Presented before the Portland City Council 2 May 2024 1:14:14 See also: Open Letter to U of Oregon: Endorsing faculty shared principles denouncing the bigoted ignorance of the Students Union and Graduate teaching fellows

The PSU learning community is invited to join us in a learn-in on the history of Palestine, to take place on an ad hoc basis in the plaza between the student union and the library, until the library re-opens. We propose a lecture series, an analysis of primary source texts, an overview of Semitic languages, literature, philosophy, and religion, and invite lightning-talks from diverse points of view, QA sessions, seeking dialectical resolution of disputed questions, and careful analysis of the accusations that have made against Israel. Using The Israel-Palestine reader as a starting point, for reading the primary sources from all sides, we will also admit texts proposed by our colleagues, and invite collaborators.

We are also creating a companion course to the text by Nirenberg, David (2014), Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-34791-5.

Although originally given that name by the Greek historian Herodotus, Palestine began as a Jewish vassal state under Julius Caesar and then a colony of Rome, after the conquest and occupation by Roman legions under Titus Vespasian in 70 CE and later Hadrian in 130 CE, who first declared the colony and Roman province of “Syria Palestina”, reducing its indigenous Jewish inhabitants to the status of sub-altern natives, or exiling them from their homeland. In addition to ad hoc lectures in the plaza, we may seek out the history, philosophy, and religion departmental libraries, where we hope to lecture from primary sources, and to consider opinions secondary and tertiary scholarship.

Regarding the popular movement to abolish Israel and the wave of Palestinian campus occupations recently undertaken in furtherance of that goal, we urge all members of the learning community to read this: In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University.

We commit to an open and non-dogmatic evaluation of the various contrary propositions we have been offered, in the spirit of skeptical inquiry. We invite all students, faculty, and teaching fellows to come and defend their theses in public disputation. Since no Zionists have appeared on campus to publicly advocate their cause, we will argue the government's propositions until better spokesmen can be found. Since the Palestinian advocates number in the hundreds and appear to have triumphed by default, and through sheer volume and duration, they do not need our help in on this camputs. However they have won the moral or historical argument, but have merely formed an echo chamber that has become somewhat repetitive and boring, having failed to even hear the argument for Israel, let alone respond to or refute it. Ignorance is not a counter-argument, nor an adequate solution to problems facing Palestinians, or the Arab or Islamic worlds as a whole.

Police action is not sufficient to defeat a terrorist ideology or an epistemic error - this can only be done through moral philosophy: through defending your theses and through sophistic refutations of your opponents. Please read the thesis and refutations which we've offered here, and provide a forum for public disputation. Any response to calls for divestment and boycott from alleged “terrorist” or “rogue states” should include at least the following: Lebanon/Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Algeria. Israel and the Palestinian Authority should both be investigated, as both are recipients of U.S. aid. But demands for divestment that single out Israel, hold it to a different standard than every other nation, that deny or endorse the Oct 7th “Al-Aqsa flood” massacres, are manifestations of ignorant and prejudiced anti-Jewish bias. They should not be entertained, and should be actively rebuked, because although Jews are often the first group to suffer, they're almost never the last. Now the entire learning community has lost use of PSU Millar Library for the next few months, as a result of entertaining this prejudiced violence against the world's one and only Jewish state. Also, Hamas is still in power and using civilians as its human shields, and Israel is still at war with Hamas, bringing death on thousands, and seeking redemption of hostages. If the administration takes a position on US foreign policy in this war, it should demand that the State department pressure Egypt to open its border to refugees seeking asylum, before exerting any pressure on Israel to abandon efforts at redeeming its hostages.

The faculty and administration should endorse the bipartisan congressional letter of July 2023 to State Department and Secretary Blinken, from over 50 prominent U.S. Congresspeople, requesting a financial investigation of the “PA martyr's fund” and enforcement of the 2018 “Taylor Force Act” 115th H.R. 1146, against its egregious “pay-to-slay” stipends given to prisoners and families of suicide bombers. (Presented before City Council 13 May 24:33) We should prohibit any US tax dollars from financing Palestinian terrorism, before considering divestments from companies that do business with Israel.

