03/21/2018
Call to action: Please share – the world in general, and students at US colleges in particular, should know that the calls to boycott Israel are facing massive objections amongst students – in this case, the students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champain (UIUC) once again voted down a resolution to boycott Israel.
Sometimes, with all the noise surrounding calls to boycott Israel on US campuses, one seems to forget that most of these calls are shot down by the majority of students who don't buy into the call to boycott Israel. This time, the student body at UIUC voted down yet another resolution, penned by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to boycott Israel by 3,133 to 1,700 vote.
The SJP teamed up with the chapters of the Muslims Student Association, Black Lives Matter etc…but were met with an equally broad coalition led by UIUC Jewish students as Elan Karoll, co-president of IlliniPAC explains: "We had African-American leaders, we had Latino leaders, a lot of non-Jewish students came out and supported us". The SJP, as usual, tried to mask the resolution by not mentioning Israel at all but the anti-boycott coalition made sure that the students would understand that the real agenda behind this resolution is only to boycott Israel and drove a simple point home: Divestment (from Israel) = Division (amongst students).
But it's a bitter-sweet victory since the debates surrounding such resolutions are usually ugly and "Jewish and Palestinian students alike testified that they felt harassed and threatened by the hate speech the campus debate generated the resolution".
Colleges and universities have to understand that the freedom of speech awarded to organizations such as the SJP should be balanced by the right of the people their hate-speech targets.
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