For quite some time the Jew haters from Students for Justice in Palestine have tried every means at their disposal to get Stanford University in the US to divest from Israeli companies or companies that do business in Israel “that they claim profit from human rights abuses and violations of international law in Israel/Palestine.”
At the same time Stanford is in the news for yet another case of a highly inappropriate questioning of prospective student council candidate. Once again a student was asked how her Judaism would affect her views on boycotting Israel.
Now Stanford’s Board of Trustees has issued a statement on this and while rejecting the BDS attempt, it’s hard to find a moral backbone:
The Board concluded that the university’s mission and its responsibility to support and encourage diverse opinions would be compromised by endorsing an institutional position on either side of an issue as complex as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Therefore the Board will not be taking action on this request, nor will it consider this request further.
Their statement ends with this (my emphasis):
The request from the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine asserted that Stanford should divest its holdings in certain companies that they claim profit from human rights abuses and violations of international law in Israel/Palestine. Neither the APIRL nor the Board sought to determine the veracity of those claims, or to disprove them.
Rather than explore such issues, the Board focused on the questions of divisiveness and negative impact on its mission as contained in the Statement on Investment Responsibility. The Statement provides that if the Trustees conclude that a specific Trustee action “is likely to impair the capacity of the University to carry out its educational mission (for example, by causing significant adverse action on the part of governmental or other external agencies or groups, or by causing deep divisions within the University community), then the Trustees need not take such action.” The Board concluded that any action on this issue would clearly have such an impact.
Here’s my reading: if they were to declare that an over-active and entirely unmatched hatred of Jewish Israel by Students for Justice in Palestine was outright Jew hatred, they’d have a huge fight on their hands. If they just sneak away and hide, perhaps their army of Alumni who feed the treasure chests with their donations will continue to let the money flow.
And so, by not even choosing to make an adjudication, the Stanford Board of Trustees has failed what George Gilder called “The Israel Test”. By not even choosing to investigate the claims of these people and to reject them on merit, they’ve stuck their heads in the sand and shown a complete lack of moral backbone.
