The decision was made by the main SF organizers of the coalitions involved -- BAUAW, ANSWER, NION, and UfPJ. That means that none or few of the SF organizers wanted Rabbi Lerner as a speaker badly enough to work to create a critical mass to override the preference of the organizers who did not want him. So, the good Rabbi was not invited. Tough. It's not as though Lerner's prerogative to speak from the _podium_ at the SF rally were written into the US Constitution or natural law or the Old Testament or whatever (though it is clear that Lerner himself presumes that it was!). He has _no_ right to call the organizers _anti-Semites_ for lack of invitation, unless he has evidence that he is not invited because he is Jewish, which he doesn't.
Further, the initial protest letter and Marc Cooper's preface to it demagogically call the lack of invitation a "ban" and ask us -- busy activists -- to protest against it. The simple lack of invitation doesn't justify the use of such a loaded term, which amounts to the use of prejudicial language (a species of logical fallacies -- Cf. <http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/pl.htm>). -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>