Friday, October 23, 2009

Free Speech - Part 2

My boss just sent me a link to a YouTube video that was made from footage shot on someone's iPhone last night. I'm in pretty much the entire thing, as most of the protesters were right around me. According to the video, 22 people were arrested, but it sure seemed like more than that. This video was uploaded by someone calling himself "ElectronicIntifada" and it is definitely not pro-Israel.





Free Speech

This is a contentious issue for many, but I've never been so overwhelmed by the implications of that two-word phrase as I was last night. As part of my internship, I attended a "conversation" between Ehud Olmert, the former Prime Minister of Israel, and our CEO Jane Wales. It was held in a fancy hotel ballroom in the middle of downtown San Francisco and general admission tickets were $35. Security was tight to get in, as one might imagine, and there were tons of police officers—both in uniform and plain-clothes—all around the hotel.

Just walking into the hotel was interesting, given the cops all over, the fact that both sides of the street had been barricaded, and the "Free Palestine" demonstrators across the street. When I got into the ballroom, however, everything seemed pretty calm. There were lots of people (about 400 tickets were sold) and they all seemed engaged and eager for the program to start.

However, as soon as Olmert was brought on stage (in the company of two bodyguards who remained on stage with him all evening), a dozen or so people started chanting things like "You're a murderer!" and "You should be in a jail not a ballroom!" and holding up Free Palestine banners and making speeches about how he's a war criminal. While it is true that he has been indicted by the Israeli government on three counts of corruption, they did not have anything to do with war crimes. The police acted swiftly, and removed the demonstrators, many of whom were literally sitting next to me.

Little naïve me thought that would be the end of it, but over the course of the next half hour, another 30 people (roughly) stood up and let their anti-Olmert feelings be known and were arrested, including one who had been sitting a few seats down from me who had to be dragged out of the row on his back and eventually carried out with one policeman holding his feet and the other his arms. Both Olmert and Jane Wales were very poised throughout the disruptions, often continuing to speak over the din. Occasionally Olmert would make comments about them, noting that eventually all of the protesters would be outside and then we could have a civil conversation. He also said that he thinks everyone has the right to free speech and finds it odd that the protesters seemed to think they should be able to talk and that he shouldn't.

The last 30 minutes of the program did go uninterrupted; however, I left feeling unsettled. I've never been somewhere where there was so much hate and vitriol in one room. I also left wondering if something else Olmert had said about the protesters was true: he'd said most of them were likely professional protesters who really didn't know what they were talking about. Certainly, most were non-Arab looking (most looked like your typically Bay Area extreme leftists), but maybe some of them were Palestinian, who knows?

If you're curious, you can read more about last night's events in an article from the San Jose Mercury News.