Regards,

Jared Essig ben Noah

Master's candidate, non-matriculated affiliate scholar at PSU, Lecturer in philosophy. Theses and Apology at the Condemnation of Athens

In support of the educational mission “Let Knowledge Serve the City”

Advocate, RoseCityIronFront.org

See also: Open letter to UO - Endorsing faculty shared principles denouncing the bigoted ignorance of the Students Union Three or more fallacies compounded on top of one another, do not make a sound argument. Mere volume and duration are not proof, but merely ad nauseum.

• Appeal to Ignorance is not a justification for indiscriminate murder and taking of civilian hostages. In their official propaganda and at rallies by campus affiliates, The AMP/SJP, JVP, DSA, and PSL, and PFLP/Samidoun have refused to even mention the 1,400 Israeli dead and 134 hostages still held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, let alone denounce the massacres or call for “release of the hostages”. This the same strategy used by holocaust deniers - it didn't really happen, but then again, 6MWE. The incoherence leads to circular moral reasoning and victim blaming, where a war of aggression launched by Hamas is held to be morally justifiable given Israel's lethal response.
• Appeal to Pity We can mourn the 34,000+ Palestinian dead, as a result of the Israeli counterattack. But pretending that Jews don't exist in Palestine doesn't honor the memory of those Palestinian dead, and neither does appropriating their memory into a death cult for military terrorism. Hamas was the efficient cause of their death, even if the IDF was the proximate cause.
• Fallacy of equivocation in use of the terms “apartheid” as applied to Israel. Apartheid may exist the territories of Judea and Samaria, the former west bank, is due to a de facto cold-war that Palestinian Legislative Council and the Arab world as a whole have never abandoned - as the PA still maintains a “pay to slay program” from its “martyr's fund”, and as most Arab countries refuse to admit Palestinian refugees as asylum seekers.
• Fallacy of equivocation in use of the term “settler colonialism”. Palestine was originally a colony of the Greek and Roman empire, with the indigenous Jewish population semi-autonomous and later subjected as sub-altern natives. Oregon was a “settler colony” of the American empire, and America itself of the British empire; much like Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia were settler colonies of various Arab empires with conquered, occupied, and colonized those regions and subjected them to an Islamic Arab monoculture. The crusaders also settled an colonized Palestine. Unlike these, and contrary to the anti-semitic conspiracy theories borrowed by the Hamas charter from Nazi ideology, there is no “international Jewish empire” that settled and colonized Palestine - merely Jews returning to their homeland from exile, mostly in Europe and in Arab countries, and joining the Jews who were already there or never left. Moreover, the Diaspora Jews were not the authors of the French revolution, WWI, the League of Nations, the United Nations, as the Hamas charter claims, and all Palestinian nationalists should renounce these ignorant and disproven conspiracy theories.
• Projection, scapegoating, false accusations of murder, war crimes, attempted genocide. Of these, Hamas is demonstrably guilty, and the projection of its own guilt onto Israel appears to be a process of scapegoating the victim in order to justify the perpetrator. Moreover, Hamas's campus propagandists teach that “resistance is justified, by any means necessary”. But if we admit that immoral premise of the Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon, then Israel would also be justified in anything to achieve Jewish national liberation from the Arab empire, and the case against Israel self-defeats because all of these are permissible. But they are not permissible, therefore our adversaries should renounce that premise, and impartial judges should bring accusations against Hamas before we entertain further analysis of the facts that are issue in the case against Israel's counter-attack.
• Appeal to Brute Force fallacy ad baculum - occupying shared space, denying access, and threatening the use of force, might enable you to subdue an opponent from making his argument, but it won't enable you to actually prove your counter, or make 2+2=5. A confession or admission obtained under such duress, is not valid in court and does not constitute sincere agreement, any more than it changes the underlying reality. Also, coercing worshippers to bow before an idol, does not constitute actual worship. Nevertheless, Jews are forbidden to submit to such duress, and required instead to sacrifice their lives for “sanctification of the name”.
• Verbal abuse fallacy ad hominem. “punk”, “bitch”, “bastard”. A bitch is a not a bad thing to be, if you're dog. A female is not bad either. Your deliberate misgendering me, a man, is not only an act of verbal sexual violence against me, it is a misogynist insult to women everywhere, and to females of any species. Your dehumanization and sexist misogyny will not defeat my arguments, but they will corrupt your thought process. No, not all cops are bastards, but even if some are, Bastards Lives Matter.
