No Silence on Hate

It was late on Sunday afternoon when a high school student from Cleveland, his shaggy hair covered by a huge multicolored yarmulke, came bounding down the steps of Ohio State University’s student center. An Israeli flag was draped around his bulky parka and a broad smile plastered across his face.

“They keep coming to the door, muttering they can’t believe we’re still out here,” he said. It was at that point, exhausted, voice gone, legs shaky and body frozen — the result of protesting for 28 hours — that it all came together. And it was at that point that I truly understood why our presence here was necessary.

For six hours on a Friday, 11 on Saturday and now approaching 11 on Sunday, a group of us had been protesting outside the third annual National Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, Nov. 7-9. A conference that convenes under the insidious banner of hate, anti-Semitism and support of terrorism.

Conference organizers, speakers and attendees typically use this forum — to varying degrees — as an expression of their distaste for Jews and the Jewish homeland, Israel. At last year’s conference, Sami Al-Arian was the keynote speaker. Al-Arian now sits in a federal penitentiary on charges that he is the U.S. head of Islamic Jihad. This year, Adam Shapiro addressed the conference. Shapiro is the founder of the International Solidarity Movement, a group with explicit ties to anti-Israel terrorist organizations.

Even more egregious than his outright lies — on Sunday morning Shapiro accused the Israeli army of “randomly firing into Arab homes” in the West Bank — is his support for Palestinian “armed resistance.” Unfortunately, Palestinian “armed resistance” has been expressed in the bloody carnage of innocent Jewish men, women and children riding buses and sitting in cafes. But support for suicide bombing was par for the course at this conference. Several times over the weekend I asked attendees as they came in and out of the student center for their view on suicide bombing.

“Go for it” and “it is a legitimate form of resistance” were two of the more common responses.

The affront to human decency — to any notion of morality — didn’t stop with explicit support for terrorism. Conference attendees hurled vicious anti-Semitic slurs, made vulgar gestures and even handed out a flyer with a picture of a little boy urinating on the American flag. The caption read “F*** this racist country.” Conference attendees left little room to doubt their real intentions, what really lies in the hearts and minds of those who came to Ohio for this conference. When a pro-Israel demonstrator, not affiliated with Amcha, handed out a flyer depicting a Palestinian and Israeli flag and the caption “Two States for Two Peoples,” numerous conference attendees grabbed the flyers and folded down the Israeli flag. It was a chilling reminder that the mantra “Free Palestine” is, in reality, nothing more than a call for the destruction of Israel. I wondered what these people envision happening to the more than 5 million Jews living in Israel when “Palestine is free from sea to sea.”

This vitriol for Jews and support for violence against Jews did not surprise us. It is why we came to Columbus from New York, Cleveland, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Jersey in the first place. We came not because we wanted to, but because we had to. We could not remain silent and allow the supporters of murder, terror and hatred to conduct themselves unopposed. As British statesman Edmund Burke famously said more than 200 years ago, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

And so we arrived on the campus of Ohio State on a cold but sunny Friday morning in November. After delivering a letter to the university president demanding that she prevent the conference from proceeding, we made our way to the site of the conference — Ohio State University’s student center. For the next three days, as conference attendees came and went, they were greeted with American and Israeli flags, anti-hate T-shirts and signs that created a visual spectacle matched only by the impassioned chanting of “Shame,” “Divest From Hate” and “Arafat, Bin Laden, Same Old Terror.”

I found it ironic that Sunday, the last day of the conference, was the 65th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” That horrible night was the unofficial beginning of the Holocaust, as thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned and hundreds of Jews murdered. The next day, 30,000 Jews were hauled off to concentration camps. Kristallnacht, like the events that followed, was met largely with silence. The world, including much of the Jewish community itself, remained passive as the Nazis began conducting their campaign of horror.

“It doesn’t affect us,” they said. “These are isolated events, nothing really to worry about.”

But of course what started as small, isolated acts of anti-Semitism became the Holocaust — the murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children. I often wonder what might have happened had there been a strong voice of protest — of moral conscience — in those early days. I thought about that in Ohio as I was told to “get back on the boat” by a conference attendee. I thought about that when fellow Jews criticized us for “drawing unnecessary attention to the conference,” as if the proper response to violent hate is to ignore it. I thought about that during every minute of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic conference taking place in the heartland of America. I was thankful that this time we were not silent.

Scott Chait is the operations director for Amcha — The Coalition for Jewish
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