Editor,
On Thursday, a student organization identified as the Salam Coalition prepared a very edifying and informative event at Smith Plaza in which it constructed a miniature replica of the wall being erected between the West Bank and Israel. The foremost purpose of this project was to increase awareness and to educate UNM by bringing the outcomes of global incidents closer to our community in a diplomatic way. The work was very successful in that many UNM students inquired about the wall itself, while others were astonished by the effort and took pictures with their camera phones.
However, the event was not all positive. In fact, another student organization, the UNM Israel Alliance, found it necessary to sabotage the Salam Coalition's endeavors. Members of the UNM Israel Alliance seized black spray paint that members of the Salam Coalition carelessly left out and spray painted "Israel Lives" in Hebrew on the wall. Nobody from the public was permitted to spray paint anything, good or bad, on the wall. In addition, when a Salam Coalition member asked what they were doing, the transgressors replied they were writing "peace," which is clearly a lie. There are pictures of the deed and of the product.
Furthermore, affiliates of the UNM Israel Alliance persisted in defacing the work by posting fliers on the wall, its foundations and around the premises. These fliers consisted of falsified and embellished information on Palestinian treatment in other Arab countries and diverted the attention from Israel onto other Arab countries. Other fliers compared the wall with apartheid in South Africa and concluded that declaring the wall an apartheid device is an insult to everything the South African activists stood for. The flier publicized all the disparities and concealed all the similarities. Nonetheless, for a student organization to act out against another student organization and interfere with its event is clearly more of an insult than declaring a wall an apartheid design.
The Salam Coalition is not endorsing conflict, but rather peaceful measures to a solution. The organization draped not only a Palestinian flag from the wall, but also an Israeli flag. Yet, it is extremely suggestive that the UNM Israel Alliance would attempt to disrupt an informative and peaceful proceeding. The fact is, the UNM Israel Alliance is making an effort to bring or incite a conflict that has more to do with the motives of its student organization than the conflict itself. As a UNM student not affiliated with the Salam Coalition, I am particularly affronted that a student organization would promote unruliness on this campus and would think that students, faculty and visitors are ignorant enough to not recognize the awkwardness of a flier posted on the wall that contradicted the wall's implications.
The UNM Israel Alliance could assume more mature and appropriate methods for promoting its message than the devious actions that were accomplished Thursday.
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Katryn E. Fraher
UNM student
