Nachman Shai says president deliberately excluding students at Ariel University in the West Bank from his main public event
Adiv Sterman and JTA
The Times of Israel
3/17/2013
Labor MK Nachman Shai called on students to skip US President Barack Obama’s planned speech to the Israeli public, scheduled for Thursday night, citing the White House’s exclusion of Ariel University from a program to allow students to attend the Jerusalem address.
Shai said the Student Union should protest the president’s decision to exclude the university by not attending the highly touted speech, to take place at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center.
“Following the decision not to invite students from Ariel to the US President’s speech in Israel, I demand that the Student Union inform President Obama that they will not attend his lecture on Thursday,” Shai wrote on his Facebook wall.
The US Embassy said it was not boycotting Ariel University, located in the eponymous settlement deep inside the West Bank, but rather was only offering tickets to the speech to schools with which it has a partnership.
Ariel became a university last year after a highly contested political fight.
But Shai said the US was boycotting Ariel students because of where they study.
“It is shocking to think that you can disqualify students just because they learn in the West Bank. I do not understand how President Obama wants to conduct a dialogue with the Israeli public when he is consciously excluding part of it,” he said…
The article continues at The Times of Israel.
H/T Weasel Zippers
Related: Israel’s new coalition government, under Benjamin Netanyahu, has been approved.
Update: WaPo Smooths the way for Obama’s Israel Trip
The Washington Post runs a lengthy front-page article in its March 18 edition about President Obama’s trip to lsrael, stressing his need to correct missteps in his first term when he applied one-sided pressure on Israel that spawned tense relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
In his article, Wilson, a former Post Jerusalem correspondent, also highlights Obama’s mistaken view in his 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world that the Jewish state is rooted in the Holocaust and European persecution — overlooking biblical ties to the land over a span of four millennia.
However, in expounding on this Obama miscue, Wilson commits a couple of missteps of his own…
Wishful thinking at the White House…
