
The Top Ten Colleges that Promote Jew Hatred and Incite Terrorism
Five Campuses that Deserve Their Reputations and Five More That Should Make the List
Campuses Already Notorious for Jew Hatred
University of California-Los Angeles
San Francisco State University
University of California-Irvine
Campuses which SHOULD be Notorious for Jew Hatred
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Introduction:
A widespread and pervasive epidemic of Jew hatred has overtaken our nation’s colleges and universities. From small liberal arts campuses to preeminent state universities, Jewish students and advocates for the state of Israel on campus report experiencing threats, intimidation, and outright hostility from university departments, individual faculty members, and most especially Hamas-linked anti-Zionist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association. Where resolutions endorsing the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, a genocidal effort to isolate and weaken the world’s only Jewish state, were once rare, over a hundred campuses have now debated such resolutions and several dozen have passed them.
Jew hatred is no longer solely the purview of academic outliers, those institutions known for radical activism and absurdist teachings. The Jew hatred promoted by Hamas through its front group Students for Justice in Palestine has now trickled down to infect less typically activist campuses in the heartland—including the University of Minnesota which hosted this year’s National Students for Justice in Palestine conference.
Jew hatred has also taken center stage in Democratic Party of the United States Congress. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Students Association in her collegiate days at North Dakota State University, has frequently professed anti-Semitic views and voiced her support for BDS. Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is a graduate of Wayne State University, one of the schools profiled in this report. Tlaib has also promoted the BDS movement, co-sponsoring legislation with Omar and other democrats supporting BDS and comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.
To document the malignant spread of Jew hatred in our nation’s academic institutions, this report presents an image of the problem at five campuses which are already well known for their tendency to harbor Jew haters and five additional institutions, not yet recognized for their promotion of Jew hatred, but which should be.
The main source of the current epidemic of Jew hatred is not difficult to trace. It begins with the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, a terrorist originated and funded plot to isolate and weaken the world’s only Jewish state. Support for BDS is then fueled by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Hamas-linked student organization which is the leading promoter of BDS on American campuses.
The BDS movement is a true and deserving successor to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s rise to power was marked by efforts to marginalize Germany’s Jews, to isolate them financially and socially from mainstream German life, and to deny them citizenship and a place in their own nation. Similarly, the BDS movement aims to delegitimize Israel, weaken the country through depleting its financial resources and make it a pariah among nations. In Muslim nations around the world, Christians are persecuted, apostates and homosexuals are sentenced to death and women are beaten or slaughtered for resisting religious dictates or asserting their independence. Yet it is Israel, and Israel alone, which the BDS movement singles out as an allegedly “racist” and “apartheid” nation. The BDS movement seeks to purge Israel of its Jewishness, while ignoring the role the Islamic religion plays in dictating the brutal and horrific treatment of women and minorities in Islamic nations across the globe.
BDS proponents will try to deny that the movement is anti-Semitic and claim that they are targeting Israel’s alleged atrocities, not the Jewish religion. But this excuse does not pass muster. In 2016, the U.S. State Department, along with 30 other nations that comprise the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a “working definition” of anti-Semitism that illuminates multiple ways in which the BDS movement promotes anti-Semitism.
The member nations of the IHRA defined anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
Examples of anti-Semitism were presented “to guide IHRA in its work.” These examples include “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions,” “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” among others.
Israeli politician Natan Sharansky encompasses many of these points in his equally illuminating but more succinct definition of anti-Semitism which is known as the “Three D’s” which stand for Delegitimization, Demonization, and Double Standards. In Sharansky’s definition, criticism of Israel crosses the line into anti-Semitism when it delegitimizes Israel as a Jewish state by claiming that its founding is illegitimate or racist, when Jews or Israelis are demonized as evil or portrayed as bloodthirsty, and when double standards are applied to criticize Israel for its foreign policy and record on human rights while ignoring similar or worse situations in other nations.
Perusing the statements and rhetoric of BDS proponents, including a prominent founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, it is not difficult to find ample evidence that BDS is an anti-Semitic movement. Barghouti himself has often declared Israel to be “racist” and compared Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Nazi persecution of Jews, both clear indicators of anti-Semitism. He has accused Israel of “legalized and institutionalized racism”; “apartheid”; “violent repression”; “indiscriminate killings”; “genocide”; and “ongoing … campaigns of gradual ethnic cleansing” intended to “Judaize their space.” In a December 2004 op-ed he asserted that “many of the methods of collective and individual ‘punishment’ meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers … are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews” and in 2009 he said: “Must we see gas chambers in order for people to react?… Germany did not start with gas chambers, they started with racist laws … and we are seeing this process in Gaza and in the occupied territories and even inside Israel.” The anti-Semitic statements of the BDS movement’s recognized founder are echoed by his followers all across the globe, and by students on the campuses profiled in this report.
Hamas’s promotion and funding of the BDS movement on American campuses is also a matter of public record. Hamas’s goal, as stated in its charter, is the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state. This goal and the aims of the BDS movement are one and the same. Hamas employs a network of Islamic “charities” and front groups, most notably the organization American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), to funnel large sums of cash and provide external support to assist SJP chapters in promoting this genocidal and anti-Semitic BDS movement at American colleges.
In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, an expert who previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury, detailed the methods and means through which American Muslims for Palestine disburses Hamas funds to SJP chapters across the nation for the purposes of promoting its agenda on college campuses.
AMP is headed by the notorious anti-Semite and jihad supporter, UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, the co-founder of SJP. AMP’s board, as Jonathan Schanzer has shown, is dominated by former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation which was successfully prosecuted by the US government for funding Hamas. SJP is the chief campus sponsor of BDS—a Hamas orchestrated campaign to isolate and financially strangle the Jewish state.
Schanzer testified, “At its 2014 annual conference, AMP invited participants to ‘come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.’” He described AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States” and revealed that AMP “provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and grants to SJP activists” and “even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.” He added, “according to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”
Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy Gilad Erdan has backed up Schanzer’s findings, declaring recently that, “The relationship between terrorist organizations and the BDS movement has never been closer, ideologically or operationally.” And yet, Students for Justice in Palestine and proponents of the BDS movement continue to obscure the issue, claiming that their rhetoric and aims are not anti-Semitic. UCLA’s student council even passed a resolution last spring laughably asserting that SJP and the BDS movement were subject to “unjust intimidation tactics” by individuals and organizations, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which exposed their program of Jew hatred. The resolution was passed by 8 non-Jewish members of the student council; the lone Jewish member dissented.
The epidemic of Jew hatred on our nation’s campuses, fueled by the Hamas-funded BDS movement and the Hamas-front Students for Justice in Palestine, has reached a crisis point. In spite of its rampant Jew hatred, rule-breaking activities and hostility to free speech, SJP occupies a privileged niche on our nation’s most prestigious campuses, protected by campus administrators who coddle it as a cultural group, instead of taking a hard line against its rule-breaking and promotion of hatred and discrimination. It is time for our universities and for the public at large to recognize the source fueling campus Jew hatred and to take steps to eradicate it. The lives and safety of our students depend on it.
Campuses Already Notorious for Jew Hatred
University of California-Los Angeles
San Francisco State University
University of California-Irvine
Campuses which SHOULD be Notorious for Jew Hatred
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
The University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota is one of the nation’s most overlooked academic havens of Jew hatred. Much as Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has revealed her anti-Semitism gradually in tweets and comments, only recently coming under fire for her beliefs, the University has also thus far managed to avoid a high degree of scrutiny for its harboring of student organizations and academic departments which promote anti-Semitism. That will likely change this November when Minnesota will host the infamous National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference, an annual event which typically features blatant displays of anti-Semitism and support for anti-Israel terrorists. But signs of radicalization and increasing anti-Semitism at the university have been visible for some time.
Minnesota is home to a highly radicalized faculty and student activist community which promotes Jew hatred and the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. In March of 2018, the UMN Divest coalition succeeded in passing a full student body referendum urging the University to divest from companies that are involved with Israel, thus singling out and demonizing the Jewish state.
