Graduation at the University of California, Irvine comes in many colors. One of them is green and on Saturday, June 19, at UCI's commencement ceremony, graduating members of the university's Muslim Student Union (MSU) and Society of Arab Students (SAS) will be wearing arm bands in that color to demonstrate their support for a terrorist organization.

Green, as most Muslim students at Irvine are aware, is the symbolic color of Islam but also used by the outlawed terrorist organization Hamas. It is the color of that organization's flag, appears prominently in all their literature and embroiders their website www.hamasonline.org.

If a green arm band was all that the students chose to wear on their arms as they accepted their diplomas, there would be few objections. Yet these two organizations, determined to leave no doubt of their sympathies, have taken their green symbolism one defiant step further. According to a letter sent by MSU board member Jazakhallah Kair to all graduating Muslims, the word shehada (martyrdom) will be printed on one side of the arm band and a verse in Arabic on the other. Shehada is the term regularly used by Hamas terrorists in Gaza to describe suicide bombings in Israel.

Hamas is listed by over 100 countries as a terrorist organization. Its assets in the United States have been frozen, its fund raising organizations outlawed and its leading operatives in the United States jailed or closely monitored by the FBI.

So what is the University of California at Irvine doing about this flagrant demonstration of support for an organization which promotes the indiscriminate murder of men, women and children?

Nothing.

In fact, Manuel Gomez, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs at UCI has defended the Muslim students' rights to express themselves in the way they wish. "When I receive pleas and letters to shut down student demonstrations on the campus, I continuously defend our community," Gomez has said. "It is during times like this that we all put aside our political differences to respect the liberties of free expression without intimidation."

Free expression? One can wonder how much free expression it takes to nudge UCI's administration into accepting that valued democratic rights, when unmonitored, can also be used against a democracy, making a mockery of the very freedoms they so strenuously endorse.

Consider some of the following MSU/SAS's "free expression" activities of the past few years:

Posters were distributed around campus equating the Star of David with the Nazi Swastika

On February 26, 2004 a MSU presenter spoke on the topic "America Under Seige: The Zionist Hidden Agenda," reintroducing the century old canard that Jews control the media and manufacture international conflict to serve their own ends.

On May 26, 2004 SAS brought to campus radical cleric Imam Mohammed al Asi who claimed that "the average person is falling victim to equating terror with divine revelation and scripture," implying that the terrorist tactics of organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad can be excused because they are divinely inspired.

On June 10, 2004 MSU brought to campus, as part of its Zionist Awareness Week, Amir Abdel Malik Ali who is an open and vocal supporter of Hamas. He called for an Islamic revolution in America led by the "white college students, who will bring their parents to Islam, also" His attack was not merely against America but western civilization as well.

In February 2002, UC Irvine's MSU newspaper, Alkalima, published a special report entitled "Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid." The authors explained the reasoning behind this report: "As the Zionists continue to colonize, torture and ethnically-cleanse in the name of the 'peace process' and the Americans continue to fund them, the respective staffs of Al-Talib and Alkalima feel it to be their basic duty to expose Zionism, its evils and its effects...Zionist-controlled world media has been purposefully distorting and misconstruing world events too long." The report has a section devoted to "the resistance movements against Zionist aggression," Hamas and Hizbulah, which are lauded as heroes fighting Israeli occupation.

Today over 150 MSU chapters exist on American college campuses, which makes it the most extensive Muslim student organization in the country. Clearly if students in such campuses across the United States are allowed to follow UCI's example, there is little to stop other causes - conservative, liberal or radical - from using their university's platform to announce racial or political views that are tantamount to incitement.

The ability to have open debates on any subject and to speak one's mind without fear of intimidation are essential rights in any free, democratic society. Yet when freedom of speech crosses the line into incitement, all institutions - whether they be corporations, non- profit organizations or academic institutions, have a duty to stand firm. Under no circumstances should First Amendment protections be used to shield hate speech. Under no conditions is it acceptable for those professing to uphold democratic concepts such as tolerance, pluralism and open debate be permitted to employ those same concepts to propagate the ideology of murderers or the politics of hatred.

Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.

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