WORSE... THAN ANY ZIONIST: The planned "Solidarity With Palestine" conference scheduled for October at Rutgers University may now be off, because members of the national Palestinian Solidarity Movement have a beef with the conference's infamous organizer, law student Charlotte Kates. According to an e-mailed "public letter," which has not apparently drawn the attention of a media that has understandably been more focused on the bus that was blown up today in Jerusalem by the PSM's allies, the national leaders are proposing moving the conference from Rutgers to Ohio State. The reason? "violations of the democratic process and irresponsible behavior by New Jersey Solidarity that seriously threatens the future of the movement."
These "violations" seem to be that New Jersey Solidarity, Kates' group, no longer has any Arab members, has been disavowed by every other major pro-Pali group in the New York area, and members of the NJS "had confrontations with almost everyone at [a previous national meeting], were not respectful of democratically-made decisions, nor personally respectful to the individual delegates." Therefore, Not-So-Good Charlotte is taking their group on "a destructive course that could very well have a worse impact on the PSM than any zionist."
Since New Jersey Solidarity appears to be a Kremlin-style cult of personality consisting of Little Red Kaffiyah Hood and very few (if any) others, obviously the PSM folks' problem is with her, even though her name is not mentioned. I mean, these people may be terrorist sympathizers who don't recognize Israel or its right to exist, but to their credit they're consistently supportive of democracy- something Charlotte, a lifelong Communist, clearly isn't so into.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this- yes, it's great to see this loathsome individual put in her place; after all, blogger Mickey Kaus pointed out the other day that "as Howell Raines learned... it's harder to get away with being a bigshot prick than it used to be." But I was sort of looking forward to the conference actually taking place; just yesterday morning, it was announced that a pro-Israel conference would be happening at the same time as Kates' jubilee. I was sort of hoping the "Solidarity Conference" would end up being like one of those Klan rallies where 600 counter-protestors show up, opposite five or six Klansmen.
My other favorite thing about the letter? The signatories all have either distinctly Arabic names, or distinctly Jewish names.