Debate over Ture shows 'dialogue' isn't the answer to everything

In the Review of 3 May, Black Faculty, Staff and Students aired their outrage at responses to Kwame Ture's harangue on Zionism. Having authored the faculty letter rejecting Ture's message of hate and violence, I feel bound to reply - lest someone see the letter, too, as "tactics" designed to mar Ture's visit to Oberlin. In this reply, I can only speak for myself, yet I am confident that, to a person, the same seventy faculty who cosigned my letter would condemn any message so hostile to enlightened thought as Ture's. For truth and morality are indivisible. Those who protested their violation by Kwame Ture will surely act with equal resolve, in word and deed, when the rights and dignity of any group are threatened.

Black Faculty, Staff and Students feel, needlessly, that they were faced with one of two choices, either to denounce Kwame Ture as an anti-Semite or to be charged with anti-Semitism themselves. Far be it from me - and, I'd venture, all seventy cosigners - to entertain a notion so inane. By its logic, the one hundred and seventy or so other Oberlin faculty who, following their own good judgment, declined to sign the protest letter, would be subject to the same charge. Altogether, I'm at a loss to fathom how this matter could have become an issue between African Americans and those who repudiated the bigotry of Kwame Ture's talk on Zionism.

That Ture's anti-Zionist position - "A good Zionist is a dead Zionist" - was "well known," as the writers confirm, explains exactly why the Students for a Free Palestine invited him: He told them what they were itching to hear. Far from their views getting "little consideration" on campus, within six weeks they were aired twice, each time in a manner so vile that anyone concerned for humane values had to recoil in fright. Yes, at Oberlin College we do pursue a mission to encourage and defend "free speech, intellectual inquiry, and the vigorous exchange of views," as the writers of the Statement make crystal-clear. And, I will add, Jewish students, too, can be expected to bear the pain and distress that intellectual inquiry may sometimes exact of all of us. Their pain and distress, however, derived from quite another source; it derived from the cheers and applause accorded Ture's demagoguery - every clap and cheer another blow to them and, if it need be said, an affront to historical truth and intellectual rigor. What they and we heard from Mr. Ture, and then from Mr. Sidiqque in his own diatribe on Zionism, made a mockery of the principles of free speech and had as much in common with intellectual inquiry as the ravings of Brother Jed with metaphysics.

As enumerated in the Statement, Ture's achievements have been lofty. All the deeper did he plummet, then, when he preached hate and violence in Finney Chapel, and all the more reason to lament his fall. Attempts, though, to turn his visit "into an anti-Semitic event," as the writers see the protests against it, would have been utterly superfluous. Ture's noonday talk on Zionism, and this is what dozens of us protested, was an anti-Semitic event.

The writers of the Statement, however, locate the problem elsewhere: in "differences between definitions of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism." Yet their own definition of anti-Zionism is so mistaken as to be virtually useless for any discussion. For one, the belief that the land of Israel was pledged by God to the Jews, finds its most fervent adherents precisely among those ultra-orthodox Jews who stridently oppose political Zionism (but, for reasons unexplained by Mr. Raviv at his botched teach-in, are as free of anti-Semitism as Messrs, Ture and Siddique are infected by it). As to the right allegedly claimed by the Zionists to "occupy" the land to the exclusion of others, let it be said that Israel is presently "occupied" by a majority of Jews and a minority of some 850,000 Arab Muslims and Christians, and Druze, all of them Israeli citizens. Of late, however, the prospect of a free Palestine under president Arafat has inspired lines of Arabs from East Jerusalem, Arafat's envisaged capital, to seek Israeli citizenship. Seemingly, they have their own view of what defines an occupation.

Anyone who wishes to comprehend the various Zionisms that gave rise to the Jewish state - and by extension the one anti-Zionism that typifies the enemies of this state - can do it. Indeed, since Kwame Ture's prior visit we've had seven years to learn what the fuss over a few remarks was all about, and we've got books enough in the library to help us. For a late start, Hans Mayer's Outsiders (1982), a work on women, homosexuals and Jews in modern bourgeois society, might do. Mayer defined the matter this way: "Whoever attacks `Zionism' but by no means intends to say anything against `Jews' is deceiving himself or others. The state of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wishes to destroy it, overtly or by means of policies that can effect nothing but such destruction, is pursuing the Jew-hatred of years past and beyond." By defining anti-Semitism as the "unprincipled...discrimination against Jewish people," the writers of the Statement unwittingly open the door to those principled discriminators - and how principled they can be! - who would pave the road to another Auschwitz.

The qualitative difference between the call to "dialogue" that the Review trumpets whenever someone protests the abuse of free speech on campus, and the "serious dialogue" advocated by the writers of the March 3rd Statement, escapes me. Since Kaukab Siddique's ignominious recital of the anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic litany on 21 April and its disingenuous defense by Siddique's hosts, I've come to feel all the more that this notion of dialogue is, in plain words, a lot of baloney. We'd all be better off if we tended to our mission - and it requires that we enlighten.