Inside Duke's Hate Fest

On October 15-17, in sunny North Carolina, a strategy session for radicals, anarchists, anti-Semites and communists took place in the halls of an elite institution of higher learning, while under the benevolent gaze of university administrators. Billed as an "open dialogue" on Middle East issues, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Conference proved to be an indoctrination and tactical training session for activists dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel and the support of Palestinian terrorists engaged in the effort to liberate the Holy Land “from the Jordan river to the sea.”

In previous solidarity gatherings at Berkeley and the University of Michigan, the organizers of these conferences have featured known (and now jailed) Islamic terrorists and led participants in chants of "Kill the Jews!" Duke's Conservative Union ran an ad detailing the organization's violent history and agendas in an effort to dissuade their university from disgracing itself by defending the charade that this event had anything to do with an academic curriculum. But despite the clear evidence as to who the solidarity movement represents and what its agendas of violence and hate may be, the Duke Administration represented by its Vice President for Governmental Affairs, John Burness, ran interference for the radicals and went out of their way to make sure the event would take place exactly as the organizers intended.

Several Jewish organizations mounted a campaign to alert the Duke administration to the conference's destructive agendas. But presented with a petition of 92,000 signatures, the Duke Administration not only refused to turn away the PSM activists, but grossly whitewashed what went on during their gathering on Duke's campus and facilitated their activist agendas. Thus Students for Academic Freedom, a 135 chapter campus organization, appealed to Duke President Richard Brodhead to insist that all sessions of the conference be open to the public and to the press to no avail.

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