I was interested to read David Mandel’s response, “These cases are just crying wolf,” to Tom Elias’ “Do campuses back anti-Semitism?”

Most of his article focuses on the checkpoints that Students For Justice in Palestine puts up on campuses all across the United States, checkpoints that are supposed to replicate security checkpoints that the Israeli army employs around Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria.

It is pointless to argue with Mandel about the unfortunate necessity of these checkpoints except to say that that knife-wielding, bomb-carrying Palestinians who have the expressed desire to kill “Jews” (not Israelis) are stopped at these checkpoints virtually every day — including yesterday.

Mandel would have us believe that the SJP checkpoints are nothing more than innocuous “street theater” events in which “actors” have “assigned parts.” His claim that “no other students were “significantly inconvenienced or let alone harassed” is disingenuous at best.

During the last week of May last year (which was designated as “Palestine Awareness Week”), Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis carried out a number of such activities. On Monday of that week, the SJP set up a mock Israeli checkpoint to subject all those crossing that part of the Quad to harassment by students supposedly dressed as Israeli soldiers. The next day, the SJP treated students to an “Israeli soldier” bloodily killing “Palestinians” who died on the Quad.

My point in describing this is not to suggest that these activities do not fall under “free speech”; my point is merely to say that if this is not a form of inconvenience and harassment, then I’m not sure what is.

I know that when my own daughter encountered such displays at UC San Diego several years ago she felt inconvenienced, harassed and intimidated. When she quietly told Mandel’s so-called “actors” that she was an Israeli-American and attempted to engage those “actors” in dialogue, she was surrounded and had verbal abuses heaped on her. After that encounter, Mandel remonstrations to the contrary, she felt unsafe walking around the UCSD campus alone.

George Rooks

Davis

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