To the Editor:
While I am pleased that more members of the College's community have joined the debate over Kwame Ture's visit to Oberlin in March, I can't say I welcome this form of "dialogue" for its own sake. Nonetheless, I feel obliged to make one additional contribution to what I hope, in the end, will prove a constructive exchange.
In their "Special Statement" published in the last issue of the Review, a group of faculty and staff writes of their discomfort at feeling forced to take sides in a debate that they had not part in initiating about a speaker who does not necessarily represent their views or, for that matter, those of any one else on campus. This discomfiture is understandable. I myself, however, am discomfited by their statement that "the occasion was marred by incidents which were designed to mobilize opinion against him." Surely, Kwame Ture's familiar record of anti-Semitism and his vituperative reiteration of some of his most inflammatory views sufficed to mobilize opinion against him without his audience having to do anything at all. The authors of the statement also argue that, "unfortunately, by turning Ture's visit into an anti-Semitic event, the unannounced discussion of the relationship between Zionism and the state of Israel was invalidated." As I understand this sentence, it implies that, by labeling Ture an anti-Semite, those who opposed or protested Ture's presence on campus inevitably transformed what otherwise promised to be a constructive discussion of Zionism into an anti-Semitic diatribe. This neatly evades who or what made anti-Semitism an issue. Surely not anyone in the audience or the fact that the "discussion" was "unannounced," but Kwame Ture himself!
As the authors of the special statement point out, Ture can be considered an authority on Pan-Africanism. At issue, however, are not Ture's record or qualifications to speak on that important subject, but rather the aptness of his receiving financial support from the College to speak on Zionism, an issue on which he is as manifestly unqualified as, say, David Duke on Pan-Africanism. Funding, not free speech, is the issue here; to the best of my knowledge, there has still been no clear attestation from the administration whether it funded a series, in which Kwame Ture came to be a participant, or this specific speaker on this specific topic.
Finally, I find it strange, to say the least, that at a moment in the Middle East peace process when even the PLO has formally renounced the usually specious distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, there remain those at Oberlin who insist on keeping what they would call an open mind on this topic. In this they would appear as inflexible and unbending as those Jewish settlers who insist that all, not just part, of Palestine belongs to them. For Ture - and no one else, it should be emphasized, certainly not Oberlin's tiny Jewish community - to link the issues on which he can speak with authority with the most inflammatory, rabid, anti-Semitic rhetoric imaginable does a grave disservice to the very causes for which he would ostensibly stand. To confuse these issues for students at Oberlin does them a grave disservice as well.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 24; May 10, 1996
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