Overflow crowds attended both meetings. At Colorado College’s Armstrong Hall, 800 people repeatedly interrupted Ashrawi’s talk with applause while another 1,500 listened as her lecture was piped into Shove Hall and onto the campus commons. More than 2,000 students and community members heard her speak in Boulder. They filled Glenn Miller Auditorium and sat on the grass outside of the building while loudspeakers played her speech.

"Because of a concerted effort to distort my views," Ashrawi said at Colorado College, "I will begin with a personal statement. I have been repeatedly beaten up, shot at, interrogated, imprisoned. My daughter’s childhood has been destroyed. I have recently lived for weeks at a time as a prisoner in my own house. Yet despite having lived under the worst horrors of captivity, I have never accepted any kind of revenge."

"Without self-determination for the Palestinian people there will be no resolution to the fighting in Israel," Ashrawi emphasized.

Much of Ashrawi’s speech centered on her views that strengthening the World Court in the Hague and implementing international law are necessary to resolve the conflict in Palestine.

Calling Ashrawi an "apologist for terrorism," Rabbi Bruce Dollin, president of the Rocky Mountain Rabbinical Council, called on Colorado College president Richard Celeste--the former governor of Ohio--to resign for organizing the meeting.

Governor Owens criticized Colorado University, a state-funded university, for using student fees to pay Ashrawi’s $8,000 honorarium. "I regard [them] as state funds," he said.

Dollin predicted that hundreds or thousands would protest Ashrawi, who had been invited to Colorado College as the keynote speaker at a symposium on the worldwide effects of the September 11 attacks. The invitation, Dollin said, showed "gross insensitivity to our community, our nation, and to the victims of this unspeakable crime."

A coalition protesting Ashrawi’s visit provided a bus trip and meal for Denver residents to the Colorado Springs event; but, on the day of the meeting, only a few hundred protesters showed up. They were almost matched by demonstrators supporting Ashrawi’s right to speak. The latter were led by Palestinian students from local campuses, and included the Denver-based Coloradans for Mid East Peace and the Coalition for Justice in Palestine from Boulder, who organized a picket that drew 150 people.

Some 20 anti-Ashrawi protesters came to the Boulder meeting. More than 100 people defending Ashrawi attended, some carrying Palestinian flags and signs that said "Occupation is Terrorism," "Let Her Speak," and "Listen, You Might Learn Something." Among them were supporters of Jason Alessio, the Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Congress in Colorado’s Third District.  
 
 
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