Reply #4: Some more info on Mr. Wiesenfeld

[oberliner]

From 2007:

In his first con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing for CUNY Board, State Sen­a­tor Daniel Hevesi ques­tioned Wiesen­feld sharply about these reports, includ­ing alle­ga­tions from Com­mu­nity Advo­cate Isaac Abra­ham that he had called blacks “sav­ages.” As Hevesi remarked, “I don’t know what to believe, but if some­one calls blacks ‘sav­ages’ they have no busi­ness being on the CUNY Board of Trustees.”

Even though Hevesi went on to say, “I know this nom­i­nee does not have the char­ac­ter to sit on the CUNY Board,” Jef­frey Wiesen­feld was con­firmed by the full State Sen­ate in June, 1999, and then re-appointed by Pataki in a last minute “emer­gency” meet­ing of the state sen­ate, just before the end of Pataki’s term on Decem­ber 13th, 2006. For more on this see “Pataki Appoints Two Trustees in Last Minute Sen­ate Meet­ing” in the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 edi­tion of the GC Advocate.

Most recently, Wiesen­feld has been in the fore­front of the attack on aca­d­e­mic free­dom in 2007. As New York Board Chair of the Stop the Madrassa Coali­tion, he has joined a group that has repeated base­less charges that a new dual lan­guage Ara­bic Eng­lish pub­lic school, the Kahlil Gibran Inter­na­tional Acad­emy, would inevitably become a haven for ter­ror­ists and was already a rad­i­cal “Madrassa” reli­gious school. None of the coalition’s alle­ga­tions against the school or against the Prin­ci­pal were or are grounded in fact. Nor were the numer­ous arti­cles in the New York Post or the New York Sun, which linked them to its main web page.

After months of media harass­ment, the Prin­ci­pal of the Gibran school Deb­bie Almontaser was hounded out of her posi­tion when she was required to be inter­viewed by the New York Post, with min­i­mal to no pro­tec­tion from the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion. The New York Post demanded to know Ms Almontaser’s views about T-Shirts that a female youth group was sell­ing, which dis­played the slo­gan “Intifada NYC” to indi­cate Arab empow­er­ment. Despite no direct involve­ment with the girls group, and despite denounc­ing any vio­lence, Deb­bie Almontaser’s efforts to explain the sig­nif­i­cance of the slo­gan to the Arab com­mu­nity was dis­torted in the right wing media and she was forced out by risk averse city offi­cials. She was suc­cess­fully scape­goated– despite a long career of almost unmatched inter­faith dia­logue and community-based peace work.

http://www.gcadvocate.com/2007/11/spotlight-on-the-board-of-trustees-jeffery-wiesenfeld-islamophobia-and-the-madrassa/