Minnesota’s chapter of the Hamas-supported organization Students for Justice in Palestine is highly active and holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” to promote Hamas propaganda and denounce Israel, and also brings in anti-Semitic speakers such as Russ Waletski who used his campus address to accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and compared the Jewish state to the Nazi regime. The Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University also openly promotes anti-Semitism. It has held events featuring anti-Semitic Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar and also promoting the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel. The department’s uncritical support for anti-Semitic speakers and the genocidal BDS movement is a flagrant violation of the proper role of an academic institution. The University of Minnesota should henceforth be recognized as a locus of organized anti-Semitism.
Instances of Jew Hatred:
The University of Minnesota was recently announced as the location for the infamous National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) conference which took place November 1-3, 2019 on campus. NSJP is a Hamas-funded organization. Speakers at SJP events are known for promoting Jew hatred, invoking anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and condoning terrorism against Israel. Guests attending last year’s conference at UCLA carried tote bags reading, “Make Israel Palestine Again,” a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, and were heard shouting slogans promoting the terrorist Intifada against Israel.
In May 2019, the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota responded to faux newspapers produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and distributed on campus which identified that Department as anti-Semitic for holding a forum delegitimizing Israel and supporting the BDS movement. In a false and defamatory statement that was co-signed by the campus chapters of SJP, MSA and also the Al-Madinah Cultural Center, the Department claimed that “”On May 7th, 2019, the second day of Ramadan, a group of Muslim students were breaking their fast when a white supremacist group, David Horowitz Freedom Center, strewed false and hate-filled flyers on campus… These flyers are meant to derail honest criticism of the Israeli occupation because of how they misrepresent the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and discredit Muslim and Palestinian voices by associating them with ‘Jew Hatred’ in a racist and Islamophobic way.” The idea that the David Horowitz Freedom Center is a “white supremacist group” is laughable; its founder and namesake is a Jew and a lifelong supporter of civil rights and racial equality. Equally absurd is the claim that the BDS movement—which singles out and demonizes the only liberal democracy in the Middle East as an alleged “apartheid state”—is not anti-Semitic.
In April 2019, SJP at the University of Minnesota held Israeli Apartheid Week on campus. The week is part of a national movement to denigrate Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, as an “apartheid” state similar to South Africa—a blatant lie. SJP hosted several events as part of the apartheid week including a discussion titled “BDS and U.S. Politics” which endorsed the anti-Semitic and Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. The Facebook event page exhorted students to “Join SJP and Students for Ilhan for a comprehensive presentation and discussion on BDS, the current climate in US politics surrounding the movement, and the recent backlash US Representative Ilhan Omar faced due to her support for it.”
Minnesota’s apartheid week also included a screening of the film Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back. “Pinkwashing” is a demonizing term used to accuse Israel of using its laudable record on homosexual rights to cover for other alleged abuses. It is ironic that anti-Israel activists choose to attack Israel’s record on gay rights while many of the nations bordering the Jewish state still endorse the death penalty for homosexuals.
In March 2019, UMN SJP posted an article from the anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada on its Facebook page which defended Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic comments about the Israel lobby and claimed “Ilhan Omar has come under renewed attack for speaking about the outsize influence of the Israel lobby, and simply for being a Black Muslim woman.”
On March 13, 2019, the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies hosted Rutgers professor Dr. Jasbir Puar for a talk on “Existence is Resistance.” The term “resistance” is a commonly-used euphemism for anti-Israel terrorism. Puar is infamous for her anti-Semitic scholarship, including her recent book “The Right to Maim” in which she claims that Israeli policies deliberately “enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies,” leading another academic to say of her work, “she updated age-old antisemitic libels for the 21st century.” The online event page for her talk stated that Dr. Puar would “examine the production of mobility obstacles and restrictions in Palestine through the linked frames of disaster and carceral capitalism, highlighting the logistics of border crossings and movement in the West Bank, in relation to disability rights frameworks.”
In November 2018, SJP at UMN spearheaded a statement and petition urging a boycott of a trip to Israel organized by Minnesota Hillel. The petition characterized the trip as a “bribe” and a manipulative attempt to promote pro-Israel sentiment: “This supposedly objective trip is, in reality, a thinly-veiled attempt to push a narrative about Israel/Palestine that erases Israel’s systematic violations of Palestinian human rights…To be clear, this is a bribe, and a manipulative one at that. Minnesota Hillel is investing at least $3,000 each into student leaders expecting them to come back to campus as ambassadors for their cause in opposing the Palestinian-led call for divestment from Israeli apartheid…In response to this and all future trips, we urge our fellow student leaders to not be active participants in the legitimization of the illegal occupation of Palestine.”
In October 2018, a student group at UMN which calls itself the Anti-War Committee held a defamatory and profane protest outside a Students Supporting Israel event which featured soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces discussing the ethical dilemmas of their role as soldiers. A video of the event reveals protestors holding signs stating “”End U.S. Support for Israeli Apartheid” and “Israel is terrorizing Palestine””—criticisms that defame Israel and do not acknowledge Palestine’s role as the aggressor in the conflict. Video of the event screened by the watchdog group the Amcha Initiative revealed protestors yelling “”F**cking Zionists”” and “”you’re a f**cking war criminal”” at the speakers as they entered the event, while one protestor also made an obscene gesture at the invited guests.
In June 2018, SJP at UMN released a statement attempting to shame student government members for attending a Hillel-sponsored trip to Israel. The statement characterized the blatantly anti-Semitic BDS movement as “a nonviolent political movement meant to put economic pressure on Israel to change its discriminatory treatment of Palestinians” while invoking age-old anti-Semitic tropes of divided loyalties by claiming that “To willingly participate in a trip [to Israel] funded by Maccabee Task Force… while claiming to represent University of Minnesota students is dishonest at best. These MSA representatives are paid for the time they spend at the university representing its diverse student body and we vehemently condemn their participation in such a blatantly one-sided and propaganda-filled program.””
In April 2018, SJP at UMN held an event titled “Palestine 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Palestine” featuring the anti-Semitic speaker Russ Waletski. During his address, Waletski made numerous demonizing and anti-Semitic comments including the claim that “Jews introduced terrorism into Palestine. Atheist Jews, religious Jews introduced terrorism. Not Christians and Muslims.” He also justified terrorist actions against Israel, stating “When you rise up against it as a Christian or a Muslim in this land you’re called a terrorist. This is not terrorism. This is a war of liberation against an occupying, dispossessing, European force.” Waletski accused Israel of attempting “complete ethnic cleansing that is continuing to this day in Palestine,” and made several references to the Jewish people acting like the Nazis. Waletski also invoked anti-Semitic tropes of alleged Jewish greed, claiming that during the “Nakba,” a term anti-Israel activists use to describe the founding of Israel as a “catastrophe,” the Jews “used survivors from the concentration camps to [rob] Christian and Muslim women, [to] steal the gold.”
A letter to the editor of the Minnesota Daily from two students present at the event noted that “The speaker, Russ Waletski, spent the first half of his lecture misrepresenting and attempting to debunk the Torah, the holiest book to the Jewish people, by cherry-picking quotes to disparage the values of Judaism. It was clear that his aim was to convince the audience that Jews have no connection to the land of Israel and that Zionism is antithetical to Judaism. Not only is this proclamation blatantly offensive and deeply hurtful to me and other Jewish students, but it is simply incorrect and ignores over 3,000 years of Jewish history.”
