Reporter Warns Duke Univ. Against Hosting Pro-Terrorist Conference
by Jim Brown
September 23, 2004
(AgapePress) - Duke University is being criticized for allowing a Palestinian group dedicated to the destruction of Israel to hold a three-day conference on campus.In mid-October, Duke will host the fourth annual conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, or PSM. While members of the group behind the conference claim it is engaged only in peaceful activity and discourse, investigative journalist Lee Kaplan says the organization is a front for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and for Hamas, both of which are involved in the war against Israel.
Kaplan is a contributing editor for FrontPageMag.com and founder of the pro-Israel group "DAFKA." He says Duke officials are naïve to think the PSM is a nonviolent peace movement, especially when a primary activity of the group is "to hold fundraising events on the college campuses and raise money to be sent back to the Middle East, which may go for terrorism."
Also, Kaplan says, the PSM promotes propaganda and support for the terrorist movements overseas as well. He alleges that, through its extension in the United States, members of the group "are actually supporting what they call 'the resistance' in Iraq -- which are the insurgents who are killing our soldiers over there, by the way."
The investigative reporter says the PSM conference organizers deceitfully purport to promote peace in the Middle East, but in reality they advocate divestment from Israel and raise support for terrorist attacks against the Jewish State. He sees little evidence of truly peace-promoting activity by members of the pro-Palestinian movement.
"They never go in and help a child in a hospital who's been injured on a bus [in a terrorist attack] or do anything ... to help bring about a peace settlement," Kaplan points out. Instead, he says, "They have conferences where they discuss the right of return, which is another double-speak -- a euphemism for flooding Israel with Muslim Arabs so they can overwhelm the Jewish population. So basically, [a PSM conference] is a war conference. It's not a peace conference."
According to the journalist, Duke University has a history of inviting terrorists to proselytize its students and has hosted appearances by indicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader and former university of South Florida Professor Sami Al-Arian, as well as Laura Whitehorn, who was involved in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Capitol.
Kaplan is urging Duke's administration to rethink its decision permitting the PSM to hold its mid-October conference on the college's campus. Early next month, the group will be holding a smaller conference at Horace Mann Middle School in San Francisco, California.
