February 22, 2008

A hidden camera captured an anti-Semitic speech by Amir Abdel Malik Ali at UCI Muslim Student Union: ” Zionist Jews were behind 9/11″

An anti-Israel speaker praises suicide bombers. Posters display Nazi symbols, anti-Israel slogans and the Israeli flag with blood dripping from the Magen David. A Muslim student says “F— Israel,” drops his drawers and shows his swastika tattoo to a non-Jewish student.

Such allegations, detailed last week in a 34-page report by an independent task force on anti-Semitism at University of California, Irvine (UCI), are not new. During the past few years, the Orange County campus has been the subject of news reports and protests because of the pro-Palestinian campaign of its Muslim Student Union (MSU). Anti-Israel, and at times anti-Jewish, rantings are often spewed by radical speakers these students have invited for campus events dubbed “Zio-Nazis,” “The UC Intifada: How You Can Help Palestine” and “From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide,” the last of which was held this month.

The 12-member task force was formed by Hillel Executive Director Jeffrey T. Rips and community activist Ted Bleiweis in December 2006 in the wake of allegations that UCI’s vice chancellor made the statement: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.” Rips and Bleiweis selected the initial members, and those members added a few more to the committee, which included a former member of UCI’s medical school faculty, four rabbis and a Presbyterian pastor. Hillel lost interest in the task force last summer and cut it loose. It then became the Orange County Independent Task Force.

The extent of the anti-Semitic activities at UCI were confirmed by a November report from the U.S. Office of Civil Rights, which spent three years investigating 26 complaints by Jewish and non-Jewish students against the university. But the Office of Civil Rights found that the complaints were all either more than 180 days old when reported, and therefore inactionable, or were outside its jurisdiction. As a result, university officials were cleared of accusations of violating the civil rights of students who claimed they had been discriminated against because of their religion or nation of origin.

The report just released by the independent task force, however, claims university officials are responsible for allowing Muslim students and anti-Israel speakers to persecute Jewish students.

In a press statement, UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake, who declined the task force’s request for an interview, pointed to the civil rights office’s assertion that administrators “promptly and effectively” responded to complaints and said that though he disapproves of the nature of speech supported by the MSU, there is little he can do to stop it.

“The First Amendment mandates that speech is protected,” said Drake, who ascended to the university’s top spot in May 2005. “We are obligated to, and will continue to, follow the law. There are those who continue to claim that by protecting speech, we endorse it. This is simply not true.

“Protecting speech means allowing it to take place but does not mean endorsing, supporting or in any way evaluating that speech. We have clearly stated our active opposition to harassment and racism, including anti-Semitism, and to other forms of categorization,” he said.

The task force, however, in addition to urging Drake to “publicly identify and denounce hate speech,” recommends Jewish students reconsider attending the only coastal University of California campus between those in La Jolla and Westwood.

“Students with a strong Jewish identity should consider enrolling elsewhere unless and until tangible changes are made,” the report states. “It is incumbent on UCI to make itself a hospitable environment, not the Jewish students.”

That’s a misguided approach, said Kevin O’Grady, Orange County-Long Beach regional director for the Anti-Defamation League.

“What UC Irvine needs,” he said, “is exactly those types of students, Jewish students with strong Jewish identities who can stand up to that type of rhetoric.”

The task force singled out the ADL branch for being ineffective, along with the Jewish Federation of Orange County, American Jewish Committee and Hillel, but O’Grady called that criticism unfair. He said that while the Zionist Organization of America and StandWithUs have helped students push back against the “anti-Zionists” — students and speakers who identify themselves as only hating the State of Israel and its supporters, not all Jews — the major organizations also have been working behind the scenes, hosting the chancellor at town hall meetings and encouraging the UCI administration to cool the climate on campus.

“There were many incidents in the past. We are seeing a mere fraction of those incidents today,” said Shalom C. Elcott, Orange County Federation CEO. “We have a new chancellor and a much stronger Jewish community, and the two of those will ensure the university keeps this on the front burner.

“We can’t sweep it under the rug,” he continued. “We have to deal with the issues as they come, on their merit. In the meantime, I want to build Jewish identity on campus. That is the most important thing we can do as a Jewish federation and a community that care about our young adults.”

The problem for members of the task force was that improvements have been slow and, they would say, insufficient.

Students agreed the atmosphere at UCI is not as volatile as it was — “Two years ago when I was on campus, it wouldn’t be, ‘We’re against Zionists and Israelis.’ It was, ‘We’re against Jews,'” said Reut Cohen, who graduated last September — but the climate for Jews remains far from peaceful.

“I cannot count the number of students I have had to counsel,” said Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, a member of the task force and associate rabbi of the university’s interfaith center. “Every single time these speakers are brought to campus — these hateful speakers — it puts Jewish students under great emotional stress, especially students whose families have suffered great persecution, particularly families kicked out of Iran, or students from Israel who are familiar with hate on Palestinian TV.