In March 2018, a resolution urging the University to divest from companies that are involved with Israel was passed by a full study body referendum by a margin of 217 votes which is 3.4%. The initiative asked, “”Should the students of the University of Minnesota demand the Board of Regents divest from companies that are 1) complicit in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, 2) maintaining and establishing private prisons and immigrant detention centers, or 3) violating Indigenous sovereignty?”” Jewish students and others on campus objected that the resolution was proposed only a very short time before the vote occurred, not allowing sufficient time for discussion, and that it unfairly singled out Israel. “”The process of introducing this referendum has bred discrimination and silencing of the Jewish community, and we sincerely hope the greater campus community will support us in our efforts to create a more inclusive dialogue around this issue,”” commented Leeore Levinstein, president of Minnesota Hillel, on the resolution.
On March 2, 2018, the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota held an event dedicated to Hamas propaganda titled “BDS, Racial Justice, & Pinkwashing in the Trump Era.” The forum capped off “Divest Week” at the University, a week organized by Students for Justice in Palestine and supported by other campus organizations to promote the anti-Semitic, Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and to garner votes in a campus-wide referendum on the topic (which passed by a narrow margin). The event description which was posted on the department’s Facebook page demonized Israel by accusing it of “daily human rights abuses” and made clear that attendees are expected to learn how to “work in solidarity with the global BDS movement.” The topic of the event, ‘pinkwashing,’ is a term used by Israel’s enemies to accuse Israel of using its support for gay rights as a shield to cover for other alleged abuses.
In February 2017, a Jewish student at the University of Minnesota reported that someone had entered his dorm room and drawn an image of a concentration camp along with a swastika and the phrase “Nazis Rule” on the whiteboard in his room.
University of California—Los Angeles
UCLA is eminently deserving of its reputation as one of the nation’s most hostile campuses for Jewish students. The university is home to a virulent and radicalized chapter of the Hamas-funded organization Students for Justice in Palestine. UCLA SJP has violently disrupted numerous pro-Israel events on campus and is known for chanting pro-terrorist slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a genocidal call to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. Despite SJP’s complete disregard for UCLA’s community standards, the University administration nevertheless permitted SJP National to hold its infamous annual conference—which is known for featuring anti-Semites and Hamas supporters—on the UCLA campus in November 2018. The announcement for the 2018 conference at UCLA even bragged about their record of hijacking pro-Israel events, stating “”Other instances of our perseverance include disruptions of pro-war, Zionist, and racist guest speakers.””
UCLA’s campus administration is notorious for turning a blind eye to the rules infractions of SJP while refusing to protect pro-Israel students on campus. UCLA’s student government was an early supporter of BDS, passing a resolution supporting the Hamas-funded BDS movement in 2014. The campus has hosted Hamas-supporting and Jew-hating speakers who support the BDS movement, including BDS founder Omar Barghouti and Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abuminah. UCLA SJP sponsors an annual “Palestine Awareness Week” during which students promote BDS and display a mock “apartheid wall” showcasing Hamas propaganda and also an annual “Nakba Week” deriding the creation of Israel as a “catastrophe” – a term used by Hamas and its supporters to promote the lie that Israel was created from stolen Arab land. The campus also has a long history of promoting anti-Semitic tropes; the student government once accused a Jewish candidate for office of holding divided loyalties, and only begrudgingly apologized amid a firestorm of controversy.
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In May 2019, SFSU Professor Rabab Abdulhadi gave a guest lecture to an anthropology class at UCLA in which she likened Zionism to white supremacy and proclaimed that “pro-Israeli groups…[and] white supremacists are very much in alliance” in promoting an “Islamophobic Zionism agenda.” When a Jewish student in class objected to Abdulhadi’s tirade, the professor responded that “Jews come in all sorts of stripes and colors and backgrounds and so on. I align myself with the Jews who are opposing Israel’s settler colonialism and I ask people who are Jewish, it’s their choice, you can decide what you want to actually stop the alliances with white supremacy and do a different alliance… I don’t agree with you and I believe it [Israel] is part of white supremacy. I’m sorry if you feel that way but maybe you need to kind of check this and look into it more.” At the end of Abdulhadi’s lecture, the course instructor, Associate Professor Kyeyoung Park, told the class, “I agree with this speaker. That’s why I brought her.” One student in the class characterized Abdulhadi’s address as “hate speech” and added that “Watching an educator belittle a student to tears with such blatant ignorance leaves me to question the values UCLA wishes to uphold.”
In May 2019, UCLA’s Undergraduate Student Association passed a resolution by an 8-to-1 vote declaring that Students for Justice in Palestine is not anti-Semitic and condemning the David Horowitz Freedom Center for distributing newspapers on campus which printed the truth about the financial and organizational ties between SJP and the anti-Israel terror group Hamas. The resolution notably did not refute the factual information presented by the Freedom Center on SJP’s links to terrorism. All 8 members of the student council who voted for the resolution are not Jewish. The sole dissenting vote came from its lone Jewish representative, Tara Steinmetz. Rabbi Abraham Cooper who is Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center at UCLA called the resolution an “insult to the Jewish community.” He posited that the reaction would be very different “if eight white students at UCLA passed a resolution defining ‘racism’ without input from African American or Latino students.”
In November 2018, the UCLA administration allowed the SJP National Conference to be held on campus. The conference was titled, “Radical Hope: Resistance in the Face of Adversity.” The term “resistance” is commonly used by Hamas supporters as a euphemism for terrorist aggression against Israel. Guests attending the conference carried tote bags reading, “”Make Israel Palestine Again”” and were heard shouting slogans promoting the terrorist Intifada against Israel. During his keynote address, speaker Hatem Abudayyeh demonized Israel and promoted anti-Semitic tropes such as the alleged Zionist control of American government: “When Zionist Israel is weakened even further because of our coalition work with black and other forces, the U.S. will be forced to no longer be able to provide it with diplomatic… financial and military support. And that is when Palestinians will return to their homes and lands, occupation and colonization of all Arab lands including the Golan Heights will end, and all the people of historical Palestine will live in one single democratic state. Not in an apartheid Zionist state of Israel that does the bidding of U.S. imperialism by controlling, exploiting and terrorizing non-Israeli Jews, but in the nation of Palestine that rejects Zionism and racism and is a state with peace, equality and justice for all.””
Shortly prior to the November conference, UCLA issued a cease-and-desist letter to National SJP asking that they stop using the UCLA name and campus mascot, the Bruin bear, in its conference materials. The conference logo featured the Bruin bear flying a kite in Palestinian colors. This logo invoked anti-Israel terrorism. Aaron Lerner, the executive director of UCLA Hillel, argued in an op-ed for the Daily Bruin that the kite “resembles actual petrol kite-bombs, which Hamas, a terrorist organization, launches into Israel to start fires and terrorize the population.” “NSJP is openly broadcasting its solidarity with Hamas terrorists by co-opting UCLA’s cherished mascot in this fashion,” Lerner explained. “Standing for Palestinian human rights is one thing; advocating for violence is another. This use of the university’s trademark should offend all Bruins, regardless of their political sympathies.”
On May 17, 2018, SJP at UCLA disrupted an event held by Students Supporting Israel (SSI) titled “”Indigenous Peoples Unite”” with loud chants and demeaning actions and succeeded in shutting down the event for over 15 minutes. While one of the panelists was speaking about surviving genocide in Armenia, a protestor walked over and tore down the Armenian flag and threw the speaker’s notes away while shouting directly in his face. The protestors also tore the Israeli flag off the wall. SJP protestors used horns and whistles to create a chaos of noise and chanted slogans including “”We don’t want 2 states, we want ’48,”” a genocidal statement to abolish Israel and return to a time before it existed. Other slogans included, “”From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,”” “”No peace on stolen land, justice is our demand”” “”Protesting is not a crime, free free free Palestine,”” and “”Israel is a terrorist state!”” UCLA administrators denounced the protest about a week later but claimed that they could not take action against the protestors because a police report had not been filed by SSI. After this announcement, over a dozen pro-Israel students filed complaints with the university police department.
