/28/2006 06:12:00 AM

http://www.juancole.com/2006/11/end-of-academic-freedom-and-israel.html

"Our university is complicit too through its investments in arms companies that provide Israel its arsenal."

Monday, November 27, 2006

Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, 1948.
_____________________________________________________

"A flawed democracy"

By Shimaa Abdelfadeel

MICHIGAN DAILY (University of Michigan)
11/27/06

"Since late June, Israel has killed 400 Palestinians in Gaza. In the morning hours of November 8, 2006, in the village of Beit Hanoun,

"Israeli tanks repeatedly fired shells on a house, killing 18 members of the same extended family. Other attacks earlier in the month were launched against peaceful protesters in Gaza. In breaking the months-long cease-fire that Hamas had agreed to this summer, this invasion collectively punished innocent people in the name of Israeli security.

"Promoters of Zionism tout its democracy, which offers legal protection to all. There exists, however, a gap between theory and practice that has bred racial apartheid within Israeli society and between Israel and its occupied populations in Palestine. In a state that asserts the dominance of one religious persuasion, democracy cannot really flourish. By failing to protect a plurality of ethnic and religious groups, the Israeli government exposes non-Jewish populations to persecution in a variety of ways.

"Israeli political leaders like Avigdor Lieberman, who was recently promoted deputy prime minister, explicitly support the ethnic cleansing of Arab populations as a way of preserving the Jewish majority in Israel.

"Immigration law under the Israeli democracy is another site of exclusion. Israel's "Law of Return" offers citizenship to anyone of the Jewish faith from anywhere in the world, yet Palestinian refugees are denied the right to return to their homes and become citizens. These refugees are numbered in the millions and were displaced from their homes at various points during the last 60 years.

"In 1948, Israeli independence came in conjunction with the forced removal of 750,000 Palestinians from their land. Through the years, Israel has conquered and occupied more Palestinian land by war, a violation of the United Nations Charter. During these wars, millions more were displaced from their homes in Israel/Palestine. Despite UN Resolution 194, Israel refuses to grant refugees the right to return home because this would threaten the demographic majority in Israel. In its obsession with maintaining this majority, Israeli policy has led to the removal and marginalization of another people and culture, instead of upholding the values of inclusion and equality that democracies promise to foster.

"Arabs living in Israel as citizens compose the lowest socioeconomic classes. They cannot purchase land owned by the Jewish National Fund, an organization that administers a large proportion of Israel's land and only sells real estate to its Jewish citizens.

"In occupied Palestine, Israeli military rule does not even pretend to uphold democratic values. Nor does it adhere to the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bars the settlement of Israelis on land that is under Israeli military occupation. Not only did Israel transplant 12,000 new settlers into the West Bank after its formal withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, but it also maintained a military siege on the strip, controlling the flow of people and goods in and out and violating Palestinian airspace and ports.

"In the name of security, Israel has laid waste to the Palestinian economy and turned Gaza into an open-air prison. To enforce an illegal settlement project in the territories, the Israeli military implements policies that degrade their democratic ideal further, as witnessed by the tragedy in Beit Hanoun weeks ago.

"Israelis and Palestinians are using peaceful resistance against Israeli policy. Hundreds of Palestinians assembled at a Gazan home, forcing the Israeli military to call off its planned air attack. In defiance of their government's occupation, Israeli activists seized control of tanks at a Gaza border crossing. This cross-national struggle desires a peace that only justice can nourish. The end of Israeli occupation and an overhaul of Israel's exclusionary state are prerequisites to a just solution.

"The UN General Assembly recently condemned the attacks in Gaza, but the United States vetoed a similar resolution in the Security Council, thus exerting American power to excuse its ally's atrocities. But massive American military aid also facilitates Israeli crimes.

"Our university is complicit too through its investments in arms companies that provide Israel its arsenal. Divesting from these companies would allow our campus to invest in just outcomes rooted in equality and lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians."

"-- Shimaa Abdelfadeel is an LSA senior and a co-chair of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality."

On the Web at:
http://www.michigandaily.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&ustory_id=2b7b6a66-0c4c-4627-b543-f21c5416ebc1
_____________________________________________________

# posted by Stop Crucifying Palestine @ 7:58 AM

http://stopcrucifyingpalestine.blogspot.com/2006/11/our-university-is-complicit-too.html