talkback...

Stagnant income

Tim Redmond wrote a well-researched article that surely will merit agreement among a majority of people ["The Brutal Budget," 7/3/02]. Tax the rich more. A progressive mantra for 30 years. The corporate tax dropped from 25 percent down to 15 percent in a Democrat-controlled Congress before Reagan, he should add, on top of his well-deserved abuse against the whore Democrat Willie Brown. Historical perspective helps us all deal with reality.

But there is one ridiculous stat that I can't believe he wrote. Is it a typo?

"The income of the most highly paid ... rose ... by 4,300 percent between 1981 and 2000, while the income of most other workers merely doubled."

Did he move to the Marina when we weren't looking? Where, yes, the "income merely doubled."

If he got that stat from the book Wealth and Democracy, I won't read it. It is wrong. Income for the bottom half of this country has been stagnant, or maybe increased by $2,000 a year, since the mid '70s. Add the regressive taxes, as much as $5,000 more per household, and you see how much more the "workers" are poor in the United States.

A reminder: the poverty tables of the U.S. Census Bureau do not take into account regional housing rents, rising cost of health insurance, if workers even have insurance, nor the increased state and local taxes.

Thomas Seiler

San Francisco

Tim Redmond responds: Thomas Seiler is correct: income for most working people was stagnant between 1981 and 2000. The figures I cited are not adjusted for inflation.

Racists at SFSU

While Camille T. Taiara's piece "State of Unrest" [7/10/02] raises important issues around freedom of speech on the campus of San Francisco State University, what is truly remarkable is how the author completely lets the racists off the hook.

Without a mention of some of the disgusting anti-Semitic propaganda (posters of "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license") that appeared along with the intimidation and verbal assaults ("Hitler didn't finish the job," etc.), Taiara manages to create the illusion that the affair is all about supporters of Israel trying to quell any opposition to the policies of the Israeli government.

Daniel Pevsner

San Francisco

Cops prevented violence

Regarding your article "State of Unrest" by Camille Taiara, I believe the Bay Guardian got its facts wrong. The SFSU pro-peace demonstration turned into a riot, with roughly 20 Jewish students trapped in a corner of a courtyard with hundreds of screaming Arabs attempting to break through the police lines while chanting "Kill the Jews, Kill the Jews." Violence was only prevented by the heroic efforts of the San Francisco Police Department, who brought in massive reinforcements. I know this for a fact; I was one of the pro-peace demonstrators trapped in that corner. I saw one Palestinian man try to calm the Arab crowd. "The rally is over, it's time to go home," he yelled, and then the megaphone was ripped from his hands by the mob. It required an escort of dozens and dozens of police in a ring around us to extricate us from our corner.

Josh Moss

San Francisco

Coping with 'unrest'

Congratulations and thanks for your fine article "State of Unrest." Entirely accurate, stated throughout in calm, reasonable language, and making several crucially important points.

I accepted an appointment from President Corrigan to serve on his "Presidential Task Force," which is supposed to come up with some recommendations for coping with this kind of student "unrest" problem. This has been an eye-opening experience.

I was especially glad to read the part of your article that mentioned the local American Civil Liberties Union. As usual, they spoke good common sense.

Dwight Simpson

professor of International Relations,

San Francisco State University

Evenhanded coverage

Thanks for your evenhanded coverage of the discrimination towards Arab American students and their allies at S.F. State. I'm sure you will take a lot of heat for this article, so I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate it.

Cori Parrish

San Francisco

Distorted report

The Bay Guardian's distorted report on the May 7 events at San Francisco State University will do nothing to advance the cause of free speech there or anywhere else.

What the Jewish students experienced was an attack on their rights, as the ACLU wrote in a letter to President Corrigan: "Some participants at the demonstration report that they were physically surrounded, threatened and detained by counter-demonstrators. If true, this indicates a failure on the university's part to ensure that both sides be able to express their views at a political demonstration. Faced with a demonstration and counter-demonstration, the university's obligation is to protect all participants by creating an adequate separation between the two sides and a fair opportunity to express their views on important political issues."

Rabbi Dan Zoloth Dorfman

Berkeley

It's about intimidation

As an SFSU student journalist who covered the May 7 protest, I'm really disappointed Taiara didn't look to the [X]press student newspaper to assist her.

I understand the points she's trying to make, and they're quite valid: Yes, it isn't right to obstruct any student's freedom of speech, period. Yes, President Corrigan is unabashedly pro-Israeli, and trying to get the District Attorney's Office to discipline the students is absurd and irresponsible.

But that's not the whole story.

The sad thing is, the big problem (that requires discussion more than discipline) isn't about Corrigan, racism, or free speech. It's about intimidation.

It's about when pro-Palestinian protestors feel oppressed by the metal barricades and police while being taunted by those on the other side. It's about when a trembling Jewish girl behind a barrier of police can't understand why people hate her. It's about a school president who clearly favors one group and seeks to eradicate the growing influence and power of another.

