Submission: Attacks on GSA president amount to persecution and are not based in fact

A witch hunt is underway at UCLA. Milan Chatterjee, president of the Graduate Students Association, is its victim.

Chatterjee asserted GSA neutrality on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement – a policy adopted by a unanimous vote of the GSA Cabinet – and would not endorse the BDS movement against Israel. Now Chatterjee stands accused of a host of charges. He faces impeachment Wednesday and one of his accusers, BDS activist Jonathan Koch, is running to replace him.

Chatterjee is exonerated by the facts. In October 2015 the GSA Cabinet made a grant of $2,000 to support a town hall meeting hosted by the Diversity Caucus. It was an extraordinary funding request and the money came from the GSA’s surplus funds. Chatterjee attached a rider to the grant: No BDS event would be funded by GSA Cabinet. Likewise, no counter-BDS event would be funded by GSA Cabinet. The GSA adviser assured Chatterjee that GSA Cabinet was within its right to apply the stipulation. The event was held and many student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine participated.

Then the legal threats began. Palestine Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union spuriously claimed that Chatterjee impeded the First Amendment rights of pro-BDS student groups. Outrageously, they argued that GSA’s failure to endorse their viewpoint was akin to stifling it. BDS advocates ran op-eds vilifying Chatterjee. More absurd legal complaints followed and months of media scrutiny ensued. GSA meetings were overtaken with this BDS-related business.

The First Amendment charge has been thoroughly refuted. The American Center for Law and Justice stated that the GSA Cabinet resolution “is clear in its purpose: preventing the GSA, as a government body, from becoming embroiled in a controversial political issue through a decision to abstain from engaging on either side of the debate.” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of University of California, Irvine School of Law and the nation’s leading expert on First Amendment law, wrote that GSA’s policy is “viewpoint neutral and is consistent with the First Amendment.”

The charge failed the legal test, but did serve another purpose. It cast aspersions against Chatterjee, intimidated others from standing in his defense, and might clear the deck for pro-BDS candidates to take over GSA.

Now there are new charges. Attorneys drafted a 30-page rap sheet against Milan. They throw a handful of accusations against the wall to see if they will stick. They have not. GSA Forum established a performance review subcommittee to draft a list of formal charges against Chatterjee. The subcommittee dissolved itself after failing to agree on a single charge. At the request of BDS activists and a few others, Chatterjee is being tried and impeached anyway.

The latest allegations are ridiculous. Effectively, they assert that Chatterjee has the right to be accused but not to defend himself. They claim that the GSA President acted inappropriately when he emailed evidence of his innocence to the GSA Forum and to an ASUCLA board member. They claim that the GSA President acted inappropriately by “shifting responsibility” to the administration when he pointed out that his actions were reviewed and approved by the GSA administration representative. This is Kafkaesque.

It makes no sense, except in the context of BDS. On our campus, BDS activists have used legal and political harassment to intimidate student representatives who oppose BDS.

This is not an attack only on Chatterjee as an individual. It is a strategy for clearing the political field of anybody the BDS movement disagrees with.

End the witch hunt. We have to stand against this as a community and as a student body.

Saidoff is a Ph.D. candidate in political science.