Your Voice | Promoting a pluralism of ideas

We read with some shock the opinion piece you published yesterday by Penn Professor Ruben Gur. With no evidence whatsoever, and in direct contradiction to everything we’ve ever said or written, Gur designates our student group “genocidal” and equates our upcoming conference with Nazi anti-Semitism. He labels our Jewish participants and organizers “Capos” and (in the same breath that he scolds us for describing Alan Dershowitz as an “Israel apologist”) compares Palestinian human-rights activist Omar Barghouti with Adolf Hitler.

This is the kind of rant one might expect to find in the nether regions of the blogosphere, not in the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper, and especially not under the byline of a tenured professor. That opponents of BDS are capable of responding to our language of human rights, international law and basic equality only with offensive slanders and name-calling speaks to the weakness of their position.

Professor Gur takes The Daily Pennsylvanian to task for printing our viewpoint “without any kind of balancing opinion.” But yesterday the DP published not one but three anti-BDS opinion pieces alongside a paid advertisement by the Islamophobic “David Horowitz Freedom Center.” We encourage the DP to raise its standards for what constitutes civil discourse and to actively promote a pluralism of ideas rather than allowing one voice to dominate the discussion.

PennBDS

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.