The speakers at “Israeli Apartheid Week” get to exercise their right of free speech, while....
The MSU Plot to Silence Israel’s Ambassador
IPT News
April 7, 2010
Despite claims to the contrary, internal emails from the University of California, Irvine’s Muslim Student Union (MSU) show that the group orchestrated the repeated disruptions of a speech given on campus by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren February 8.
A copy of the email exchanges was sent anonymously to school and local law enforcement officials, who are investigating whether students violated conduct codes or criminal laws, respectively, in deliberately disrupting an invited guest speaker at the school.
The emails include a “game plan,” which details the disruption plan down to where the student disruptors would sit, how they would communicate with each other via text messaging, and how to act if campus police began to arrest students.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism also received a copy of the packet sent to UCI officials.
During his speech, Oren was interrupted more than a dozen times by students who stood up and shouted that he was a murderer and a war criminal. He left the stage for about 20 minutes before order was restored and he was able to continue his remarks.
Prior to the speech, MSU officials told UCI administrators that they were not planning any disruptions before the speech. Police arrested 11 students during the event, eight from UC Irvine and three from UC Riverside.
Afterward, numerous press accounts included MSU denials that the disruptions were orchestrated.
“It was not put on by the MSU, but rather by students acting on their own,” chapter spokeswoman Hadeer Soliman told the Los Angeles Times. She repeated the claim in a column in UCI’s student newspaper.
On a website created to support the arrested students, MSU President Mohamed Abdelgany wrote that “all of my actions on Monday were done out of my own individual accord and were not on behalf of the Muslim Student Union or any other organization at UC Irvine.”
As the now public emails make clear, these denials were an attempt to cover up the truth about MSU’s behind-the-scenes attempt to shout down a visiting diplomat. A decision to disrupt the event had been made at an MSU board meeting days before the speech, the records show.
“We’ve already discussed the different options in the GA (general assembly) meeting and we took a vote,” a February 4 email to the MSU board said. “So now that we have voted on one method of action, we all go through this together, insha’Allah ta’ala together as one MSU … one Ummah.” [Emphasis original]
Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/1892/the-msu-plot-to-silence-israels-ambassador