EDITORIAL: SG impeachment fails student body

Monday’s Student Government impeachment trial of VP of Finance Kimberly Barzola and VP of Internal Affairs Marwa Sayed has become a flashpoint for Boston University students, both across social media and on campus.

It all started when Barzola published a seemingly pro-Palestine post on her personal Facebook page. After seeing the post, an anonymous student group called Terriers Against Discrimination started a petition to remove Barzola from office. Days later, a formal complaint in three parts was filed by South Campus Senator Daniel Schwartz.

The first complaint charged that Barzola had not been fulfilling her constitutional duties as the VP of finance by failing to submit financial reports. A similar claim was made about Sayed’s inability to maintain meeting records. The SG Judicial Commission found the first two claims valid and sent them to the Senate floor. However, the third complaint, which said Barzola had discriminated against a Jewish cabinet member and that the SG Executive Board held “an overt bias against Jewish Senators,” was deemed invalid. On Oct. 30, the Senate voted unanimously to begin a trial.

While Barzola and Sayed cited some reasons for their inabilities to fulfill their duties, more than two-thirds of the Senate voted Monday night to remove the two women from office. On Tuesday, protesters began charging that Barzola and Sayed were impeached based upon their political beliefs and have begun calling for the dismantling of SG as a whole.

To be blunt, anyone who believes that the impeachment and removal of Barzola and Sayed was based in an issue of clerical errors is deluded. While doing one’s job is obviously important, it’s unlikely that the whole of Student Government, save Barzola and Sayed, consistently fulfill their duties to the letter, not that they would be held to that level of scrutiny.

The Daily Free Press has been covering BU Student Government for years, and we have not seen impeachment on the table since 2003, when two Tribunal members of the E-board resigned before they could be formally tried and impeached. But “deceit, misappropriation of funds and failure to produce a set of bylaws” are a far cry from confusion over changed budget processes or absences due to migraines.

That said, it seems inherently clear to us that at least Barzola was impeached due to her personal beliefs, so we will treat the proceedings as such.

Being critical of Israel or Palestine doesn’t make you prejudiced against the group of people who support or live in either of those countries. Barzola did not post an outright violent or anti-Jewish statement about one of her classmates or colleagues. In fact, the SG Judicial Commission ruled that Barzola’s allegedly discriminatory post was completely legal, for lack of a better term. If keeping Facebook posts concurrent with the beliefs of SG as a whole is not a written rule in the SG Constitution or its bylaws, then these Facebook posts aren’t in any way problematic.

As members of SG, therefore, students still have a right to post their own views on their personal Facebook accounts. Realistically, as long as a student isn’t blatantly targeting another with hatred or threats, senators should be allowed to voice whatever opinions they’d like. Every day we see members of Congress making decisions on behalf of their constituents, yet expressing their own personal views in the media or in private forums. And that’s OK, because that is how free speech works. Just because a large group of us disagrees with a racist and bigoted congressman from Georgia, for example, doesn’t mean we have legal grounds to impeach him. That just isn’t how the world works.

It simply doesn’t make sense that this entire conflict seemingly stemmed out of one Facebook post from Barzola. Consider the alternative: Schwartz, the original complainant, has a Facebook page donned with pro-Israel photos and articles from online news publications. One article’s featured photo was even made one of Schwartz’s cover photos in 2014. The headline of the article reads, “Palestinian attacks Israeli family with acid.” Should we demand Schwartz’s removal, then, for discriminating against pro-Palestinian students? If personal Facebook posts do matter, we are seeing a double standard that we should not stand for.

But as we stated before, being pro-Israel is not the same as having outward hatred for an individual group of people. In the same vein, again, being pro-Palestine is not the same as being anti-Semitic. Therefore, if we are basing this argument off of Facebook posts, Barzola and Schwartz are arguably on the same playing field.

It is difficult to see SG senators suffering from this clearly unnecessary impeachment. Realistically, there isn’t a whole lot wrong with how the Senate voted in this case. The senators were presented with certain terms — the pair’s failure to do their jobs correctly and efficiently — and the Senate voted accordingly. If given the same responsibility, many of us would have voted the same way. Members of the Senate were trapped by miniscule claims against the two women in spite of the fact that their supposed political affiliations no longer mattered in the case. Barzola and Sayed lost on a technicality.

All of this is causing more disruption than it is worth. These conversations could have been teaching moments, and instead they have become conflagrations of hatred and fighting that have caused a complete unraveling of SG. Now, the organization has lost two members of its E-board — if the budget reports and weekly notes weren’t updated previously, they definitely won’t be now.

SG President Andrew Cho said it best after the removal of these two officers took place on Monday evening. “This has completely undone the legitimacy of Student Government,” Cho said. “I don’t really understand why the senators chose this. Regardless of Student Government we need to come together as a community and make amends about it, regardless if we disagree.”

While this hints at the notion that the two E-board members weren’t impeached on the fairest grounds, it also highlights the fact that this entire impeachment ordeal has hurt not only SG, but those who depend on it — every single one of us.