Letter: Keohane should sign anti-intimidation petition

I'm shocked and dismayed that President Nan Keohane declined to sign the anti-intimidation petition. The petition's goal, according to the American Jewish Committee, was to affirm that campuses are places of debate, not of propagandizing one viewpoint at the silencing of another. This petition was necessitated by the rise in intellectual and physical intimidation on campuses in the past year with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unfortunately, debate over this conflict has too often spilled into expressions of outright hatred, often directed against Jews more than Arabs and Muslims.

Events at Berkeley, San Francisco State University and Concordia University in Montreal have reinforced the situation of intimidation by pro-Palestinian students on campuses in North America, seeking to silence their critics through violence. Thankfully, such events haven't occurred at Duke, though we have come close. In April 2002, a series of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic graffiti messages were painted on the East Campus bridge, including a swastika and glorifications of violence. Some students attempted to paint over the messages with others of peace and reconciliation. However, they were immediately covered with the same hate messages when we left, thus revealing the true intentions of silencing the debate and propagating the hatred by those painters.

I hope Keohane releases a statement regarding the issue of intimidation of debate at Duke, lest this become a paradigm for debates, or lack thereof, about future issues.