Barriers to Critical Thinking

On Wednesday evening, there will be a panel discussion on campus on a topic whose name alone stirs up a great deal of controversy. Some people will call it the Israeli Occupation, some people will call it the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some people will call it a massacre, some people will call it revenge, some people will call it just desserts. It is very easy for people who live thousands of miles away from the Middle East to sit back in their armchairs and name things.

In any case, a passage from the original notice posted to a faculty listserv regarding this panel discussion caused a great deal of controversy in its tone:

Since the Palestinians elected the Islamic Movement Hamas in 2006, Israel has sealed off Gaza from the outside world, and has been starving it ever since. Just before the inauguration of Barak Obama, while the world was celebrating Christmas, Israel assaulted Gaza from air, sea and land spreading death and destruction on a largely disarmed, starved and scared population for 23 days. In the US media, this war crime went largely unreported, although US taxpayer funds it and US politicians provide cover for it. This panel aims to educate the public, mourn the dead, and express solidarity with those who survived.

A faculty member, concerned about the tone of the email, asked the following question:

Will the panel provide the other sides of the story?

The response he received offlist:

"You have the whole world demonizing the Palestinians for you, and am sure you do a great job yourself. You don't need me to do that for you."

This caused someone else to post the following:

The poster attached to the scsu-announce is obnoxious, insensitive and vulgar....all words used when swastikas were found on campus last year. The juxtaposition of the recent violence in Gaza with actual historical photos of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe is completely inappropriate. If the HURL professors want to speak on behalf of Palestinians and Gaza and Hamas...so be it, but their suggestion that Israel, Jews, are equal to Nazis....is completely out of line and does not belong in a university which is supposedly on guard for such vulgar manipulation of discourse.

The announce list should not be a means of such mean-spirited views.

I have stood with two of these professors in solidarity....I will not be silent. Their opposition to Israeli policies is obvious, the use of Nazi photos goes far beyond that opposition.

Which finally led to the poster of the original announcement to respond:

This is not the space to respond to Dr. Edelheit's attack on the forum Gaza 2009. The accusation of the connection of this panel with the swastikas found on campus last year is unfounded,and inappropriate. There are no Nazi photos in the flyer. There are photos of two ghettos that were both sealed off, starved, and disarmed.

Peace comes only with proper historical understanding of injustice, and no other place is more equipped to do that than a university. If we are interested in pursuing peace, we should try to understand the situation from the perspective of the most helpless victims. Closing discussion only prolongs the injustice. We welcome all views and questions in this forum.

With the exception of one poster, who asked a simple one sentence question, all other posters involved accused each other of terrible things, made assumptions about each other's political beliefs, and ended up closing dialogue before it could even begin. If participants in the panel discussion perpetuate such behavior, are they truly engaged in educating students about what is happening in Gaza right now, or are they going to mis-educate students into prejudice and one-sided information?

For the record, I am not against the creation of a Palestinian state. I am, however, against faculty setting a bad example of ad hominem for students.