“They are distraught,” he said. “They can’t focus on their studies; they have to leave the school for the day…. Students have come to me in tears.”

Students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) were surprised to learn last month that for the first time their professor for a course in contemporary Islam was, in fact, a Muslim.

Ismail Bardhi had arrived as a refugee a few weeks before through the college’s Scholar Rescue Fund. The former dean of the faculty of Islamic Studies in Skopje, Macedonia, Bardhi was beaten and stripped of his title because he refused to cede to the vision of Kosovar nationalists, who in rising to power were marginalizing secular Muslims and “Islamic humanists” like Bardhi.

“In 1939 and 1940, Hebrew Union College had a program to rescue a number of scholars from Europe,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of HUC-JIR. “One of these men was Abraham Joshua Heschel. I thought of that when I received [the] initial request to find a place for professor Bardhi. I recalled how HUC had done this for Jewish scholars who were in this kind of situation 50 years ago and felt there really was a Jewish imperative to provide refuge in this case as well.”

Reuven Firestone, an Islamic studies professor at the Los Angeles campus and at USC, brought Bardhi to Ellenson’s attention, and his efforts went beyond convincing administrators to create a visiting professorship for Bardhi and ensuring that the U.S. government grant him entry. Firestone also needed to secure the funding.

HUC-JIR’s scholar’s fund matches whatever funds Firestone raises for Bardhi’s income, up to $20,000. Some of the needed funds will be provided through honorariums for speaking at a number of Los Angeles congregations, including IKAR, Valley Beth Shalom and Temple Isaiah.

Firestone first met Bardhi in Macedonia six years ago, when the latter was helping organize an international conference on religion and peace, the first to bring together the country’s Muslim Albanian and Orthodox Christian Slavs.

The conference coincided with a violent build-up between the two ethnic groups — including shootings, retaliation shootings and torchings of churches and mosques — that put the young nation on the brink of civil war. But the dialogue that began with Bardhi and his Orthodox Christian counterpart helped dissolve the tension, and the conflict fizzled.

“In Skopje, Mr. Bardhi was the voice of Muslim moderates who greatly promoted in a nonpolitical manner the process of reconciliation between Albanian Muslims and Macedonian Orthodox,” Paul Mojzes, organizer of the conference and co-editor of The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, wrote in a letter of recommendation. (Last March, in an essay titled, “Orthodoxy and Islam in the Balkans,” Mojzes identified Bardhi as “the best Muslim proponent of inter-religious dialogue in the Balkans.”)

The Macedonian peace, however, was short-lived, and two years ago, when Bardhi was nominated to become president of the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, he discovered that the problems had bled into his own religious community. After a former student who had become affiliated with the Muslim nationalists smashed Bardhi’s face with the butt of a gun, Bardhi spent weeks secluded in his home, withdrew from the political race and eventually lost his job for political reasons, he said.

“During the latest elections within the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, professor Bardhi has been the most prominent and trusted candidate,” Ahmet Sherif, a professor at Macedonia’s Institute of National History, wrote in a letter to the Scholar Rescue Fund. “But unfortunately, due to the threatening and sinister actions toward him and his collaborators he chose to withdraw his candidacy as an act of protest.”

Bardhi’s problem was an unwillingness to politicize his faith. He is, as Firestone described him, an “Islamic humanist,” a religious progressive willing to see Islam as “the perfect expression of the divine will,” but not alone and superior on the world stage.

“My topic is quranic exegesis and how we have to be more open between the Quran and Torah, to see how they could speak together,” said Bardhi, 50. “We have spent too long using religion against each other. This is not good for religion or for human beings.”

A slight man with light skin, gray hair and a pointed goatee, Bardhi speaks four unrelated languages — South Slavic, Albanian, Turkish and Arabic — and is quickly learning conversational and professorial English. HUC-JIR Dean Steven Windmueller said Bardhi will expose students to a different version of Islam, and Los Angeles’ most prominent Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), was pleased to hear of his arrival.

“For there to be this visiting professor from the Balkans, which has experienced a lot of ethnic tension, obviously, could be very eye-opening for students at HUC,” said MPAC spokeswoman Edina Lekovic, whose family is from nearby Montenegro. “To look at ethnic tensions in unfamiliar settings can sometimes shed new light on old conflicts. His experience of ethnic tensions in the Balkans might allow people at HUC to step back and add another dimension to their approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

“If we want people to get a more three-dimensional aspect of faith in the modern world,” she added, “especially these days when it comes to Islam, there is no better place to get it than the horse’s mouth. Everybody asks, ‘Where are the moderate Muslims?’ Well, it’s great that there is one right at HUC.”

Bardhi plans to stay through the spring semester, which ends in May, and then return home. Why? So he can teach his compatriots how to live in an ethnically and religiously diverse community, something he hopes to learn a lot about in Los Angeles.

“We have to clean up religion to get it back to what it should be,” he said, “a spiritual endeavor.”