The Amcha Initiative, a group dedicated to tracking and combatting anti-Semitism, received a report that in May 2018, when a professor was late to class, a graduate student mocked Orthodox Jews and made anti-Semitic comments to his classmates. In particular, he made fun of the fact that religious Jews avoid doing work on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, and claimed that they “can not even rip toilet paper on Sabbath.” He also said “Shalom” multiple times with an accent to mock how Orthodox Jews talk and called them “weird people” and complained about how “they are everywhere in L.A.” These comments and impressions were reportedly received with laughter by his classmates.
In May 2018, SJP at UCLA held an event titled “Teaching Palestine with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi & Dr. Robin Kelley.” During the event, Dr. Kelley, a history professor at UCLA, claimed that “the Nakba” (an Arabic term opponents of Israel use to describe Israel’s founding as a “catastrophe”) was “the ethnic cleansing operation that turned three-quarters of the Palestinians into refugees and transformed the top-ranked wealth and even the intellectual and cultural capital into the hands of Israelis. So it’s like a gangster operation. Armed robbery sanctioned by the world.”
In March 2018, UCLA SJP joined several other student groups in a protest outside of a UC Regents Meeting. The group chanted slogans including “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” a genocidal call to eliminate all of Israel as a Jewish state, and also promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel.
In January 2018, a mezuzah, or Jewish prayer box, that had been hung outside the office door of UCLA’s Jewish student body president was torn down. This was the second time in two years that a mezuzah was stolen from this office.
UCLA SJP holds an annual “Nakba Commemoration Week” to recognize the founding of Israel as “a catastrophe.” The word “Nakba” means “catastrophe” in Arabic and is used by Hamas and its supporters to describe the creation of Israel and to promote the lie that Israel was created on Arab land. It was not. It was created by the United Nations on land that had belonged to the Turks—who are not Arabs—for 400 years previously. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan were created in the same way.
UCLA SJP also hosts an annual “Palestine Awareness Week” featuring the display of a mock “apartheid wall” plastered in anti-Israel Hamas propaganda. One recent wall displayed the infamous series of misleading Hamas propaganda maps purporting to show the Jewish colonization of “Palestine.” Palestine Awareness Week also functions as an opportunity for SJP to bring in speakers to promote the myth that Israel is an apartheid state and to bolster support for the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel.
On September 01, 2016, UCLA Graduate Student Association (GSA) President Milan Chatterjee announced in a lengthy letter that he was leaving his post and UCLA Law School as a result of the “hostile and unsafe campus climate” created by groups supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on campus and the UCLA administration. Chatterjee described in his letter how he had “been relentlessly attacked, bullied and harassed by BDS-affiliated organizations and students” who objected to his attempts to distribute student fee monies in a “viewpoint neutral” manner with regard to the BDS movement.
On August 22, 2016, UCLA SJP announced on its Facebook page that it was endorsing the political platform of Black Lives Matter, which includes a section that embraces the Hamas propaganda lies against Israel and its terrorist cause. UCLA SJP stated: “We are moved by the platform’s recognition of Israel’s apartheid laws, illegal settlements, segregated road systems and military checkpoints, punitive home demolitions, and prison system, through which Palestinians, including children, are routinely subject to harassment and torture. As campus organizers, we also welcome [Black Lives Matter’s] endorsement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), particularly given the current climate of anti-boycott legislation that we face, and we echo its acknowledgment of the US’s culpability in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, notably through military aid, diplomatic support, and investment in private prison companies.”
On April 19, 2016, in response to anti-BDS posters created by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang sent an email to the 50,000 members of the UCLA community attacking Horowitz –calling the posters “repulsive” and “personalized intimidation” and stating that they produce “chilling psychological harm” that “cannot be dismissed as over-sensitivity.” Vice Chancellor Kang also pronounced them “hateful” and “thuggish” and claimed that they utilized the “tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially tinged fear.”
On April 14, 2016, UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies sponsored an address by Noga Kadman on her book “Erased From Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948.” During the address, Kadman accused Israel of conducting a “massacre” of the Palestinians, a claim that is historically false and a staple of anti-Israel propaganda.
On February 09, 2016, SJP members published an op-ed in the Daily Bruin falsely claiming that Israel treats its Palestinians as “second class citizens” and arguing unconvincingly that the genocidal chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is not in fact a call for genocide.
During January 25-28, 2016, UCLA-SJP held its annual “Palestine Awareness Week” on campus. The week featured numerous anti-Israel speakers who voiced their support for the genocidal BDS movement against Israel including Max Blumenthal, who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, Miko Peled, and Sa’ed Atshan. The event also featured the display of a mock “apartheid wall” plastered with anti-Israel propaganda.
During his address, Blumenthal stated that suicide bombing against Jews is justified by “the occupation” and described Palestinian terrorists as “young men who took up arms to fight their occupier.” He also promoted the BDS movement and compared Israel to the Islamic state, calling it “‘JSIL,’ the Jewish State in Israel and the Levant” and stating his belief that Israel collaborates with ISIS “to collapse Jewish life in the diaspora.” Miko Peled also defended terrorism, stating that it is “a struggle for freedom and justice and equality,” and describing terrorists as “very brave Palestinians who are engaged in fighting this brutal occupation.” He also declared that “any resistance, even armed resistance is legally and morally justifiable and perfectly understandable.” Peled also described Jews as analogous to Hitler, calling Jewish soldiers “young little Jewish gestapos,” and further accused Israel of “massive, violent, brutal oppression,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and of being “a colonialist, apartheid, racist system.” He also endorsed the BDS movement.
On December 09, 2015, a UCLA student who was also employed at a UCLA-affiliated medical center posted a vicious, hate-filled, anti-Semitic rant on social media which stated in part: “Fucking Jews. GTFOH with all your Zionist bullshit. Crazy ass fucking troglodyte albino monsters of cultural destruction. Fucking Jews. GTFOH with your whiny bullshit. Give the Palestinians back their land, go back to Poland or whatever freezer-state you’re from, and realize that faith does not constitute race.”
On November 06, 2015, UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies held a conference on “Palestine and Pedagogy” during which speakers compared Israel to the Nazis, praised anti-Israel terrorism and supported the BDS movement against Israel. UC Irvine Professor and Director of the UC Institute for Humanities Research Theo Goldberg accused Israel of practicing “eliminationist racism” such as used by the Nazis and claimed Israelis view Palestinians as “vermin, cockroaches, rats, snakes…that take boots on the ground to get rid of,” and of possessing “a commitment to purification.” Goldberg’s libels also included the false accusation that Israelis make “snuff films” featuring the deaths of innocent Palestinians which go viral resulting in “an orgasm of feeling” for Israelis. UC Riverside Professor David Lloyd called Israel “a colonial Zionist project that has become a…nightmare, ever more rigid and oppressive.” He endorsed the right of Palestinians to take up arms against Israel and also promoted the BDS movement.
On October 29, 2015, UCLA-SJP created a blog post listing the names of 44 Palestinians who were allegedly “killed by Israelis and the Israeli Defense Forces since Oct. 1, the beginning of the third Intifada.” According to the Amcha Initiative, the list “included numerous terrorists who had murdered or injured Jews.”
On July 8, 2015, UCLA-SJP reposted an article on their Facebook page mourning the one-year anniversary of the Israeli response to thousands of unprovoked Hamas rocket attacks on civilian areas – “Operation Protective Edge.” SJP parroted Hamas claims that this was a “brutal military attack.” Students for Justice in Palestine have supported the Hamas terrorists in all their aggressions against the Jews during the Gaza conflicts.
Another SJP article posted on this date regurgitates preposterous Hamas propaganda about the Gaza conflict: “The war in the summer of 2014 was not about rocket fire, Israeli security or Hamas: it was about subduing and disabling Gaza, something Israel has consistently been trying to do ever since it occupied the territory together with the West Bank nearly fifty years ago.” In fact, Israel’s original occupation of Gaza and the West Bank was the result of unprovoked aggressive wars by five Arab states in 1948 and 1967 and the refusal of the Arab states to sign a peace treaty.
