Appearing at Brown University last week to speak alongside the actor Michael Douglas, the former Soviet dissident faced a small but well-organized group of protestors. Distributing pamphlets calling him “an infamous anti-African racist,” they attempted to disrupt the event. Ira Stoll writes:
[It is] a sad moment for American higher education, for Israel, and for world Jewry when a campus conversation between an American actor with a Jewish identity and a human-rights hero known for surviving nine years in the Soviet gulag is greeted—before it even happens—by an op-ed in the student newspaper summoning a rally “to speak out against this justification of Israeli crimes.” It’s a measure of the movement’s virulence that it targeted not an appearance by an Israeli general or a foreign-policy talk but rather a discussion about Jewish identity.
Mr. Sharansky spoke about the anti-Israel protesters and the boycott, divestment, [and] sanction movement they represent. “The moment you move to a logical debate, they have nothing to say. . . . They are only shouting,” he said. “Behind it there is a desire to destroy Israel. It is not about human rights. . . . My fear is they are discouraging so many young Jews from being connected to their people and to the state of Israel.”
Read more on New York Sun: http://www.nysun.com/national/sharanksy-breasts-a-protest-against-his-talk/89435/