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Sunday, April 28, 2024 — Houston, TX

Daniel Ledeen


NEWS 1/22/09 6:00pm

Forum fails to give balanced viewpoints

The "Crisis in Gaza" forum held last Thursday was far from the kind of balanced conversation that had been promised. Rather than presenting both the Palestinian and Israeli perspective on the most recent events in Gaza, three of the four professors were pro-Palestinian and the lone Israeli speaker was far from enthusiastic about having to represent the Israeli voice on the panel. As a result, students left the forum having heard a wildly one-sided point of view on the Arab-Israeli conflict.The audience flowed out of Herring Hall with a full dose of pro-Palestinian propaganda absent any defense for not only Israel's incursion into Gaza but, more fundamentally, Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. No speaker on the panel discussed Hamas' self-proclaimed mission to wipe Israel off the map as part of its larger dream to massacre the world's Jews. A brief glance at Hamas' charter reveals an anti-Semitic organization whose sole purpose is the destruction of Israel with zero possibility for any peace agreement.