In March 2015, when the Stop Jew Hatred on Campus campaign (an action of the David Horowitz Freedom Center) placed posters on the UCLA campus depicting SJP as “#JewHaters,” UCLA Chancellor Gene Block called the posters “another example of intolerance” and compared them to swastikas found on Jewish fraternity buildings.
On March 06, 2015, four UCLA professors were among the signatories of an op-ed appearing in the Daily Californian urging the administrators of the UC system to support the BDS Movement against Israel. Those professors were Nouri Gana, Sondra Hale, Chris Tilly, and Marie Kennedy.
In February 2015, members of UCLA’s student government repeated age-old anti-Semitic accusations of “divided loyalties” to question whether judicial board candidate Rachel Beyda’s status as a Jew would affect her objectivity in disciplinary decisions.
In November 2014, UCLA’s student government passed a BDS resolution by an 8-2-2 vote.
On May 14, 2014, UCLA SJP brought Communist party spokesperson and BDS proponent Angela Davis to campus. She told the crowd that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is worse than the treatment of blacks under apartheid in South Africa. Davis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the East German police state during the Cold War.
In May 2014, SJP introduced an initiative that would require candidates for student government to sign a pledge to not take trips to Israel sponsored by the pro-Israel organizations, AIPAC, ADL, or Hasbara Fellowships. Candidates were not asked to refuse trips from other organizations to other countries.
In January 2014, SJP held a speaker event with the Hamas-inspired and funded BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti. During his address, Barghouti opposed the existence of a Jewish state and Jewish rights to self-determination in Israel, and slandered Israel repeatedly.
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University has a well-earned reputation as perhaps the most anti-Semitic University in the nation, and Professor Rabab Abdulhadi serves as the public face of its Jew hatred. To say that Abdulhadi is notorious is an understatement. She is a rabidly anti-Semitic professor of Ethnic Studies who also heads SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED). AMED sponsored an event at which posters asserted, “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers,” referring to Israel’s Jews. Abdulhadi has glorified anti-Israel terrorism in public talks and served as faculty advisor to SFSU’s chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students, an SJP surrogate group, during the time when its leader posted pictures of himself wielding a knife and threatening Jews on social media and was investigated for terrorism by the FBI. In a guest lecture in a UCLA anthropology class last spring, Abdulhadi equated Zionism with “white supremacy,” refusing to back down even when a Jewish student tearfully attempted to counter her vitriol. AMED, the university initiative she leads, does not even play to the pretense of neutrality but instead openly declares Zionism to be racism and Israel to be the occupier of Palestine.
SFSU has a lengthy record of ignoring if not outright enabling campus support for terrorism and threats against Jewish speakers and students. The student organization, General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), takes every opportunity to make Jewish students feel unwelcome on campus. GUPS prides itself on disrupting pro-Israel events. The group interrupted a speech by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, shouting “Intifada,” a call for terrorism against Israel, and chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” a call for the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of its people. A lawsuit filed in U.S. district court in 2018 charged that the University “has systematically supported these departments and student groups as they have doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights and their ability to feel safe and secure as they pursue their education.”
In 2018, SFSU President Leslie Wong infamously gave an interview with a Jewish news organization in which he refused to categorically state that Zionists are welcome on SFSU’s campus. When forced to reverse his position amid a public outcry, many SFSU campus organizations and entities including Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, and SFSU’s Woman and Gender Studies Department issued their own statements lambasting Wong for welcoming “racists” on campus.
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In July 2019, the official Facebook page for the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) at SFSU, which is led by Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, shared an image of a large banner exhorting “”Zionism = Racism, Silence = Death, Palestine is a Queer Issue – Boycott! Divest! Sanction!””
In May 2019, multiple displays of Jew hatred were found on campus including a swastika that was carved into a toilet paper holder in a campus restroom. The four arms of the swastika were labeled with the words “San Francisco State University” and “Free Palestine” was written below. At least one flier was also found on campus with the message “Anti-Zionist Students Welcome, No Occupation, No Anti-Semitism,” thereby implying that Zionist students are NOT welcome on the campus.
In March 2019, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi shared a live video on AMED at SFSU’s official Facebook page alongside a statement which demonized Israel and invoked anti-Semitic Zionist conspiracy tropes by accusing the SFSU administration of “collaborat[ing] with the Zionist designs to silence us… staff, faculty and community who view Israel (as I do) as a colonial, racist and occupying power…” and labeling the administration’s conduct as “the weaponizing of free speech in the service of Nazis, Zionists and other white supremacists…”
In February 2019, members of several student organizations at SFSU including the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), the League of Filipino Students (LFS) and Jews Against Zionism (JAZ) held a rally to protest the classification of Israeli Independence Day as a campus religious holiday. The University claimed that classification was a “”clerical error”” and apologized. Activist chants at the rally promoted the false narrative that Israel is the oppressor in the Middle East conflict. These included “Free Palestine,” “Zionism has got to go” and “Stop the attacks. Stop the hate. You’re supporting an apartheid state.”” were shouted. One student displayed a sign stating “Zionism is NOT welcome on this campus.”
On April 19, 2018, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) at SFSU, an SJP surrogate group, held an event titled “The Global Resistance Against Zionism: How Israel Affects All Our Communities.” The event description called for the “right of return of millions of stateless Palestinian refugees,” which would destroy Israel as a Jewish state, and also chastised “Zionists” for celebrating Israel’s founding, declaring that “Al-Nakba marks a destructive and horrific time in history as Palestinians faced death, expulsion, and full out violence from Zionist European militias. The Zionists, however, commemorate this day through dancing and celebrations, proving their continuous dehumanization of Palestinian people and history. There is nothing to celebrate about May 15th, 1948.”
In April 2018, a video was posted on the official Facebook page for Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at SFSU which featured a radio interview with AMED Director Professor Rabab Abdulhadi in which she equated Zionists with the KKK and other hate groups. Referring to SFSU President Wong’s statement that Zionists are welcome on campus, she said, “I’m waiting for him to say, white supremacists is welcome, KKK is welcome, David Horowitz is welcome, Richard Spenser is welcome, Neo-Nazis are welcome, homophobes are welcome, misogynists are welcome, why stop only at Zionists? Welcome them all. I mean bring the…whole club. Bring everybody who is right wing and racist, bring them to campus, why only stop at Zionists.”
On March 26, 2018, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) held an “open dialogue in Malcolm X Plaza” as part of “Palestine Awareness Week.” A large sign at the protest read “Zionism is not welcome here; The support of genocide is not welcome,” and a small mock “apartheid wall” declared “To exist is to resist.” “Resistance” is a euphemism used by Hamas and its allies to describe terrorist acts against Israel.
In February 2018, GUPS and AMED Studies at SFSU held the, “”11th Annual Edward Said Mural Celebration.”” The description for this event which was cosponsored by an official university program, demonized and delegitimized Israel, stating that “The US claiming that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel enables the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians…” Speakers during the event accused Israel of “apartheid” and one speaker promoted the anti-normalization stance held by Hamas stating “”it’s important to note that the Palestinian people refuse to remain silent in this normalization of constant displacement, erasure and exile by the racist, settler-colonial state.”” Professor Abdulhadi also spoke at the event and equated Zionism, white supremacy and “”any kind of hatred and bigotry.”” AMED, the initiative directed by Abdulhadi, has also held numerous other events at which Israel was declared to be an “apartheid state” and demonized and delegitimized. At an off campus event in October 2018, Prof. Abdulhadi referenced locations in Israel as part of “Palestine” thus delegitimizing the Jewish state. Another speaker at the event called a member of the Israeli Defense Forces an “Israeli Occupation Soldier.”
In February 2018, SFSU President Leslie Wong sent out a campus-wide email and made a public statement apologizing for a previous interview with a Jewish news organization in which he refused to categorically state that Zionists are welcome on SFSU’s campus. “Thus, I want to sincerely apologize for the hurt feelings and anguish my words have caused. Let me be clear: Zionists are welcome on our campus,” Wong declared.
