CUNY in the spotlight - the Tony Kushner controversy

Transcript of Jeffrey Weisenfeld's statement:

BOARD OF TRUSTEES
OF
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING

JEFFREY S. WIESENFELD SPEECH

Monday
May 2, 2011

BENNO SCHMIDT, Chairman

MR. WIESENFELD: Again, Mr. Chairman, forgive the indulgence. I want to raise an issue that’s larger the candidate about which I want to speak, but I want to explain why. There is a lot of disingenuous and non intellectual activity directed against the State of Israel on campuses throughout the country, the west generally and often times the United States as well. And the reason I choose to address this is there have been a couple of instances and I don’t in any way God forbid denigrate this university because we are far and away better in this regard than most others and certainly not the college in question, but I want to address in context the question of the granting of the degree to Tony Kushner.

Now, about a year or so ago, if I am not mistaken John Jay College also issued a John Jay Justice Award to Mary Robinson and there was an article in The Wall Street Journal, and I will just give a brief quote to set the stage, “Criticism of Mr. Obama’s award to Mary Robinson to be official bestowed has centered on Mrs. Robinson’s central organizing role as secretary general of the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durbin, South Africa. Instead of concentrating on its purported objectives, Durbin was vehemently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and at least implicitly anti-American. So vile was the conference’s draft declaration that Secretary of State Colin Powell correctly called it a throwback to the days of Zionism equals racism, referring to the infamous 1975 U.N. General Assembly Resolution to that effect. President George Bush, whose father led the 1991 campaign that repealed the U.N. Zionism as a form of racism resolution, unhesitatingly agreed when Mr. Powell recommended the U.S. delegation leave the Durbin conference rather than legitimize the outcome.

Mrs. Robinson did not see it that way then and she has shown no remorse since. In late 2002 she described Durbin’s outcome as “remarkably good including on issues of the Middle East.”

Now to Mr. Kushner. I chose with Mr. Kushner not to look at pro Israel Web sites that would give insight into his feelings of Israel, rather I went to the Web site of one Norman Finkelstein, another discredited individual that mercifully we rid ourselves of at this university, and he pridefully displays key quotes of Mr. Kushner on his Web site which are accurately reflected elsewhere and by Mr. Kushner’s record itself and I quote Mr. Kushner.

First, why Mr. Finkelstein praises the candidate. Kushner also deplores the brutal and illegal tactics of the I.D.F., which I might add is the only force of its kind in the world that has the high code of ethics that the Israel Defense Forces has and the deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture in a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people. He is also on the board of an organization which opposes the security fence, a unified Jerusalem or military aid to Israel recommends Norman Finkelstein’s notorious books and supports boycotting and divesting from the State of Israel.

Now to Mr. Kushner’s quotes, “Israel was founded in a program that if you really wasn’t to be blunt about it was ethnic cleansing and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people. I have never been a Zionist, I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state, it would be better if it never had happened.”

Kushner said establishing a state means [expletive] people over. However, I think that people in the late 20th and 21st century, having seen the Holocaust, having seen the 20th century and all of its horrors cannot be complacent in the face of that. The Israeli reporter questioning Mr. Kushner says, but you are saying then that the very creation of the State of Israel as a Jewish state was not a good idea. And Mr. Kushner answered it was a mistake.

I think you get the idea. I don’t wasn’t to bore you all with the details. Let me just say that when people identify themselves politically in principle or principally by these types of viewpoints, yes it could be said by other trustees or by members of faculty that it has a chilling effect when a trustee brings up these types of matters, but I think it is up to all of us to look at fairness and to consider these things, especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are misogynist, anti-gay, anti-Christian and societies that are doing today to the Christians what they did to the 500,000 Jews who lived in the Arab world in 1948 at the time of the creation of the State of Israel, dispossessing them, murdering them, deporting them.

And so I have to say that even if I am the lone dissenter, that it is time that it would be much worse for the reputation of the university not to mention this, especially after the appointment of an individual at Brooklyn College, Mr. Oberton, who has some equally specious scholarship.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.