Dear Brian Eller,
In response to your criticism of our co-sponsorship of MSA’s speaker, Abdel Malik Ali, and your hope for our ignorance in co-sponsoring him, we’d just like to say, there are things we don’t know and things we do. For example, we don’t know you. But we know a lot of other things, like that MSA desires a peaceful solution to the conflict in Palestine and Israel, and that PSA and Poly Greens desire the same thing. We know we sponsored Palestine Awareness Week with the intent of giving the Palestinian side of the argument an opportunity to present itself.
We know PSA has occasionally disagreed with speakers it has sponsored in the past. PSA has a proud history of giving obscure or lesser-known topics and speakers a voice. We may agree with a few things they say, but we do not necessarily agree with everything, just like you may have voted for Bush without necessarily agreeing with everything he had to say … hang on, that may be a bad example.
We know PSA feels that the Palestinians have gotten the raw end of the deal in the Middle East. We also know that PSA is not anti-Semitic, and that we have had two Jewish co-directors in the past two years.
Finally, we know we don’t agree with the bombing of innocent civilians, of any race for any reason. The killing of innocent people, whether accidentally or intentionally, creates anger, but this anger cannot be used to justify killing more civilians. If anyone believes that you can’t bomb your way to peace, it’s us. That’s why we don’t support the war in Iraq. To assume we support bombings is incorrect and we’d like to take this opportunity to clarify that.
Matt Sutter
Abbie Livingston
Nelson Bonilla
PSA co-directors