Tony Blair and the business of covering up war crimes

[Jan Klimkowski]

I didn't hear the lecture, for I was outside in a free speech corral (the first one to have appeared on my campus) with a group protesting Blair's invitation and his enormous lecture fee of $150,000, as confirmed to me by his exclusive agent, the Washington Speakers Bureau.

We also protested the censorship of questions. For several years now, by requiring that all questions to them be pre-submitted and approved, the UB administration has protected from direct questioning those of our Distinguished Speakers whose resumes include war crimes in the Balkans and West Asia. This time, they packaged the censorship as "The Blair Student Question Contest": students pre-submitted questions for review, and the administration invited the lucky winners up on the podium to deliver their approved questions in person.

.....

Nicolas Kabat, a UB political science major, co-founder of UB Students for Justice in Palestine, and member of the Western New York Peace Center Palestine-Israel Committee, was one of the lucky contest winners because of the slow-pitch, painfully bland question he pre-submitted. But at the microphone, he asked a hard-edged question about Blair's response to the Goldstone report, why he thinks the basic principles of international law are irrelevant to the Middle East peace process, and why the continuing siege on Gaza isn't also harmful to that process.

A video of the five-minute Kabat-Blair exchange is available on YouTube. I'm told by the UB student who recorded it that UB Vice President for Students Dennis Black (visible at the end of the clip) heard Kabat's unapproved question with vein-popping disbelief. Later, Director of UB Special Events William Regan wrote Kabat to chastise him for departing from the approved question, saying that he had "violated a trust that needs to exist for a contest like this to function properly." In a delightful Freudian slip, he added that "We are very disappointed with your ethical conduct." There is something exquisite about the righteous indignation of a befuddled censor.

Excellent stuff.

:beer: To the resourcefulness of the students.