Israeli counsel in Houston

A student sent me this (he/she does not want to be identified): "Hi. I have an anecdote which I would like to share with you. Yesterday my professor invited the Israeli counsel general in Houston to speak in class. She/he is [of Arab] origin, and apparently she/he felt that the "Arab kids" in her/his class need to be exposed to the Israeli point of view, because they ”grew up in households which have a very negative perception of Israel". I decided that I would personally not attend because I do not believe that the representatives of the "usurping entity" should be given a platform to disseminate their propaganda. Unfortunately, I received an email from the Professor in the morning stating that attendance to the speech is mandatory, but to be fair the email was sent to everyone in the class. I attended the speech without preparing any questions or doing any necessary research, because as I mentioned earlier I had planned not to go. The counsel general speech was nothing short of a pathetic attempt to garner sympathy for Israel, there was nothing of real substance in the whole speech, so much that I struggled to find a suitable question. In fact, I can sum up her speech: I am afraid of terrorists... we want to make peace with Palestinians... but Hamas will not allow us.... Israeli only engages in violence for security reasons... Hamas... terrorism... cycle of violence and I suppose you know the rest. During the Q and A session one student brought up the issue of the WALL and she insisted that while she does not like it because it is "ugly”, it is necessary to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks and has in fact been successful in curtailing terrorist attacks on Israeli territory. So I decided to challenge her and mentioned the advisory decision of International Court of Justice which stated that the wall is illegal because it does to not follow the green line and runs through illegally occupied Palestinian territories. She responded by saying...... I kid you not Dr. As’ad ..... "Well it is not a border"!!!! I then said”mam...the reality is that the wall was built deliberately to confiscate land illegally occupied in 1967".... and her response??? “Yes next question please"!!! I was really astonished by how incompetent and dumb she was, and I was reminded of the clown you debated (yet another Israeli consul general) in April and end how inarticulate he was. I have drawn two important conclusions after this experience: 1. Israeli's crimes and violations of international law have become so indefensible that even it’s most ardent proponents are unable to defend it 2. Israel seriously needs to hire a new set of consul generals because the current ones are idiots (come to think of it I hope they continue hiring idiots because it makes discrediting them easier). Frankly, I felt that inviting the counsel general to speak to a largely uniformed crowd has done great damage to the Palestinian cause because if anything the the counsel general perpetuated the preconceived notions which the audience held about the conflict, for example the silly idea that there is somehow a moral symmetry between both sides or that both sides are equally violent (the stupid cycle of violence argument)."