QAIA reportback from Brooklyn College

From Brad Taylor

Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti’s presentation at Brooklyn College on Thurs. night (Feb. 7) lived up to all the incredible hype that preceded it.  They were informative, engaging, appealing, constructive – as much as their full-capacity audience wanted and expected.  They were sometimes funny – Judith paused wryly in her remarks about hearing and listening, allowing the sound of the anti-BDS crowd chanting outside to punctuate her comments.

Both speakers mentioned the barrage of scurrilous charges of anti-Semitism, threats of funding attacks on Brooklyn College from public officials – the panoply of false accusations, character assassination and assaults on their intent and dignity - that they suffered in the lead-up to Thursday’s event.   And both were visibly tired and saddened by the pitch and timbre of the unfriendly and unsavory reception that some in New York had in store for them.   But, undaunted, they elucidated the objectives and strategies of the BDS movement, backgrounded the current moment in the campaign, and noted numerous very substantial recent successes of the boycott - among those, the recent endorsement of BDS from the African National Congress, a landmark development.

One thing about the evening’s discussion that I found particularly notable was the grace and generosity with which both Barghouti and Butler received questions from the audience members which were designed to challenge the strategic fairness or effectiveness of BDS.  These questions required tenacity of the questioners in the decidedly pro-BDS surround – and they were sometimes questions which were so blank, so generic that they were actually somewhat inappropriate in the setting.  Like one gentleman asked, essentially, what was the point of BDS? – when that had been the whole substance of the conversation which had been going on for two hours when he asked the question.  Omar and Judith fielded every question with respect, with generosity, and found a way to answer each one much more substantively than many would have felt that the questions merited. 

That’s, I think, the hallmark of a good spokesperson – the ability to cover a concept inclusively, in a way that belittles no-one and avoids the censorship and malice that, unfortunately, the speakers themselves encountered in Brooklyn.