Wong’s apology was met with outrage by many individuals and even academic departments on SFSU’s campus. Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, Director of Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at SFSU, wrote in response: “I consider the statement from … President Wong, welcoming Zionists to campus, equating Jewishness with Zionism, and giving Hillel ownership of campus Jewishness, to be a declaration of war against Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians and all those who are committed to an indivisible sense of social justice on and off campus.” She also charged on Facebook that Wong’s statement was “racist, Islamophobic and colonialist” and claimed that the administration was bowing to “donor pressures and the Israeli lobby.”
The Women and Gender Studies Department at SFSU also released a statement condemning Wong’s apology. It read in part: “On February 23rd, President Wong of San Francisco State University sent an email to the entire campus community… The Women and Gender Studies Department is deeply concerned about the motivation, tenor, and potential effects of this statement… Wong’s statement fails to express concern or support for Palestinian, Arab, and Middle Eastern students and their allies that are harmed by Zionism… In sum, the Department of Women and Gender Studies unequivocally rejects the equation of Zionism with Judaism, and stands by all of our SFSU students and their right to a university committed to intellectual inquiry and social justice.”
GUPS declared in a Facebook post that “Wong does not have the right to speak on behalf of an entire community while welcoming racist and colonial ideology on a college campus that is meant to educate students. Zionism is not welcome at SFSU or in any space where justice, freedom, and liberation are our goals. We stand united on the front lines of achieving liberation and justice in and for Palestine, academic freedom, and a campus free of hate, Zionism, and White supremacy.”
A combined statement released by the Black Student Union, African Studies Association, Black Residents United in Housing, and Black Business Student Association stated, “To support Palestine is to combat tyranny, totalitarianism, racism, xenophobia, terrorism, colonialism, and state sanctioned violence….Leslie Wong has welcomed terrorism to our campus and has remained an ally to Zionist groups long before releasing a statement that boldly stated that Zionists are welcome on our campus…”
Chalkings in the main campus quad in response to Wong’s apology stated “Zionists Not Welcome” and “Zionism = Racism.”
In June 2017, Jewish students at SFSU together with members of the local community filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against SFSU and the trustees of California State University charging that SFSU has fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students on campus who are “often afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus, and regularly text their friends to describe potential safety issues.” The lawsuit was prompted in part by an incident in April 2016 when a speech by the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, was disrupted by anti-Israel protestors who chanted “Intifada” (a call for violence and terrorism against Israel) and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (a statement urging the genocide of Israel’s Jews). During this incident, university administrators told campus police to “stand down” and allowed the protest to continue.
The suit filed against the University claimed, “SFSU has not merely fostered and embraced anti-Jewish hostility — it has systematically supported these departments and student groups as they have doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights and their ability to feel safe and secure as they pursue their education.” The suit also specifically named SFSU professor Rabab Abdulhadi, the director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative (AMED) and the faculty advisor for SFSU’s Hamas-supporting GUPS chapter, who has a long history of supporting terrorists and their allies.
GUPS at SFSU holds an annual commemoration of the “Nakba,” a term used by Hamas and its allies to describe the creation of Israel as a “catastrophe.” Signs and advertisements for the event have stated “Never Forget, Never Forgive,” and have called for the Palestinian “Right of Return” which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, one of Hamas’s chief aims. GUPS also brings the anti-Israel hatefest “Israeli Apartheid Week” to campus each year. Past festivities have featured mock checkpoints, so-called “apartheid walls” plastered with Hamas propaganda, speakers who promote the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel, and signs and banners promoting the claim that “Zionism is racism.”
SFSU GUPS held a March 2017 event on “Israeli Policies in Relation to the Trump Era” at which they attempted to smear both the Trump administration and the Jewish state. The event description claimed “Since the settler colonial project of Israel was established as a state in 1948, the Israel government has used ‘security’ as a pretext to further oppressive and racist policies and practices against the Palestinians. This include[s]… building an Apartheid Wall…a racist ID system… and torture, resulting in the policing, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” Israel’s “apartheid wall” is actually a security fence that has saved thousands of Jewish lives by preventing Palestinian terrorists from entering.
GUPS deliberately and maliciously excluded SFSU Hillel from a February 2017 campus fair on the topic of human rights which they helped to organize by changing the registration dates after they had been announced to the public and then claiming the fair was at capacity when in reality many empty tables remained.
In September 2016, GUPS held a campus event to commemorate “one of the hundreds of massacres committed on the Palestinian people: Sabra and Shatila.” A Facebook post about the event claimed that “we hold the United States and Israel [responsible] for the continue repressions among our communities from police killing black and brown men and women to the Assad regime slaughtering Syrians. If we were to commemorate every massacre in Palestinian history, having an event every single day of the year would still not be enough.” Large signs displayed at the event falsely accused Israel of “settler colonialism” and “ethnic cleansing.”
In April 2016, SFSU hosted a tour created by National SJP called “Right 2 Education,” featuring two speakers from Birzeit University in Palestine. Birzeit is well known for hosting Hamas rallies and Hamas recently beat out rival party Fatah in student elections there. During the event, the student speakers defended terrorism claiming that acts such as knife attacks on unarmed civilians were merely efforts to “bring attention” to the alleged plight of Palestinians. The speakers praised the genocidal BDS campaign against Israel, and attempted to delegitimize the Israeli state by falsely claiming that Jews “fabricate our history to make it look like they have a right to exist in our country” and that “Israel was built to be a racist state.”
The SFSU General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) disrupted an April 2016 speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, by shouting exhortations to terrorist violence and succeeded in curtailing his address. SFSU students involved in the protest entered the auditorium carrying Palestinian flags and wearing checkered kaffiyehs which are associated with anti-Israel terrorism. The demonstrators then proceeded to shout “Intifada,” and chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” a slogan falsely claiming that Israel is Palestine (Israel is bounded by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea) and should be destroyed.
When SFSU President Wong called for an investigation into the protestors who shut down Barkat’s speech, GUPS responded by calling Wong’s request an “attack on pro-Palestine protestors” that “criminalize[s] anti-racist speech on campus.”
In Februry 2016, GUPS at SFSU held a rally in solidarity with Mohammed Al-Qeeq, a Palestinian journalist who was arrested and detained by Israel. According to the Associated Press, “Israel’s Shin Bet security service says al-Qeeq is involved in terrorism activities linked to the militant Hamas movement.”
In October 2015, GUPS at SFSU promoted a community protest on its Facebook page supporting terrorism and the Hamas goal of destroying Israel. GUPS’s endorsement stated in part: “The General Union of Palestine Students – GUPS-SFSU supports the uprisings in Palestine! We Stand with our Brothers and Sisters in the streets, and we will find victory! … End to the Zionist State! End to the killings of our Men, Women and Children in cold blood! End to the colonist empire! We will not be silenced!”
In the Fall of 2014, SFSU Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, faculty advisor to GUPS, who had previously taken a university-sponsored trip to the Middle East where she met with terrorists Leila Khaled and Sheikh Raed Salah, posted on her Facebook page, “Today San Francisco State University’s All University Committee on International Programs unanimously voted to recommend that SF State formally collaborate with An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. This is the first time that SFSU will collaborate with any university in a Palestinian, Arab or Muslim community.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has written of An-Najah University, “Today the student council of An-Najah is known for its advocacy of anti-Israel violence and its recruitment of Palestinian college students into terrorist groups. The council, almost completely controlled by factions loyal to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, glorifies suicide bombings and propagandizes for jihad against Israel. Hamas has described An-Najah as a ‘greenhouse for martyrs.’”
In November 2014, GUPS at SFSU held the 7th Annual Edward Said Mural Celebration. Among the event’s speakers was UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, former leader of GUPS, and co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine. Bazian, during a speech at an anti-war rally in San Francisco in 2004, called for an “Intifada” in America.