• Prejudicially false accusations framed as a loaded question, assuming facts not in evidence: “why'd you touch those kids?”, “have you registered yet as a sex offender?”. (FYI - that is a heinous crime, and anyone who does it ought to be severely prosecuted, since a minor can't given informed consent. I've never even been tempted to do this; as I feel sexual attraction only toward adult women. Why are you asking me this loaded question? To start an unfounded rumor, in attempting to discredit my political argument? This is amounts to another ad hominem fallacy, and we should reject these deliberative deceptive tactics, which are intellectually dishonest.) We should honor and value children as little humans, teach them good boundaries so they can protect themselves, and help them to mature into healthy and successful adults. But child exploitation is like rape or enslavement, it is “stealing a human life”, and as such a capital crime, punishable by heaven if not by human court. But perjury is also a crime - “You shall not bear false witness against the life of your neighbor”. And a witness found to be false, should suffer the penalty he conspired to bring on his fellow - in this case, expulsion and mob violence. Spreading these rumors and insinuations merely in order to defame a political adversary, does not merely smear the adversary's reputation, it leaves the rumormonger prejudiced and ignorant, and worse - it appropriates and exploits the trauma of children who have actually been victimized, risks undermining the credibility of their testimonies, and turns them into pawns for disinformation campaigns of political agitators. Avoid the such liars; expel them from your activist group; do not share their company as they will discredit and destroy your movement.
• fallacy ad nauseum - repeating a falsehood dozens of times doesn't make it true, it just makes you ignorant, prejudiced, and incapable of critical thinking. Repeating a moral error dozens of times doesn't make it righteous, it only makes you a totalitarian who does evil by statute.
• Overgeneralization, false equivalence - “IDF, KKK, PPB, you're all the same”. Military and police are not the same in their purpose, discipline, or jurisdiction, although they fall in the general class of “organizations that bear arms”, as do the KKK. The KKK differs in that it was organization that whose purpose was to terrorize black people (and occasionally Jews and Catholics) by burning crosses and wearing white hoodies to hide beyond anonymous mobs and maintain plausible deniability, which neither the IDF or PPB do. Antifa and other PFLP/Samidoun affiliates, however, are similar to KKK in that they wear hoodies as part of their security culture, and they target institutions perceived as Jewish, as do also Hamas, PIJ, and pro-Palestinian militant protestors generally. Pro-Israeli counterprotestors in America generally do not cover their faces or seek anonymity. Also, the IDF now operates over a territory smaller than New Jersey, whereas the KKK operated over the most of the American south and much of the Western states. Within that area, it operates against Palestinian militants who, like many protestors here in America, support the total destruction and abolition of Israel, to establish an independent Palestine in its place. Southern blacks never sought the total destruction of the U.S., nor did they ever conduct a massacre of whites, even remotely close to the 1,200 Israelis massacred during the Oct 7th, “Al-aqsa flood”, nor did they take hostages.
• Genetic fallacy, overgeneralization, appeal to ridicule: - “All Cops Are Bastards” - Disproven by counterexample: Officer Jones has two parents and is not bastard, therefore NACAB. Whether or not he is a “bad” cop remains an open question, but even if he is bad, it isn't on account of his status at birth. But the latter genetic fallacy is the same dyslogic at the root of racist thinking, and is a manifestation of violence against the disabled. On the contrary, www.BastardsLivesMatter.org. The anarchist who say otherwise are worthy of the ridicule that they give out.

Composed 2 May 8am

From the river to the sea / Palestine is not for free

Free, free, free PSU / The library is not for you

From the river to sea / Holy God it belongs to thee

The land belongs to thee alone / Let the truth be heard and known

Who can sojourn on thy hill? / On thy mount of holiness? / Only the righteous can, and Israel will / and his prophets bear witness.

Composed 2 May 12-2pm and shouted aloud at PSU plaza

free, free, free Palestine Where do you draw the line?

Free, free, free, Italy / and liberate its colony

The people united, will never be divided/defeated

You will be divided, you will be defeated / The truth will be heard, and the words will be repeated.

Composed 3 May ~ 2pm and inscribed on gates of County courthouse

From the river to the sea / Palestine is not for free

The land belongs to the LORD / Of heaven and earth, of his word / The distant coastlands have heard / When his mighty zeal is stirred

He will surely draw the line / and possess the gates of Palestine

Open Letter to UO 2024_University_of_Oregon_pro-Palestinian_campus_occupation

• PSU Campus Protest Updates
• 2024 Portland State University pro-Palestinian campus occupation