Last Monday, Michael Oren, the first American-born Israeli ambassador to the United States, came to the University of California, Irvine campus. Oren came to share his personal and historical perspective on the U.S.-Israel relationship.
As a campus, UCI, as of late, has been known for being just as politically charged as its northern neighbor UC Berkley. This is why I was not as surprised as many of the audience members were when Oren’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by students in protest. There were eleven of them in all.
Video of Oren’s lecture at UCI can be found easily online, as the incident has gone viral. Online forums and comments regarding the incident are accompanied with intense debate. Discussion of the promotion of bigotry by a university, issues of freedom of speech, as well as the academic future of the students, who were arrested for protesting are discussed in these forums.
According to Cathy Lawhon, UCI’s director of media relations, the student protesters, arrested by campus police for disrupting the speech at UCI, could face a host of academic repercussions from simple warnings to suspensions to all-out expulsions.
I long for the days of peaceful discourse, but it would be a shame for these students to be expelled from their university. Their actions were in no way polite, but to strip them of their education would be an extreme decision that would only complicate and chill issues regarding freedom of speech on college campuses.
The tension in the UCI Student Center was apparent from the start; audience members had to go through metal detectors to listen to the speech.
The New University, the official campus newspaper for UCI, reported that audience members’ responses to the interrupters included, “Go back to the West Bank” and “Go back to Bahrain.” When watching the video, there is a concluding moment toward the end of the footage when a middle-aged Jewish man points to exiting students and shouts, “you are all failing your exams!”
UCI’s Muslim Student Union has denied any involvement with the incident saying, that it condemned and opposed Oren’s presence, a presence that was invited by the university’s law school and political science department.
They released this statement to The New University, “The MSU believes in one’s right to speak freely, whether it is the Israeli ambassador’s right to promote Israel’s propaganda on campus or individuals who respond to the Israeli ambassador and disagree with him.”
Critics online are rejecting the MSU’s statement and even the university’s stance and handling of the situation thus far. Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, the former Campus Rabbi of Long Beach Hillel, is one of these critics. He wrote a short article on jewlicious.com about the incident titled, “Ambassador Oren VS. Hamas at UCI.”
Taking a step back and looking at this incident from a distance, I cannot help but be reminded of the so-called “tea-party phenomenon” that has gained momentum in American politics over the past year. How different is this situation than that of the tea partiers who attended Congressional town hall talks and just shouted.
After a few interruptions during his speech, Ambassador Oren left the stage for twenty minutes and Mark Petracca, a UCI political science professor, addressed the audience. “We have wasted a half-hour of a very important individuals time … we have the opportunity to hear from a policy maker and you are preventing not only yourself from hearing him, but hundreds of people in this room, shame on you!”
Professor Petracca and maybe even Ambassador Oren failed to understand that this was the agenda of the protesters. The students wanted to control the flow of discourse, which for them in this specific case, was to stifle it. I am sure Ambassador Oren took note.
Hanif Zarrabi is a Middle Eastern history graduate student and contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
This article was updated on Feb. 23 at 11:39 a.m. Rabbi Yonah Bookstein is the former Campus Rabbi of Long Beach Hillel.