Letter to the UC Leadership about Divestment

Shalom Chancellor, President, Senate and others concerned with peaceful coexistence among people of all faiths,

This coming weekend, my Reform Jewish congregation in Des Moines, Iowa is being picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church, a group that spouts the most vicious hatred and filth out there. They will shout "God Hates Jews" and "God Hates Fags" as families with children arrive to attend a Bat Mitzvah celebration. They come to spew this hatred because we are a Jewish institution and because we support the equal right of Homosexuals to marry, something legal in Iowa now unlike in your state, which has recently re-entered the dark ages. Now your school has unfortunately followed.

I do not make this charge lightly. Age old Jew hatred is rearing its ugly head, not in the form of RIGHT WING hatred, but in the form of LEFT WING "pro-Palestinian" hatred under the guise of anti-Israel sentiment originating with grossly anti-Israel international institutions. The document created by the student Senate is filled with half truths and untruths, just as the sources used to create the document were. In fact, even Judge Goldstone himself wouldn't agree with its conclusions just as he didn't agree with the conclusions put forward in his name by the UNHRC.

Goldstone himself said of his investigation, "Ours wasn’t an investigation, it was a fact-finding mission, we made that clear.We had to do the best we could with the material we had. If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven.”

Taken by the highly anti-Jewish UNHRC that didn't matter. The accusations enabled rabid Jew haters to sentence the Jewish state, just as the Student Senate at UC now has, in spite of the mountain of evidence that counters the claims.

The day that the Westboro hate tour comes to visit my congregation, I will feel more comfortable as a JEW than I would at the University of California right now. What is going on there is despicable and resembles the worst anti-Jewish behaviors in history, sentencing Jews based upon deliberately false accusations that demonize the Jewish people. That this has the imprimatur of the Student Senate is revolting.

This week, 77 years ago, on 1 April 1933, the Nazis carried out the first nationwide, planned action against Jews: a boycott targeting Jewish businesses and professionals. This was a direct response to the Jewish boycott of Germany in an effort to further cripple their economy which started in March 1933 (according to The Daily Express of London of 24 March 1933). This one-day boycott was both a reprisal and an act of warning prompted by Greuelpropaganda (false atrocity stories) that German and foreign Jews, assisted by foreign journalists, were allegedly circulating in the international press to damage Nazi Germany's reputation. [Sounds similar to the false accusations in the Goldstone Report and other charges found in the UC student document].

On the day of the boycott, the SA stood menacingly in front of Jewish-owned department stores and retail establishments, and the offices of professionals such as doctors and lawyers. [Sounds eerily similar to the shouting down of the Israeli Ambassador and calls for boycott of Israelis]. Signs were posted saying "Don't Buy from Jews" and "The Jews Are Our Misfortune." Throughout Germany, rare acts of violence against individual Jews and Jewish property occurred. [Those should be expected to occur unless this climate of hatred on the UC campus is ended].

It is shocking that this is happening right now on the campus of the University of California in 2010, only the word "Jew," has been replaced by the word "Israel." You should be ashamed.

You are helping to make "Never Again," AGAIN!!!

-David