The UCLA Student Council was asked to approve a Jewish student for a seat on the Council’s Judicial Board. There were objections not about Israel, not about politics but about the student’s religion. From [this NYT article](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/us/debate-on-a-jewish-student-at-ucla.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news): “For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.” They then voted against her, meaning they literally discriminated against her because she is Jewish. As the NYT says: “The council, in a meeting that took place on Feb. 10, voted first to reject Ms. Beyda’s nomination, with four members against her. Then, at the prodding of a faculty adviser there who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students revisited the question and unanimously put her on the board.”
What further amazes me is that the 4 students who voted against are still on the Council. They should be removed. They should be suspended from school - not expelled but suspended - for such overt racism.
I have lately been reading about several incidences of anti semitism at UCLA. I am frankly stunned and deeply saddened.
Of course this is also happening now in France (something I would not have thought possible) to such a degree that manyJews no longer feel safe there and are leaving the country.
Based purely on your description, it sounds more like she was rejected because of her affiliation with other organizations, not because of her race or religion. And once it was clarified that her other affiliations weren’t a conflict of interest, she was accepted.
I find it hard to believe that every other member of the board is involved in zero organizations (so as to avoid conflict of interest, natch).
“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Fabienne Roth, a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, began, looking at Ms. Beyda at the other end of the room, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”
I don’t see how it’s possible to color this as anything but discrimination against a candidate based on her religion. The Daily Bruin article that first described the sequence of events stated that the young woman was finally accepted after a faculty adviser intervened.
In the interest of the UCLA student body to have transparency in student discourse, the UCLA Student Council should filter those students who have a faith/affiliation with Jewish organizations, including sororities/fraternities and Hillel, that make these students biased. The Student Council should clearly mark these biased students for ready identification by other ULCA students, by making them wear a yellow star.
The names of the four have been released to the press and that the first two are Muslim:
Negeen Sadeghi-Movahed
Sofia Moreno Haq
Minghot Singh
Fabienne Roth
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/02/23/ucla-students-jewish-background-questioned-during-vote-for-judicial-board/
Be careful what you ask for…
small nit: Jewish is not a race.
Anti-semitism, yes, but racism, no.
@ucbalumnus , no idea what ^ that means, but their simply apologizing seems far too dismissive. Would this have been handled differently if she were gay? or Black?
Be careful about asking for broad speech codes or censorship (which tend to have a hard time surviving court challenges anyway), since they can easily be turned against you.
Absolutely. I find it troubling how it’s acceptable to discriminate against Jews on UC campuses (and others). It’s disturbing that this (and many other acts of anti-Semitism) does not generate the same reaction as it would if the discrimination was about race or sexual orientation.
When I was in college, campus activists and politicians were frequently accusing each other and many others of being racist (some were, usually the ones who most loudly accused others*). Generalized student apathy toward student government elections tends to allow the most committed noisy activists (leftists, since there tend to be few rightists) to win elections and subsequently put their feet in their mouths over various matters. It does not look all that different now.
*Then, as now, Israeli - Palestinian politics tend to quickly devolve into racism and accusations of racism (all of anti-Jewish/Arab/Muslim), with the noisiest activists on all sides being the most racist. Unfortunately, this type of noise tends to incite and increase actual racism (all of anti-Jewish/Arab/Muslim). But politics devolving into racism was not limited to Israeli - Palestinian politics.
@MamaBear16, I agree. And, again, ^? It really is the equivalent of: “Do you think that you would be able to fairly judge a case against a Black student?” which of course would NEVER be asked if she had been Black.
Can we please be clear that the discussion here had nothing to do with Israel or Palestine? The question raised was whether a student, because of her membership in a * Jewish * organization was able to act without a conflict of interest. And then the Council voted to deny her membership based on her religious affiliation. I agree with both @MamaBear16 and @cttwinmom2015 that we’d all be horrified if this same skepticism had been extended to a member of a racial minority or to a woman and I fail to see why this is in any way different.
Last time I checked, the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination against a student in a public university based on an that individual’s religious beliefs. This is not a he said-she said exchange. This one was a plain and unvarnished expression of anti-Semitism. My bet is it’s even worse than what’s been reported because the transcript and video were hastily removed and have not been restored.
I have searched all over youtube and all I can find is “Youtube Video removed by UCLA.” The University really needs to do more than sweep this under the rug.
The UCLA Student Council does not represent the UCLA administration. It’s noteworthy that a faculty member with a clue did intervene.
^^^I’m not quite sure that’s true. True, it’s not as clear cut as if it had been a University employee acting this way but I believe that a board of student representatives, charged with representing the interests of all students at the school and acting as a liaision to the administration, is held to the same standard.
Why has the University removed all traces of video and transcription? Seems the UCLA Student Council does represent a face of UCLA that the administration is not prepared to address. And no action is…well some action.
One would hope that those representatives (or perhaps their parties, if they are not seeking re-election) get shown the door at the next election, though that may depend on less apathy and a higher turnout (low turnout means that the noisy far-left activists tend to win because they tend to vote anyway).
US senators have lost otherwise-winnable elections after similarly stupid remarks (“macaca”, “legitimate rape”, “even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen”), but even then, they still got 39+% of the vote.