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.
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