Party Crashers on Israel's Birthday

I went to the Diag in search for falafels that American Israel Movement student group was going to be handing out. All gone. After 2 hours since they opened. All gone. All I got was tabouleh and hummus. Eh, okay. I'll take those. The students also passed around small pieces of chocolate cake with white frosting with a small piece of paper with a fun Israel fact. Mine said, "Homosexuals serve openly in the military." Yay, go Israel!

As I turned around to walk away from the tent, a guy handed me a piece of paper, and I took it. I started reading it and it started with "Thank you for celebrating Israel's independence and..." it listed all the anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian facts such as 700,000 Palestinians being forced out of the territory in 1948 war. Oh B.S.! I tossed it away in disgust.

I couldn't believe it. Oh dare they. We do have the First Amendment going on here and they have the right to exercise their right to free of speech. Just as one side of my mind started protesting that they shouldn't have "crashed" the party like this, the other side considered another scenario. Now I forget what it was but whatever it was, I shut up.

It's really incredible to observe greater level of antisemitism on university campuses like Michigan and Berkeley. Yes, there is a good number of Michigan students who are anti-Israel and have proposed for the University to divest in companies who have ties with Israel and support its endeavors. Fortunately the administration flat out said no way. It's just so scary to see some Muslim students take advantage of their leadership positions in the student assembly to make proposals of that sort. I also have seen a number of anti-Israel comments (sometimes antisemitiism as well) on New York Times. You don't see Jewish students looking to do anything about American companies that have ties with Israel's enemies.

Sometimes whenever I see anti-Israel protests in Ann Arbor, I just want to take the posters and rip them apart and call the protesters idiots. Instead I just give them a glare, ignore them, and/or mutter what a bunch of idiots they are. Maybe next time, I should get my own posters and stand next to them or across the street and hold them up. You know, crash their party.