And yet, the Investigators wrote without further discussion that, “any conclusion about a discriminatory motive would be speculative.” (R. p. 33)
Instead, for factual and legal reasons they did not identify, the Investigators chose to “credit the sincerity, even if it was mistaken” of Guzman that a disturbance was about to happen, despite their own determination “nothing the four students had done gave rise to a reasonable fear that a disturbance was about to erupt.”
Having made the curious decision that Guzman’s claim of sincerity for his belief that the four expelled students constituted a threat of disruption for the meeting, the Investigators made the equally troubling decision to conclude that such sincerity is, as a legal matter, enough to immunize Brooklyn College from liability – and enough to strip the Four students of their constitutional rights.
There are three problems with those choices.
First, Carlo Guzman was neither objective nor motivated to ensure that the full panoply of viewpoints had equal access to the forum he was running. In fact, not a BC student at all, he was one of the central originators and organizers of the BC BDS event. He is also a leader of Hunter College’s Students for Justice in Palestine, despite no longer being enrolled there. And Guzman was the sole source for what turned out to be unquestionably false – not just mistaken but false – claims made to BC officials and administrators, including the Investigators themselves that the Four were disruptive and interfering with the BDS event. And the Investigators recognized this because they concluded that Guzman’s alleged concern about a disruption was “not reasonable.”
Second, Guzman’s accounts of events were fatally inconsistent with one another, and they were fatally inconsistent with every single other report of what happened at the event. These inconsistencies make it completely unreasonable for the Investigators to believe in Guzman’s sincerity. Put it this way: if Guzman were on a witness stand, the inconsistencies between his different accounts, and between his accounts and everyone else’s, would make cross-examining him a trial lawyer’s dream.
The lawyers who led this Investigation are undoubtedly experienced enough to know that. And that makes their decision to rely on Guzman’s credibility all the more strange.
And third, even if the Investigators naively chose to believe that Carlos Guzman was sincere in believing “a disturbance was about to erupt,” they are wrong, based upon the law governing political viewpoint discrimination, in concluding that such a belief justified the removal of the four pro-Israel students – especially when the Investigators themselves recognized that any such belief, sincere or otherwise, was not reasonable. And that makes their determination that there was no constitutional violation quite difficult to accept.
What follows describes the Feb. 7 BC BDS event, focusing specifically on the ejection of the four Jewish pro-Israel students.
INITIAL REPORTS
The Feb. 7 Brooklyn College BDS event was held in a relatively small lecture room. Alex Kane, a reporter for the anti-Zionist blog MondoWeiss, who attended the BDS event reported that night that the event “came and went without a hitch.” Kane was interviewed the next day by a reporter from the ardently anti-Israel Electronic Intifada. He told the interviewer that “the event really went off without any problems.”
Another anti-Zionist journalist who was present at the event, Lisa Goldman, ridiculed the “right wing” pre-event build-up.
“And after all that, the event turned out to be a non-event. An audience of about 300 people sat quietly and listened to Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti speak, which they did — without interruption” wrote Goldman in +972.
The same descriptions of an event free from disturbance also came from the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Oops.
So why were four Jewish pro-Israel Brooklyn College students ejected from the event?
REPORTS OF THE FOUR’S OUSTER, BASED UPON SJP MEMBER CLAIMS
The initial reports blamed the expulsion of The Four on the behavior of the students themselves. Interviews with Brooklyn College officials immediately after the event stated that those students were tossed out because they were vocal, disruptive and belligerant. This was from a report of an interview of a Brooklyn College spokesperson the day after the event:
My understanding is that these students were in the room along with the rest of the audience. From the first speaker they began to speak out, they were becoming vocal and disruptive to the members around them and one of the student organizers of the event went to them and said ‘you really need to be quiet you’re disrupting other people around you.’ They then did not comply and a couple of police officers asked them to come out into the lobby.’ Thompson also claimed that school officials in attendance, including Morales, confirmed this account.
Once word got out that the Four were ejected from the event for creating a “disturbance,” the revisionism began.