Trustees reject permanent ban on speaker, focus on group
DELMAR – At its Dec. 11 meeting, Bethlehem Public Library’s Board of Trustees voted down a motion to bar anti-Israel activist Miko Peled from ever speaking at the library again. At the same meeting, the board voted in favor of taking disciplinary action including, but not limited to, suspension against Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, the group that hosted Peled’s talk, for violating the library’s patron conduct policy’s anti-harassment provision.
Prior to the meeting, Library Director Geoffrey Kirkpatrick had banned BNP from using the library’s meeting space for a year for selling Peled’s books at the event, which is a violation of the meeting room use policy.
The board’s twin votes came after hearing from 15 speakers during a 40-minute public comment period at the three-hour meeting. About 20 members of the community attended, along with six board members. Member Laura DiBetta was absent.
Board President Mark Kissinger said the decision to take disciplinary action rested not just on his or any other board or staff member’s account of the meeting’s events. He said the board had also received numerous emails from the public about the event. For Kissinger, Peled’s most egregious behavior was “calling out” an individual person.
“That did not need to be done,” he said, referring to a moment where Peled pointed to a woman in the audience wearing an Israeli Defense Forces sweatshirt and told the audience that she was wearing the symbol of one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the world.
“I don’t think the BNP did a very good job of running the meeting,” Kissinger said. “They didn’t have very good control over the crowd, and the meeting was immediately very contentious.”
The board has agreed to review its meeting room policy to try to come up with ways to prevent such incidents in the future. The current policy states that facilities should be made available “on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.” The patron conduct policy requires individuals to refrain from language or behavior that threatens, harasses, abuses, or intimidates other patrons, library staff or interferes with the conduct of library business and services.
The public use and patron conduct policies became a hot-button issue when BNP invited Peled to speak using a community room at the library on Dec. 5. Peled is a critic of Israeli and U.S. policy regarding the treatment of the Palestinian people. He spoke amidst tensions in the Middle East and also two days before Hanukkah and the two-month anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks against Israel.
After a heated emergency board meeting on Dec. 4, the board voted to require Kirkpatrick to be present at the event to ensure that the patron conduct policy was not violated.
Before hearing public comments at the Dec. 11 meeting, Kissinger warned speakers, “If anyone is aggressive or inciteful, the board takes a recess.”
While the speakers said they supported the First Amendment generally, they cautioned against allowing a forum for the “dog whistle” of anti-Semitism.
“We are very much attuned to dog whistles, said Lianne Pinchuk Wladis, who attended with her daughter, a BCHS student. “Perhaps people who have not heard them repeatedly are not attuned to them. … Saying I didn’t hear hate doesn’t mean it wasn’t intentionally there.”
Amy Bloom served for 10 years as the preschool director at Temple Israel, the Albany synagogue where a man was arrested for allegedly firing two shotgun rounds on the front steps of the building and shouting “free Palestine” on Dec. 10 with 60 children inside.
“Those were my babies inside,” she told the board. “I will not say that what happened Tuesday night caused it, but it created a space for someone who is mentally unstable to act the way he did.”
Another speaker, Susannah Levin said, “anti-Zionism is today’s anti-Semitism. Even though we all stand for free speech, there are limits. You definitely would not have somebody who hates blacks or somebody who hates gays standing up and speaking, bringing in a speaker that supports those kinds of positions.”
Greg Burke, another Bethlehem resident, also raised concerns that a double standard is being applied to statements of Jewish hate.
“A fundamental question is if a racist came here and said, ‘I think segregation is good for society and that we should have black and white people separated,’ would the board allow that?” Burke asked.
Harold Iselin, a Bethlehem resident, said he was sorry the board had been put in a difficult position, but it still needed to do more.
“You stood up for free speech,” he said. “We understand you have a policy. … You can express your view as a board about what Peled said, and these were things that crossed the line. You can speak out and condemn it.”
Some put the blame for the controversy on BNP.
“I believe it’s on the organization,” said David DeCancio, who added that he would like to know whether BNP condones Peled’s statements that the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 was justified. “I feel this could have been handled much better.”
He said speakers from both sides could have been brought in to have a discussion rather than just a one man who uses the contentious phrase “from the river to the sea.”
BNP member Leslie Hudson defended the organization.
“We live in a democracy, and in a democracy people are supposed to engage in a civil discourse,” she said. “Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace operates on the premise that we want peace for everyone. … I am very sorry that people were feeling as offended as they were, but I think it was determined that Miko was not using hate speech from a legal standpoint and the meeting was able to continue to its conclusion.”
Trudy Quaif, another BNP member, thanked the board for “standing for freedom of speech.”
“It was a really tough call that night. … People really wanted to hear what the speaker had to say,” she said.
She then lectured those who challenged Peled’s talk — almost all of whom are Jewish – of “diminishing” what “anti-Semitic” means.
