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AIPAC official on taking over student gov't
DPrival78
CT Posts: 2,259
AIPAC- We’ll take over the UC Berkeley student government (video at link)
Why both with moral persuasion when you can just threaten to take over government… everywhere?
On March 18, UC Berkeley’s student senate voted 16 to 4 in favor of divesting from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. A week later, in a move oddly predicted by AIPAC’s Jonathan Kessler at AIPAC’s policy conference, the vote was vetoed by the student senate president. (Students hope the senate will overturn the veto next Wednesday.)
When asked about fighting the Berkeley pro-divest initiative, Kessler said, “we’re going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote…This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.” Kessler is at 3:58 in video below. Student elections are happening now at UC Berkeley and you can bet everyone’s looking for the AIPAC-Manchurian candidate, if such a thing exists.
Why both with moral persuasion when you can just threaten to take over government… everywhere?
On March 18, UC Berkeley’s student senate voted 16 to 4 in favor of divesting from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. A week later, in a move oddly predicted by AIPAC’s Jonathan Kessler at AIPAC’s policy conference, the vote was vetoed by the student senate president. (Students hope the senate will overturn the veto next Wednesday.)
When asked about fighting the Berkeley pro-divest initiative, Kessler said, “we’re going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote…This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.” Kessler is at 3:58 in video below. Student elections are happening now at UC Berkeley and you can bet everyone’s looking for the AIPAC-Manchurian candidate, if such a thing exists.
i'm more a fan of popular bands.. like the bee-gees, pearl jam
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You know things are bad when this shit is happening at Berkeley, of all places. fuck AIPAC and their righteous arrogance; their complete contempt for both the democratic proccess and free speech. That quote, and this story in general, make me sick.
chances of anything being done about these bastards?
This is what was said:
“we’re going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote…This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.”
Not quite the same thing as your arrogant assertion that the Berkeley student leaders need educating.
O.k, I apologize. I didn't watch the video.
I don't see anything legitimate in supporting and encouraging Israeli expansionism and aggression. Unless you think that the amount of land stolen since 1967 warrants all of the bloodshed on both sides of the conflict in that same period of time?
The issue of whether or not you think AIPAC's policy positions are legitimate is separate from the legitimacy of their methods, which is what is actually under discussion here.
Obviously their position underpins and largely dictates their methods. Like most all Israel apologists subterfuge is their preferred weapon of choice.
Thank you kindly Sir.
"taking over student governments" to force their viewpoints on a group that clearly disagrees with them goes well beyond advocacy and "education".
same goes for what they do in washington.
How exactly are they forcing their viewpoint on anyone? It isn't like AIPAC is arming pro-Israel Berkeley students with sub-machine guns so they can storm the student union building and take over. They are trying to convince people to accept their arguments, and they are trying to get those people elected to student government. And by the way, AIPAC doesn't work directly on college campuses. When you talk about what AIPAC is doing at Berkeley you're really talking about what Berkeley students are doing at Berkeley. At most these students have access to AIPAC staff who are available in a consulting capacity, but at the end of the day the students will do what they want to do. They aren't taking orders from AIPAC. If you can explain to me what is wrong with Berkeley students trying to get people who espouse policies and beliefs that they agree with elected to their school's student government I would be very interested to hear what you have to say.
Took forever for me to find, but here is how this played out (unsurprisingly) :
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer255/erakat.html
On April 26, 2010, the student senate at the University of California-Berkeley upheld, by one vote, an executive veto on SB 118—the student body resolution endorsing divestment of university funds from General Electric and United Technologies, two companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Proponents of the resolution needed 14 votes to override the veto and, as 16 senators had spoken in favor of doing so, it appeared a simple task.
But the vote in Berkeley had shifted the gaze of national pro-Israel organizations from Capitol Hill westward, begetting an unlikely alliance between the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its self-proclaimed liberal rival, J Street. The two groups collaborated in lobbying efforts on campus to sustain the veto. Ultimately, two senators changed their votes and a third abstained, bringing the final count to 13 in favor of overriding the veto and five opposed. While adherence to student body procedure has blocked the divestment measure, the numbers indicate the strong support for divestment on Berkeley’s campus and can be regarded as a milestone in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
The strident response to Berkeley’s resolution from off-campus groups reflects that the BDS movement is being taken more seriously by its opponents than ever before. Berkeley students have been at the forefront of BDS efforts since February 6, 2001, the day Ariel Sharon became Israeli prime minister. They erected a mock checkpoint on campus and unfurled banners exclaiming, “Divest from Israeli Apartheid.” Within the span of three years, this first university-based divestment campaign spread onto dozens of other American campuses as well as into churches and community organizations. Yet the movement did not gain international legitimacy and elicit serious treatment until a call for BDS came from Palestinian civil society in 2005.
