Students could be expelled for UCI protest

Student protesters who were arrested by campus police for disrupting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine could face a host of academic repercussions — from simple warnings to suspensions to all-out expulsions, a university spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The university, which released the names of the 11 protesters, said that Monday night’s incident, in which the protesters repeatedly interrupted Oren at the UCI Student Center, will now be forwarded to the Orange County district attorney’s office for possible prosecution.

The protesters were cited for “disturbing a public meeting,” said Cathy Lawhon, UCI’s director of media relations.

Campus police ended up detaining them for about an hour before releasing them. No bond had to be posted, Lawhon added.

“I think everybody is entitled to free speech, but this was not that,” Lawhon said. “In the end, they were preventing him [Oren] from exercising his right to free speech.”

Three of the students were from UC Riverside, and the remainder were from UCI, according to the list provided by the university.

As soon as Oren was scheduled to speak about relations between Israel and the U.S., there was no doubt that a protest was going to ensue.

The university’s Muslim Student Union even sent out a statement by e-mail, saying that it condemned and opposed Oren’s presence, who was brought to the university by the Law School and political science department.

“We resent that the Law School and the political science department on our campus have agreed to co-sponsor a public figure who represents a state that continues to break international and humanitarian law and is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world combined,” the statement said.

Condemnation and opposition is one thing; not letting Oren speak was another.

“Free speech is about allowing people to say what’s on their minds,” said Rabbi Richard Steinberg of Shir Ha-ma’alot in Irvine. “It’s not about screaming and yelling. I’d like there to be peace over there. I’d like Palestine to be a state and Israel to be free and safe. I’d like for the Palestinians to be safe. But this sort of lack of discourse isn’t going to help. If you’re going to protest, protest in a respectful way.”

At the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, Munira Syeda, a spokeswoman for the organization, cautioned that violence in the Middle East shouldn’t “spill over” into the United States.

“We encourage both sides to have a discourse about the conflict,” she said. “Each side has a right to share their concerns with the rest of the public.”

“These students used their 1st Amendment right and engaged in protesting a foreign government’s human rights violations — violations that Israel is well-known for around the globe,” Syeda said later in an e-mail. “We should remember our own nation’s rich history of supporting protests against the unequal treatment of minorities — that’s what the civil rights movement was and is all about.”