“So when you use those words, you better know what you mean because you diminish the word,” Quaif said. “It’s dangerous when you call us out for something we’re not.”
During the second comment period held at the end of the meeting, Quaif said she had “no apologies for having him [Peled] come to this library” because “the community has a right to have a discussion of public events.”
Regarding the moments of unruly behavior at the meeting, Quaif asked, “How are we responsible for what people said in the hall? We did have peacekeepers out there and nobody went to the hospital.”
When asked, after the meeting, at what point, would she have found it acceptable for the library to have ended the meeting, she said it would be if she thought someone was in danger but, in her opinion, “it didn’t reach that point.”
After the first public comment period concluded, board co-vice president Michelle Walsh made a motion, which was met with loud clapping, to bar Peled from ever speaking at the library again.
“The First Amendment is a serious liberty in this country,” she said, adding that Peled was “deliberately inciteful” and his behavior of singling out an audience member and his lack of respect for library staff after being warned that he was “out of bounds” violated the library’s patron conduct policy.
Responding to that motion, board member Caroline Brancatella asked to draw a distinction between freedom of speech and behavior, noting that the library’s policies regulate behavior, not speech. She believed the problem in this case was that “our policy was not taken seriously by those who organized the event.”
Brancatella then asked the board to take action against BNP, again to loud clapping, for bringing in a speaker that violated the library’s patron conduct policy.
In respect to Walsh’s motion, board co-vice president Charmaine Wijeyesinghe said she would not vote to ban Peled because the library is “not in the business of banning speakers.” Instead, she said she saw “unprofessional conduct” and that Peled “allowed himself to be baited.”
Two other board members – Sarah Patterson and Lisa Scoons – believed Peled was unlikely to return.
“That [banning him] seems like not achieving anything because he’s unlikely to come back soon,” said Patterson, who added that the board should focus on “future situations to not have something like this happen again.”
Walsh’s motion to ban Peled was ultimately voted down by the board 4-to-2, with Walsh and Kissinger in favor.
Brancatella then made a formal motion that the library take disciplinary action against BNP, including, but not limited to, suspension, for bringing in a speaker that violated library’s patron conduct policy’s prohibition against harassment.
“With the First Amendment comes great responsibility,” said Brancatella. “If you bring in someone who violates, again, behavior in this case – not speech – I think that community group has to be responsible for that speaker.”
Walsh supported the motion, stating the library stopped the meeting twice, but is not trained in “policing” controversy.
Earlier, the library’s director had notified BNP it was suspended for one year from using the library for meetings for violating the policy against selling books on library grounds. Kissinger said a suspension had been necessary for that transgression because it was a second violation. In 2019, the library told BNP they were in violation of the policy when they put out a donation container.
“They know the policy. They are just not following it,” Kissinger said.
At the board meeting, BNP said it would be appealing, but according to Kissinger, no appeal has yet been received, although BNP may appeal at any point during the suspension.
All board members, except for Wijeyesinghe, voted in favor of Brancatella’s motion to take disciplinary action against BNP.
According to Kissinger, if BNP were to successfully appeal the decision to suspend it for selling books on library property, the board could then take further action to determine the length of a suspension for BNP’s violation of the policy’s anti-harassment provision.
BNP’s outstanding reservations for the meeting room have been canceled. At the board meeting, Quaif said a speaker had been scheduled for February.
The board also discussed the future of the meeting room policy. Wijeyesinghe, who is chair of the board’s policy committee, said that, up to this point, the library and board had “put a lot of trust in a lot of people that we have no control over,” including that and organization has a well thought out goal for the events it sponsors and that it has trained facilitators who know what to do if the unexpected happens.
“I just don’t think we can go by trust anymore,” she said.
Wijeyesinghe said that her understanding of the current policy is that there are “very few restrictions a governmental organization can place on the use of rooms and space.”
As there is only a little “wiggle room,” she asked whether the library should offer meeting rooms at all given the “somewhat lack of control we have about what happens in those meetings once those meetings are started.”
Brancatella acknowledged an all-or-nothing policy may be needed, but the board should try to come up with something better.
“In terms of implementation, our credibility is on the line,” she said. “I think the board has shown itself to be in support of the First Amendment. … As I said earlier, that means that if anyone wants to have that room and have speech that all of us would disagree with that we, for a matter of consistency, would have to support that.”
The board agreed that providing a public space is a “goal” of the library, particularly given the lack of other available public meeting space in the town.
“It is incumbent on us to try to figure out what we can do to make it better,” said Scoons.
Kissinger concurred that he strongly supports the library having a public meeting space. However, he suggested the library take a “pause” on taking new meeting space reservations until the board can review the policy.
“There are things we can do,” he said. “It will be rough, but we’re up to the challenge.”
Kissinger then made a motion, which was unanimously approved, to pause all new meeting room reservations effective Dec. 11 until the day after the board’s March 2024 meeting. Reservations existing before Dec. 11 will continue to be honored.