Since then, and especially since the resounding failure of the international community to hold Israel to account for war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead, the assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009, the notion of extra-governmental tactics targeting Israeli human rights violations has permeated mainstream institutions. No longer the passion of idealistic students alone, BDS demands have reverberated within American retail stores, corporations and international multilateral organizations.
The movement’s deepening acceptance among mainstream stakeholders correlates with the steady decline of faith in efforts to achieve a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While heads of state fail to extract the most modest commitments from Israel, such as a settlement freeze, BDS activists have increased compliance (albeit incrementally) with international law among corporations and institutions that have distanced themselves from, or divested their holdings in, settlement-related enterprises.
(continued...)
First: No, no one has forced anyone to do anything here (at least not that we're aware of)...however, an AIPAC member clearly states that they want to take over a government and reverse a vote....then they get the veto they want, and in the end, two more uni senators change their vote and one abstains. You can tell me that they simply 'educated' these other senators in the meantime, but if you believe that only submachine guns can be used to intimidate (read:force) or influence (read: educate, bribe, grant favours to, etc) someone to change their decision, you are incredibly naive. You seem to imply that AIPAC does everything above-board. Even if that's true (impossibly doubtful), their actions still highlight serious flaws in our systems.
Second: No, AIPAC does not work directly on college campuses. But this is like saying Warren Buffet doesn't work at the NYSE, he just consults a few investors.... or that the board of the RAND corp doesn't work for the US military, they just give them advice once in a while. Way to downplay their influence.
I was being facetious with my conspiracy comment, but it is technically true. Just to be clear:
Conspiracy: a secret plan or agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal or subversive act
Subversive: intended or likely to undermine or overthrow a government or other institution
So tell me how, aside from blabbing his ‘secret’, this AIPAC member was not a part of a conspiracy?
University of Michigan Campus
On October 20 2010, two IDF soldiers came to the University of Michigan campus as part of a national PR campaign by Stand With Us aimed at justifying Israel's recent atrocities in the Middle East. Students, staff, and community members collectively engaged in a silent walk-out in memory and in solidarity with all of the silenced Palestinian children that were killed by the IDF during Israel's most recent offensive on the Gaza Strip who are unable to take a stand and give their account today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPDkq2JHfA0
that was very powerful. thanks for sharing.
the violin part of "i love the way you lie" was haunting, yet very fitting. :(
that soldier said the air force does not fire on schools or mosques because it does not want to kill civilians. i guess not, because it does a good enough job by dropping bombs in other civilian populated areas. :twisted:
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
You're right, you're free to speculate as much as you want. It's just that when your speculation is all but pulled out of thin air, and is supported by absolutely no evidence whatsoever one might think that a more apt term for what you are doing is "making shit up."
Let's play a little game, shall we...I speculate that Drowned Out is involved in a conspiracy to cover up the genocide of every black squirrel in the northern hemisphere...No, I can’t prove any allegation in this particular case, but that doesn’t mean there was nothing shady done…. I’m sure I could find proof of many shady dealings involving Drowned Out.
My, now that I'm using your own words I must say that you make a very convincing case. :roll: Seriously though, if you're going to be making accusations the onus is on you to provide some sort of evidence. Otherwise you're just slinging mud.
And what exactly is so subversive about students taking part in the politics of their student government?
Like this:
“we’re going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote…This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mears ... rael-lobby
The Israel Lobby
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.
The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus … in the national pro-Israel effort’.
The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.
Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.
LRB Book Bags
A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.
A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.
I saw your response to Byrnzie... What is taken out of context in that quote? It is a direct quote about how to influence or "take over" the Berkely student council and reverse a vote. If a filmed confession is not evidence, what is? I'm not a judge, it's enough for me...
But they don't operate directly on university campuses. :roll: What is subversive is not the students taking part in their schools politics…it’s a massive political lobby taking part in the school’s politics…by undermining, or to quote AIPAC’s Leadership Development Director “take over”, their governments. And that’s exactly what they do, the same way they undermine or “take over” the process of democratic government in Washington….in fact, it’s their pull in Washington that makes attending this conference so appealing. Meet n greets on Capitol Hill? 1300 students from 365 campuses, in all 50 states, 400 of which are on their student councils ….I wonder which Berkeley students got invites for next year? Just slingin mud…