Alumni Support Indigenous People Event at Columbia University
Victor Muslin
Alums for Campus Fairness
Wed Dec 07 2016
On December 6, a pro-Israel student group Students Supporting Israel at Columbia University (SSI-CU) held an event on campus called “Indigenous People Unite.” The goal of the event featuring Yazidi, Assyrian, Israelite, Native Canadian and Tibetan speakers, was to educate students about the struggles and aspirations of different people with sacred and ancient connections to land, and to reclaim the narrative from Palestinians who, according to SSI-CU’s president Rudy Rochman, “frame Israel and Jews as a movement that came to take away someone else’s [land] and whose mere existence impedes Palestinian right of self-determination.”
Anti-Israel faculty and student groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), “target the average student on campus by playing up and riding on the shoulders of other minority struggles, while portraying Jewish struggle for their ancestral homeland as colonialism,” said Rochman.“ “It’s no coincidence they use phrases like ‘boycott’ and ‘apartheid’ when it comes to Israel.”...
