by Mary Noble in The College Fix
Pro-Palestinian students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee want to see the school scrub the name of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir off the campus library.
The ongoing petition effort is organized by UW Students for a Democratic Society, Muslim Students Association, and the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine.
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Meir graduated from the university in 1917, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society. She led Israel between 1969 to 1974.
Students also want to see the university “Divest from weapon manufacturers that aid the Palestinian genocide in ‘Israel’” and “End all study abroad trips to ‘Israel.’”
But a rabbi who founded the Coalition for Jewish Values criticized the claims of the activists in an email to The Fix.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken told The Fix via email “the petition is racist and offensive and should be rejected out of hand.”
The managing director of the conservative Jewish group said “[the petition] certainly has nothing to do with Golda Meir, who famously said ‘We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.’ Hamas is now using children to protect their murderous terror operations from elimination, so nothing has changed.”
“What has changed is the growth in support for terrorism in America. That begins with the idea of a ‘Palestinian martyr,’ which neatly merges the barbarian notion that a neutralized terrorist is a ‘martyr’ with the antisemitic lie that an Arab, and not a Jew, is a ‘Palestinian,’ native to that land,” Menken said.
“For 2,000 years, the only people called Palestinians were Jews, from the time of the Palestinian Talmud to the 1940s when the Palestine Post was the English-language Jewish paper, still printed today as the Jerusalem Post,” Menken said.
“Palestine has never been more than a European colonialist name for the Holy Land of the Jews, a territory with at least six indigenous names identified in the Bible.”
Originally published in The College Fix
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