RUSS REPORT - District 30 Congressional Candidate, Mark Reed, is calling on incumbents, Congressmen Brad Sherman and Howard Berman to demand a Federal investigation into charges of anti-Semitism on University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) campuses.
Reed says, “Under 18 USC §1510, both Berman and Sherman have a sworn obligation to their constituents to refer any complaint of possible violations of federal laws to the Attorney General's office. Both of their offices have been notified over the last year and no action has been taken.”
Tammi Rossman Benjamin, co founder of the AMCHA Initiative and a Hebrew lecturer at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) lodged a, first of its kind, written complaint in June 2009 to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) U.S. Department of Education, alleging “a long-standing and pervasive pattern of discrimination against Jewish students” at UCSC that allegedly violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI). Benjamin said the discriminations emanate from faculty and administrators.
Benjamin complained, “The harassing and intimidating environment for Jewish students has been worsened by the fact that NO other racial or national origin group on campus has been subjected by faculty or administrators to such hostile and demonizing criticism.” After nearly two years, her complaint was opened by the OCR for investigation in March 2011 and there has been no resolution to date.
On April 13, the Department’s of Justice and Education reached a settlement with University of California- San Diego (UCSD) to resolve an investigation that began in February 2010, alleging complaints of racial harassment and discrimination directed towards African American students.
The agreement called for UCSD to “revise its campus policies and procedures related to racial harassment to ensure they are consistent with federal civil rights laws; maintain an Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination to receive, investigate, and resolve complaints of harassment and discrimination; and provide mandatory trainings for staff and students on the university’s anti-discrimination policies and procedures.”
But no such investigations have ever been launched into alleged Anti Semitic activities by tenured Professors who encourage this rhetoric and sponsor speakers who demonize and delegitimize Israel and promote efforts to harm the Jewish state.
Recent examples include Professor David Klein, a CSUN Mathematics Professor who continues to use CSUN’s publicly funded website to encourage a Boycott of Israel and offensively posts pictures of dead and bloodied children calling Israel “an apartheid state that systematically discriminates against the indigenous population” and touting Israeli state policies, which he says, “have been a 63 year program of ethnic cleansing, including expulsion of the Palestinian population, military occupation, and mass murder.”
University Spokesperson, Randy Reynaldo, wrote that CSU Legal Counsel found no violations on Klein’s website and emphasized, “We encourage our professors—as well as students and all members of the campus community—to express their points of view, even when many others may disagree with them or even find them offensive.”
In January 2009, Professor William Robinson at UC Santa Barbara sent an email to all his students that contained virulent anti Semitic messages. “I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing "with love" on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children,” wrote Robinson. “Gaza is Israel's Warsaw - a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnutrition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to the quick death of Israeli bombs.”
Two students filed grievances claiming that Professor Robinson had violated the Faculty Code of Conduct noting there should not be “significant intrusion of material unrelated to the course” (II A, 1, b); that faculty members should not use their “positions of power to coerce judgment or conscience of a student” ((II, A, 4); and that faculty should not use “University resources…for personal, commercial, political, or religious purposes” (II, C, 3).
Robinson was cleared from any “wrong-doing.”
As one observer noted, the issue is, even if the speech used by UC Professors is protected by the First Amendment that does not mean the First Amendment would protect their use of public resources. UC Professors are entitled to speak as private citizens but must use their own resources to do so. Using public resources for private and political purposes is a crime. (Link)
Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. § 501(c) Section 501(c)(3) provides that organizations are subject to limits or absolute prohibitions on engaging in political activities while 42 U.S.C §§ 2000d states that funding of any institution of public education that allows such “hate” must be halted and can be subject to federally sanctioned lawsuits and indictment as well.
A Report Prepared for the Regents of the University of California by the California Association of Scholars, dated April 2012 furthers the notion that violations are probable on several campuses.
The report pointed to the many campuses and in pertinent part says, “The Regents are responsible to the people, to the faculty, and to the students to see that the University is faithful to this contract. They have the responsibility to see that the value of the diploma is not diluted, that it maintains its meaning to graduates and to future employers. They are responsible to ensure that public confidence in the University is justified. And they are responsible to see that the University remain aloof from politics and never function as an instrument for the advance of partisan interest.”
The UC and CSU Presidents/ Regents have lost control of their campuses to renegade Professors whose agenda is to further their own- under the guise of “academic freedom.”
Reed maintains that an investigation of all campuses does NOT infringe on the academic freedoms of anyone. But none of these “freedoms” have a place on publicly funded websites.
“This is an unacceptable use of taxpayer’s money and jeopardizes the very essence of student safety and does not “provide and sustain an environment conducive to sharing, extending, and critically examining knowledge and values, and to furthering the search for wisdom,” noted Reed, who cited the UC Faculty Code of Conduct.
Reed is urging parents, students, alumni, faculty and stakeholders to contact Congressmen Berman and Sherman and demand that Attorney General Eric Holder investigate the inappropriate use of publicly funded UC campus websites that allow tenured Professors to espouse inflammatory rhetoric under the guise of “academic freedom.”
(Katharine Russ is an investigative reporter. She is a regular contributor to CityWatch and to the North Valley Reporter. Katharine Russ can be reached at: [email protected] ) –cw
Tags: Katharine Russ, Russ Report, California University System, California State Universities, anti semitic, Brad Sherman, Howard Berman, Mark Reed, David Klein, Israel, Palestine
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 37
Pub: May 8, 2012