The email copied below, forwarded by a professor at California State University at Fullerton, announces an event sponsored by the Middle Eastern Student Society. Note the use of the word “occupation” and the terms “apartheid wall, marshal law [sic] and hundreds of checkpoints.”
As if that isn’t sufficiently politicized, the sender adds that the administration has ordered professors to get their classes to this event: “We’ve been told that we WILL encourage our students to attend the following (but God forbid we would encourage them to join ROTC!).”
The announcement follows; emphasis added:
MESS Sponsors Right to Education Campaign Photo Exhibit
(Fullerton, CA, 10/10/06) From October 23rd to October 26th in Pavilion A of the TSU, the Middle Eastern Student Society at Cal State Fullerton (MESS) will be presenting “the right to education campaign” photo exhibit. The event will highlight the culture of learning that Palestinian children endure under the Israeli occupation. The exhibit is the result of 8 students who traveled through Palestine documenting the irony, pain, frustrations, beauty and reality of trying to pass the apartheid wall, marshal law [sic] and hundreds of checkpoints in their daily hope to go to school. For more info on the campaign visit the following website: http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/
A symposium of speakers will highlight the most important issues of education and occupation in Palestine through panels and individual speaking engagements.
“The Right to Education Photo Exhibit is a haunting and thought provoking look into how hard it is to be a student in Palestine " says Noor Higley the president of MESS at Cal State Fullerton. “The exhibit shows that one of the main obstacles to the peace we all want is the lack of protection of a Palestinians education and the oxymoronic idea that you can promote democracy in a region that you refuse to promote education within,” continues Higley.
The speakers are Riham Barghouti the founder of the “right to education campaign”, Wafa Shami the director of Middle East Peace Education, Saree Makdisi professor English at UCLA and author of Romanticism and Imperialism, Suheir Daoud a Palestinian Israeli with a PhD in Politics and Women Studies, Mahmoud Ibrahim a professor of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona who taught at Birzeit University and students who studied in Palestine including Lina Shalabi, Tareq Baker and others.