Sunday, March 18, 2007
All is not going smoothly for Norman Finkelstein's Brandeis visit. Sounds like one student thought he'd stir things up by inviting the guy, but didn't wait to get everyone on board: Finkelstein visit loses club support
The Radical Student Alliance and the Arab Culture Club are no longer co-sponsoring the event, and members of the RSA-which now calls itself Students for a Democratic Society [Bwahahaha]-said they in fact never gave their consent to sponsor Finkelstein's visit.
"This just fell in our lap," Daniel Duffy '07, an RSA leader, said. "We have our own issues we're going through right now, like an anti-war campaign. [The Finkelstein visit] has just been an annoyance."
Kevin Conway '09, an RSA?member who invited Finkelstein said his group had committed to co-sponsoring the event scheduled for April 24 in the International Lounge. "Every relevant body on campus was on board," he said. "My colleagues in the RSA just jumped ship."
Conway still hopes to bring Finkelstein to campus because the money and room are still available. "We got everything except for the sponsor," he said. "I've been working on this since January. I'm not giving up, but the odds are against it...
...After the RSA decided that it didn't support the visit, the Arab Culture Club followed suit.
"It wasn't our idea in the first place," Farrah Bdour '07, the club's president, said. "If we would be the only sponsor to this event, it might seem like we were the brainstormers behind it."
Bdour said her club supports Finkelstein's right to visit campus, but does not necessarily support his ideas...
...Prof. Jonathan Sarna (NEJS) questioned the academic value of Finkelstein's visit.
"I don't really know anybody in the field of Jewish studies that would use [his work] as a serious contribution," he said. "This is polemics, not academics. Sarna also said that by bringing Finkelstein, the University would be abdicating its responsibility to bring "real experts" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"Otherwise there is no quality, and we are in many ways destroying what a university should be about."
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