The problem is really about when a conflict is so deep-rooted that two student groups simply cannot live in peace together, not now, maybe not anytime soon, and instead of choosing dialogue, everyone is choosing sides.

Julie Acosta

Oakland

Protesters broke rules

I was the MC of the Pro-Peace/Pro-Israel rally. While no arrests were made, there were several points in your article that blew my mind.

First of all, it was a real Israeli flag that was torn down and ripped.

The anti-Israel protesters also broke numerous school rules. There are reasons these people are suspended:

• They had bullhorns, drums, and whistles (all of which are not allowed)

• They stormed into our rally 20 minutes early (not allowed to do)

• Torn down our flag and jumped on it (not only against school rules, but it's destruction of other people's property, which is against the law).

Jason Reinin

cochair, Israel Coalition, San Francisco State University

Camille T. Taiara responds: The events at San Francisco State May 7 were chaotic, to say the least, and reconstructing the situation afterward was, by definition, somewhat difficult. I reviewed statements issued by the university, letters to and responses from student groups, press releases, and articles, among other written and online materials. I also interviewed both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students, a university spokesperson, professor Laurie Zoloth (author of the infamous e-mail), staffers at the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, the attorneys for all three students facing charges and academic discipline, and a free-speech expert from the ACLU. I was not granted access to the videotape and the formal testimonies the SFSU administration and the District Attorney's Office relied on for their investigations.

As I stated in my article, versions of what happened on campus that day vary widely. So I repeated both accounts – that of the pro-Israelis who say a couple dozen of them were trapped by an angry mob of pro-Palestine activists, and that of pro-Palestine activists who say the pro-Israelis' take was both misleading and blown out of proportion. As I pointed out, the conduct of some protestors from each camp was ugly and unacceptable. But let us remember that no arrests were made that day and that no violence took place. The D.A.'s announcement July 16 stating that there wasn't enough evidence to press criminal charges would seem to support the conclusions reached in my article.

The "Canned Palestinian children meat" flyers Pevsner refers to that appeared on campus earlier during the term were obviously horrible. The Muslim Student Association, whose name appeared on the flyer, took them down and issued a formal apology.

As for the racist epithets, there is no doubt some of the comments voiced by some pro-Palestinian demonstrators that day were also horrible – hateful, racist, and unacceptable in any context. There were equally racist, unacceptable comments by some pro-Israeli protestors directed at Arab students. (Pevsner, it seems, would prefer to ignore those – some of which, unlike the Hitler comment he mentions, were caught on videotape.)

What's more, according to the letters issued by the school administration to General Union of Palestine Students and Hillel, placing the former on probation and issuing a warning to the latter, both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel activists used bullhorns. The pro-Palestine activists who entered the plaza did so once all but a couple dozen of the 400 pro-Israel ralliers had left and, according to pro-Palestine demonstrators present, the barricades were already being taken down. Although Hillel technically had the plaza until 2 p.m., the rally, it seems, was effectively over before then.

As for the flag, it was described to us as a photocopy, but even if it wasn't, flags are desecrated at political rallies all the time. That often offends people, and in this case, if the flag belonged to the pro-Israeli demonstrators and another demonstrator took it down and stomped on it, that certainly wasn't laudable behavior, but it doesn't seem to rise to the level of anything criminal.

Rabbi Dan Zoloth Dorffman makes an important point. If, in fact, the pro-Israelis were hindered from freely expressing their views, then that's a serious problem that must be addressed. In my article I clearly stated that everyone has a right to freedom of expression and that the administration has a responsibility to protect that right. Based on our interviews, many people on both sides think President Corrigan is doing a bad job of that.

On the larger level, Corrigan seems to have failed to deal with the real, alarming, and ongoing problem on campus. According to numerous accounts, Jewish students – many of whom have little or nothing to do with the May 7 rally – feel intimidated displaying their religious symbols or even, in some cases, just walking around campus. Equally numerous are the accounts of Arab and Muslim students (including many who aren't involved in any activist politics) who feel frightened and intimidated after the events of Sept. 11. And tension between activists on the two sides remains high.

Corrigan might have addressed that by, say, canceling classes for two days (or more) and inviting independent, trained mediators and conflict-resolution experts and some of the leading scholars from all sides to participate in a series of teach-ins and seminars on everything from anti-Semitism and anti-Arab hate crimes to the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. That might have played to the university's strength: teaching. Instead, he tried to push criminal charges against three demonstrators, which only further inflamed passions and mistrust on all sides.

Julie Acosta is correct in that my article did not represent the whole story. (How could it?) I would even argue that there are a few items missing from her list. But the story is also about free speech. When an administration pursues criminal hate-crime charges and unduly harsh discipline against a few students (through a bizarre inquisition in which the accused didn't even know the basis for the charges against them and had no right to counsel) for acts that are almost certainly constitutionally protected free expression (however unpleasant and ugly that speech may have been), it sets a precedent with dangerous implications that reach well beyond the Israel-Palestine issue and the SFSU campus. With the crackdown on civil liberties after Sept. 11, it is a precedent we cannot afford to gloss over.