Say, Who's Up for a College Field Trip to meet with Hamas?

UC-Irvine “Facilitates Secret Meeting with Hamas for their Students,” Roger L. Simon writes:

The original intent of the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) seemed innocent enough — sending Jewish, Christian and Muslim students to Israel/Palestine to meet and greet their contemporaries and to be educated by “neutral speakers.”

But was OTI really an “olive branch” or was it taken over by something else more devious? And just who are those neutral parties?

Perhaps in an effort to be thought of as “fair” or “good,” the organizers of this endeavor made alliances with groups that can only be described as totalitarian.

One of those is the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) — an organization whose name and behavior reeks of the communist fronts of the 1930s. This was the group that — in the name of peace and justice — encouraged Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall and Tristan Anderson to go to Gaza to be killed or injured in violent demonstrations. An Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs report implicates ISM in the Mike’s Place terror attack of 2003. More recently they were spokespeople in the “Free Gaza Flotilla” of May 2010. (Lee Kaplan explains their etiology here.)

Not surprisingly then, many of the supposedly neutral speakers brought to address the students on their overseas trips turned out to be not so neutral after all. One of them was Aziz Duwaik of Hamas, who met with the students in secret inside the West Bank, far from the supposedly-impartial forum of the college campus where such meetings might be deemed appropriate.

And here the story turns back to UCI and the education of our children at one of our country’s most esteemed public universities.

You know what to do next.