Israel Matzav: PLO representative complains about anti-Semitism conference at Yale

The PLO representative in Washington is demanding that Yale University dissociate itself from a conference on anti-Semitism that was held at Yale, in particular accusing three speakers ofspreading anti-Arab propaganda.

The head of the PLO mission in Washington, Maen Rashid Areikat¸ wrote a letter Tuesday (pdf) to Yale PresidentRichard C. Levin demanding that the university disassociate itself from the conference. Areikat accused three speakers in particular of spreading anti-Arab propaganda: Retired Israeli Col. Jonathan Fighel, a senior researcher at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Anne Herzberg, legal advisor to the group NGO Monitor, and Itamar Marcus, who heads the Palestinian Media Watch website and lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.

"It's shocking that a respected institution like Yale would give a platform to these right-wing extremists and their odious views, and it is deeply ironic that a conference on anti-Semitism that is ostensibly intended to combat hatred and discrimination against Semites would demonize Arabs - who are Semites themselves," wrote Areikat.
Charles Asher Small, the organizer of the conference and head of YIISA, told The Cable in an interview he was surprised and dismayed by Areikat's letter. He said that scholars and academics from across the political and ideological spectrum and hailing from 18 countries participated in the conference.

Small also said that one of the results of the conference was the formation of a professional association, called the International Association for the Study of Antisemitism (IASA), dedicated to fulfilling the program's stated mission of combating hatred and discrimination in all its forms. "The IASA is to function to represent scholars and intellectuals everywhere, regardless of their school of thought, scientific approaches, academic discipline, or ideological opinion," he said.

For those who have not figured it out yet, the point isn't this conference - that's already water under the bridge. The game here is that Yale and other universities will be deterred from holding similar conferences in the future if they know that this sort of harassment is likely to happen before or after the conference