In February 2014, SFSU General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) President Mohammad G. Hammad was exposed as having written a number of threatening social media posts describing his wish to attack students, teachers and Israeli soldiers and to ally himself with anti-Israel terrorists including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Hammad’s posts include: A photo of himself holding a large knife with the caption: “I seriously cannot get over how much I love this blade. It is the sharpest thing I own and cuts through everything like butter and just holding it makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier…”; “I think about killing a lot. And some of you are usually the targets of my daydreams J.”; “You know what? Israelis ARE colonizers, there is literally no way around it. And you know what else? My heroes have always killed colonizers. I literally see nothing wrong with this. And my only regret is that not all colonizers were killed.”
In response to a poster that asked “how can I help actively support Palestine,” Hammad responded “Buy a keffieyh. Learn to tie it around your head…get in touch with some PFLP militants or arms dealers in the West Bank. Learn IDF patrol routes…BOOM.” “Let’s play a game. Objective: Kill U.S. Soldiers. Goal: world peace.” “The number of times I have legitimately considered flying back to the Middle East and joining the armed wing of the PFLP or something is surprisingly high.” “I think about the time I tried to be – moderate – and advocate for non-violence and honestly I just want to go back in time and slit my own throat/and then the throats of all my enemies before they grow up into the shits they are today.” “Oh/And tomorrow is [hopefully] the day that I find out if I will be the President of the General Union of Palestine at my school/…Hopefully I’ll be able to radicalize half of our population and bring them back with me as fighters.”
After Jewish groups and the media exposed his postings, Hammad eventually left campus and was placed under investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI.
During a December 2013 “emergency rally” held by GUPS at SFSU, the phrase “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers” was written with chalk on the concrete stage at Malcolm X Plaza. The same phrase, referring to the Hamas assertion that Jews have colonized Arab Palestine and must be exterminated, was also written on a sign at a display table during the “Edward Said Mural Celebration.” Said was a Columbia professor who was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Palestinian National Council until 1991 when he resigned because he thought the terrorist Yasser Arafat’s policies were too moderate towards Israel.
Columbia University
For over a decade, Columbia University has been notorious for anti-Semitism. From its anti-Semitic professors such as Dr. Joseph Massad, known for making hostile remarks to Jews in his classes, to the Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), a pro-Hamas institution embedded in the campus educational structure which has brought BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti to campus, Columbia amply deserves its reputation for anti-Semitism.
Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine has openly harassed Jewish students on campus, distributed Hamas propaganda, torn down fliers posted by pro-Israel groups and interrupted pro-Israel speakers and events. Recently, that SJP chapter demonstrated its adherence to the Hamas “anti-normalization” policy by rejecting a proposal to co-host an event with Students Supporting Israel, and promoting “social ostracization” against pro-Israel students and groups. Together with the Center for Palestine Studies, SJP and other campus anti-Israel organizations recently hosted a three-day event dedicated to demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. Speakers at that event repeated anti-Semitic blood libels against Israel and promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement.
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In May 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Columbia University released a statement in conjunction with a “die-in” held on campus that condoned terrorism and demonized and delegitimized Israel. The statement alleged that “the racist objective of Zionism” is “to create an ethno-supremacist state with no place for the indigenous Palestinians” and condemned the Israeli government for responding to Palestinian terrorism, saying “Any form of resistance, whether violent or non-violent, has been met by the Israeli state with a brutal response, sanctioned by an international community that refuses to treat the Zionist entity for the settler-colonial project that it is.” It went on to praise “the Palestinian of Gaza” for continuing to “resist” (a term often used as a euphemism for terrorism) and concluded by stating “This path of violence will come to its end when the land is liberated, when Zionism is dismantled, when the apartheid regime covering all of historic Palestine disintegrates, when colonial privileges are no longer given to one ethno-religious group at the expense of another, and when the world recognizes the right of the colonized to oppose their conditions of oppression and to live in and return to their historic home in dignity, safety, and equality. Long live the resistance of the Palestinian people!” One student held a sign reading “If you ignore the deaths in Gaza, you are complicit in their slaughter.”
In April 2019, SJP at Columbia demonstrated their adherence to the Hamas anti-normalization policy towards Israel by rejecting in harsh language the invitation of a campus pro-Israel group to participate in a dialogue. That pro-Israel group, Students Supporting Israel, sent an email to SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace (a pro-BDS group) proposing a shared event “in the spirit of creating an open dialogue, stimulating intellectual curiosity, and engaging with the broader student body.” In response to this gesture of inclusion, SJP lambasted SSI and urged the larger campus community to ostracize the pro-Israel group. In an email response which was sent to Columbia University’s newly elected student council, SJP wrote “As with other racist groups on campus, SSI’s political ideology does not deserve to be tolerated or even combated in the avenues of ideas… We believe that racist ethno-supremacism should, in fact, be challenged on campus. We also believe that social ostracization is a powerful tool that the student body can use to voice their rejection of Zionism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and other oppressive ideologies… we call on our peers and allied organizations to boycott all pro-Israel advocacy groups and clubs…”
Columbia University SJP holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid” Week featuring a mock “apartheid wall” plastered with Hamas propaganda. The most recent version of this “wall” promoted the Palestinian “right of return” which would effectively destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Apartheid weeks are also well known for featuring speakers who condone terrorism against Israel and promote the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
In March 2019, the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, an official university division which essentially exists to promote Hamas propaganda, held an event titled “”Cracks In The Wall: Beyond Apartheid Palestine/Israel.”” The event description delegitimized Israel and promoted the Hamas-backed BDS movement, claiming, “”After decades of occupation and creeping annexation, Israel has created an apartheid system in historic Palestine… and the Palestinian-led boycott campaign continues to gain momentum.”
In March 2019, When BDS supporters failed by a narrow margin to pass a measure that would create a campuswide referendum on divestment from Israel, they responded by chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a genocidal exhortation to destroy the entirety of Israel.
In February 2019, The Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia held an event titled “”Unsettling Spaces: Technologies of Violence in Palestinian Jerusalem,”” during which speaker Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian echoed age-old anti-Semitic blood libels against the Jewish people claiming that “Israel does weapons tests on Palestinian children,”” and “”They’re making money out of this. Making money over children’s bodies and children’s lives.”
In November 2018, “”The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University cohosted a three-day “Second International Meeting for Science in Palestine” with SJP and several other pro-BDS groups. During one panel, Columbia Professor Michael Harris argued that, “Including Israel as a full partner in the European Research Network effectively meant the importation of Israel systemic racism into the European research state.” The academic boycott against Israel is a part of the Hamas-funded BDS movement. Another speaker, Khury Petersen-Smith frequently alluded to “Israeli apartheid” and echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by claiming “the playbooks that the right wing [globally] is using to go after progressive academics was developed by Zionists.”
On November 28, 2018, Jewish professor and Holocaust scholar Elizabeth Midlarsky entered her office at Teacher’s College of Columbia and found two gigantic red swastikas scrawled on the walls and the anti-Semitic slur “YID” painted adjacent to them.
On April 10, 2018, Columbia Students Supporting Israel (SSI) released a statement concerning anti-Semitic actions and attacks on Jewish students on campus and the administration’s failure to address these violations of campus policy. The statement clarified the role of several anti-Israel campus organizations, including the Hamas-supported and funded Students for Justice in Palestine, in creating a hostile environment for Jewish students on campus:
“In interrupting, silencing, harassing and intimidating Jewish and pro-Israel students at Columbia, the behavior of SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine], JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] and CUAD [Columbia University Apartheid Divest] contributes to an unacceptably hostile environment for those who wish to exercise their constitutionally protected rights in ways that differ from the narratives of these groups… Since SSI [Students Supporting Israel] has started its activities on campus, SJP has continuously attacked SSI’s right to freedom of speech, expression and association in different ways and using a variety of inappropriate methods, as outlined below.”
