If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then (trigger warning: microaggression) Students Allied for Freedom and Equality is officially insane.
The Michigan Daily reports that the University of Michigan Central Student Government voted down the student activist group’s boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) resolution against Israel last night, 34 to 13, with three abstentions.
Students Allied apparently narrowed the range of companies identified for divestment in a bid to win passage – “only Boeing, G4S, Hewlett-Packard and United 130 Technologies” were discussed – but it still wasn’t enough:
This is the 10th attempt since 2002 to pass a resolution to divest at the University, including in 2014 and 2015, following in the path of similar resolutions at many other schools around the country. The vote this year was less close than it has been in recent years.
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It wasn’t just that the sponsors limited the number of companies that would be targeted: The resolution only asked the university’s Board of Regents “to form an ad-hoc committee to investigate the University’s investments in the area.”
https://twitter.com/mnisakhan/status/798690949232820225
Even with this do-little resolution that simply called on the university to form a committee, the resolution got clobbered, the Daily said:
[College of Literature, Science, and the Arts] junior Joe Goldberg, a CSG representative, said he voted against the resolution because it challenges what he stands for as a member of the Jewish faith with a complicated relationship with Israel.
“This resolutions challenges the core of what I stand for…this resolution calls for the delegitimization of Israel and that is not what the majority of this campus stands for,” Goldberg said. “This resolution divides, and more importantly, pits students against each other.”
MORE: Berkeley restores alleged anti-Semitic class with ‘cosmetic’ changes
https://twitter.com/mnisakhan/status/798692558960553985
After the resolution failed, the body allowed an alumnus and self-described Palestinian citizen, Devin Jones, to accuse student leaders of showing “the epitome of privilege”:
[I am] paying tuition, in which a portion of my tuition goes to companies that go to the oppression of my people…You have to live with this. You have to stare me in the the face.
It’s not clear how, as an alum, Jones’s “tuition” is going to anything.
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Pro-Israel student group StandWithUs said in an email blast that more than 5,000 people – 2,000 of them students – signed a petition against the resolution in the days ahead of the vote.
BDS at Michagin FAILS! Congrats to the students who fought hard to beat BDS. https://t.co/jNSTQ5WHyO
— StandWithUs (@StandWithUs) November 16, 2016
MORE: Syracuse cancels Israel film screening: It will offend ‘BDS faction’
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