February 25, 2009 By Howard Friel
Howard Friel is coauthor with Richard Falk of The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004), and with Falk of Israel-Palestine on Record: How The New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (Verso, 2007).
Suppose you are the president of a small college in the United States, or chairman of the board of trustees at the same school, and a prominent professor from the most powerful and prestigious university in the United States unfairly attacks a group of your students with baseless accusations of anti-Israel bigotry and political extremism. Do you first and foremost stand by your students—if indeed the charges are baseless and inflammatory—or do you submit an open letter to a newspaper in Israel, addressed to the university professor in question, and plead for mercy, knowing that this one professor can go a long way in ruining the reputation of your college with allegations of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bigotry?
The college in question is Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the college president is Ralph Hexter, the board of trustees chair is Sigmund Roos, the prominent out-of-town professor is Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz, and the students belong to a Hampshire College branch of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Whether the students inappropriately announced that the college had narrowly divested from investment funds that benefit Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is not addressed here, though it is a key component of the controversy that has unfolded on the Hampshire campus and in the Jerusalem Post. Rather, the concern here is that Hexter and Roos neglected to defend the underlying motivation of the Hampshire students against the McCarthy-era allegations of Alan Dershowitz, and instead engaged in a sycophantic and unprofessional public effort to distance themselves from the legitimate political and humanitarian concerns of the students.
In his “Double Standard Watch” column in the Jerusalem Post on February 15, 2009, Dershowitz referred to the SJP students at Hampshire as “a rabidly anti-Israel group,” “the virulently anti-Israel group called Students for Justice in Palestine,” “the anti-Israel group,” “the anti-Israel students,” and “the anti-Israel student group.” Meanwhile, Dershowitz invoked “bigotry” six times as the underlying motive of “the anti-Israel students,” while demanding that the college punish the SJP students for their “bigotry.” Here is what Dershowitz wrote in this regard: “There must be a price paid for bigotry”; “singling out only Israel for divestiture is bigotry plain and simple”; “this bigoted resolution” (describing the Hampshire students’ divestment initiative); “Students and faculty [at Hampshire] too must understand that bigotry has its cost”; “decency cannot survive with the kind of double standard bigotry directed only against the Jewish state”; and:
Hampshire is a small college without much influence. But those who are conducting the national [divestment] campaign see their “victory” at Hampshire as an opening wedge with which to get other more influential universities to follow suit by adopting similarly bigoted proposals. This is a cancer that is threatening to spread around the world, and it must be stopped where it began—at Hampshire.
The “cancer” here is the nonviolent SJP campaign to divest from businesses that contribute to Israel’s four-decade occupation of Palestinian territories in violation of international law.
Rather than defend the Hampshire College students from the charge of anti-Israel bigotry to which they were subjected, Hampshire’s Hexter and Roos began their letter to the Jerusalem Post as follows: “Dear Alan: We begin by affirming our high esteem for you, both as a legal scholar and a powerful voice against anti-Semitism.” And in response to Dershowitz’s incitement against the students—stating that “there must be a price paid for bigotry”—Hexter and Roos sought to reassure Dershowitz that the Hampshire administration will take “disciplinary action” against the students:
But we are also clear, and urge you to understand us clearly, when we say that students do not speak for the college and may not willfully misrepresent the school. It will be, and must be, the college’s task to undertake any disciplinary action, according to its established rules and procedures. Discipline is an internal process that is not shared with the public.