The New York Times got wind of the controversy and covered it in a story headed “Shelving of Panel on Mideast Roils School.” The sense of the situation the article gave was one of bewilderment; somehow a mistake had occurred, but it was no one’s fault. It could happen anywhere. But Qumsiyeh’s dossier was a click away on Google, which furnished countless references to his malicious hostility to the Jewish state. Evidently no one at Fieldston could bother with doing a little checking in cyberspace.
One student, 16-year-old Evan Krasner, cannily asked, “How can this be a diverse debate? It’s two sides of one side.” But most at Fieldston stressed the First Amendment. Said Kenneth Roth, a Fieldston parent who is executive director of Human Rights Watch but insisted that he was speaking privately, “It suggests that some parents who supposedly believe in progressive education and trust their kids to hear all sides of disputes don’t extend that principle to disputes about Israel.”
It would be interesting to see if the parents who agreed with Roth would welcome an assembly in which two people spoke of Intelligent Design, one addressing the literal truth of the Old Testament, the other positing the theory of the Almighty as watchmaker and the world and its population as teeth in the gears. Or an assembly on the privileges of fetuses, with one speaker dilating on the horror of partial birth abortion, and the other stating the position of the Roman Catholic Church on an unborn’s Right to Life. Would they insist that the other sides had to be heard on these topics? Or don’t they extend that principle to disputes about evolution and humanity?