Sign the Petition to Condemn Pro-Genocide Hate Speech

2010 May 20

by David Swindle

Today at Pajamas Media, UC Irvine student Aaron Elias has a fantastic article highlighting a petition that seeks to get UC San Diego to condemn the violent, anti-Semitic remarks of MSA member Jumanah Albahri:

David Horowitz: “I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. … For it or against it?”

Jumanah Albahri: “For it.”

On May 10, 2010, Jumanah Albahri, an ex-officer of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), admitted during an event put on by Young Americans for Freedom and featuring David Horowitz as a speaker, that she supported a second Holocaust. During the exchange, Albahri also refused to condemn Hamas as a genocidal organization. This chilling exchange has by now made headlines around the country.

Albahri’s blatant support for genocide has sparked a backlash, prompting students to try and get the UC chancellors to condemn her remarks as inflammatory hate speech. The movement has taken the form of a petition directed at UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox. (The petition originated in a Facebook group named “Condemn UCSD MSA’s ex-Officer for Supporting 2nd Holocaust.”

Begun on May 13, the group has, in the course of a few days, swelled to nearly 600 members. It provides updates on the situation, including the press releases and statements released by the UCSD MSA, Chancellor Fox, and Albahri herself. Most importantly, of course, it provides a link to the petition asking Chancellor Fox (and potentially the other UC chancellors) to directly condemn Albahri’s pro-Holocaust statement.

On May 15, in a half-hearted damage control scramble, the UCSD MSA released a statement denouncing “all groups or organizations, whether state or non-state actors, who target civilians or target a civilian population to impose collective punishment.” The statement is very vague and non-committal, and does not even mention the incident or the people that elicited it. It then goes into an anti-Israel diatribe and a quote from Malcom X that is totally irrelevant to the situation in question. It is, for all intents and purposes, utterly meaningless.

Read the whole article at PJM here and sign the petition here.

And catch up on NRB and FPM’s complete coverage of the issue here.