Actions taken by these anti-Israel groups as documented in SSI’s statement include tearing down SSI’s event flyers, surrounding Jewish students in a threatening manner and chanting pro-Palestine slogans when randomly encountering them on campus, and interrupting or shouting-down pro-Israel speakers and events.
In April 2018, Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia together with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a group supporting the Hamas-funded and supported BDS movement against Israel, held a “Gaza Solidarity Rally” on campus. Their rally was located opposite a booth sponsored by a pro-Israel organization for Holocaust Remembrance Day. The SJP members chanted slogans promoting the destruction of Israel and the terrorist Intifada against the Jewish state, including, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and, “From Gaza to the plaza, globalize the Intifada!”
In April 2018, Barnard, a sister college to Columbia, passed a resolution in support of divestment from Israel, part of the Hamas-supported and funded BDS campaign against the Jewish state. Columbia’s pro-Israel student group, Aryeh, put out a statement explaining all the ways in which supporters of Israel who opposed the resolution were not treated fairly during the political process:
“From the very beginning, this process was dishonest and opaque. The decision to initiate a referendum was made behind closed doors without hearing formally from any pro-Israel students—and in contradiction to repeated assurances that no decision or vote would be made during that session. There are measures in place to protect students from divisive and marginalizing referenda like this one; shockingly, however, SGA failed to invoke those measures by deciding that this referendum was not ‘contentious.’ When Aryeh was finally able to speak at SGA, our one request—for a fair and unbiased referendum—was ignored, as SGA elected to put forward an unsourced text that included CUAD’s arguments and propaganda, in many cases word-for-word. This ensured that students voting with no prior knowledge of the conflict would be informed only by material specifically written to ensure one outcome. Finally, after securing CUAD an overwhelming advantage in the wording of the referendum, SGA Executive Board unilaterally imposed campaign rules on Aryeh, guaranteeing an unequal playing field.”
On March 29, 2018, the campus anti-Israel groups Columbia University Apartheid Divest, SJP and JVP held an event titled “Resisting Settler-Colonialism: A Talk by Steven Salaita.” During his address, Salaita stated that “racist violence is based into the ideology [of Zionism]” and promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the extent of Zionist power.
On March 26, 2018, as part of “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus, three campus anti-Israel organizations, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Columbia/Barnard JVP and Columbia SJP held an event titled “I is for Intifada.” The previous Palestinian Intifadas have signified violent terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The event included “a presentation on the political history of the Palestinian intifadas and their lasting significance.”
In December 2017, SJP initiated a petition to boycott a local bookstore, Book Culture, because the store denounced the genocidal and Hamas-supported BDS movement against Israel and refused to use an anti-Israel children’s book titled “P is for Palestine” which contains a page endorsing Intifada, or violent uprising, against Israel, in an event for children.
In November 2017, Columbia and Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a pro-BDS group that is aligned with SJP, put out a statement falsely accusing Students Supporting Israel of racism and “brownwashing”:
“SSI’s blatant racism and utter ignorance of history should not be welcome on our campus. They consistently present twisted and misleading views of history, and do unforgivable violence to the sacred struggles of Native Americans and indigenous peoples. Their brown-washing and appropriation of indigeneity speak loudly for the racist political values they hold. SSI does not stand for anyone’s liberation. They stand for the occupation and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people in support of an ethno-nationalist state which has little to do with a just future for anyone.”
In September 2017, a swastika and the letters “WP” which stand for “White Power” were found written in black ink in a stairwell on campus.
On April 24, 2017, Columbia University Apartheid Divest held an event featuring Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Hamas-supported and funded BDS movement against Israel, along with BDS supporters Rebecca Vilkomerson and Premilla Nadasen. The event was titled “The Road to Freedom: The BDS Movement for Palestinian Rights and the Struggle Against Apartheid.” A large banner stating “Boycott Israel” was hung across the table where the panelists were sitting.
During his address, Barghouti called for the “return of refugees to their homes,” a policy which would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. The event was supported and co-sponsored by numerous departments and organizations at Columbia including the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, Anthropology Department, Middle East Institute, Columbia Queer Alliance, Divest Barnard for a Just Transition, Student-Worker Solidarity, Mobilized African Diaspora, CU Turath: The Arab Students Association, No Red Tape, Barnard Columbia Socialists, Columbia University South Asian Feminisms Alliance, African Students Association at Columbia University, and the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
In February 2017, Columbia’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) held an event with Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador and representative to the United Nations. Columbia’s chapter of Apartheid Divest responded with a protest demonizing Israel, and interrupted Danon at least seven times with genocidal chants such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” Signs at the protest contained similar slogans accusing Israel of occupation and racism and calling for the Palestinian right of return which would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.
In December 2016, anti-Israel protestors held a walkout protest of a Students Supporting Israel (SSI) event just as a Jew was describing his feeling of connection to Israel. Signs held by protestors at the event demonized Israel and falsely accused it of “racism” and “land theft, displacement and ethnic cleansing.”
In December 2016, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-BDS campus organization, put out a statement vilifying the pro-Israel campus group Students Supporting Israel which demonized Israel and echoed Hamas propaganda lies claiming that Israel stole Palestinian land. The statement was co-signed by 24 additional Columbia campus organizations. It read in part:
“SSI supports Israel’s expansion of internationally-condemned settlements, demolition of Palestinian homes, and theft of Palestinian resources such as water and agriculture, all in direct contradiction to indigenous rights. For SSI to claim that it uplifts indigenous struggles is not only ironic, but also deeply damaging. This event masks the catastrophic impact that the state of Israel, with its theft of Palestinian land and lives, has had and continues to have on the indigenous people of Palestine since 1948.”
On June 20, 2015, the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University in conjunction with the Middle East Institute hold a “Teachers’ Workshop” on “Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine.” The poster for the event displays the false and genocidal Hamas map which depicts the invasion and colonization of Arab “Palestine” by the Jews beginning in 1947.
On May 11, 2015, Columbia SJP hosted a panel titled “Existing and Resisting: Palestinian Women Tell Their Stories” which includes convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted by an Israeli military court in 1970 for her involvement in two fatal terrorist bombings. An article in the Columbia Chronicle stated that the event focused on “The struggles and tribulations Palestinian women face during the occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
During Israel Apartheid Week 2015, university administrators denied a request by the pro-Israel Columbia student organization Aryeh to reserve space opposite the mock “apartheid wall” constructed by SJP, where they have traditionally held a counter-protest against this event. Instead, an anti-Israel group, Jewish Voices for Peace, which promotes the BDS movement against Israel, was allowed to reserve the spot. Pro-Israel student Talia Lefkowitz wrote in an op-ed in The Times of Israel: “Until now, Hillel’s pro-Israel groups have gathered together… in a counter-demonstration to stress the importance of conversation over confrontation. But without a place to park themselves this year, the pro-Israel groups are effectively being silenced.”
On December 2, 2014, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement founder Omar Barghouti spoke to an “enormous and enthusiastic” crowd at Columbia University. Responding to a question about whether Jews have the right of self-determination, Barghouti responds, “One thing I do know– not at my expense… [They do not have] the right to expel us or to take our land.” An article about the event posted on the website Mondoweiss.net reports that “the audience broke into applause, the first time that any speaker had been interrupted by applause in two hours.” The talk was sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia.
On November 19, 2014, former U. Illinois professor Steven Salaita, who was fired by the University of Illinois for his bigoted tweets on Jews and Israelis, spoke at Columbia in an appearance sponsored by several university institutes including the Center for Palestine Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. The tweets that led to his dismissal at Illinois included claims such as: “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say anti-Semitic shit in response to Israeli terror” and “Never has the courage of Palestinians and the cowardice of their occupiers been so obvious for the world to see. #48March #Gaza.”
On March 10, 2014, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hung a banner reading “Stand for Justice, Stand for Palestine” on Barnard Hall as part of its Israeli Apartheid Week. The banner, an advertisement for Israeli Apartheid Week, depicted Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip without any internal borders, buttressing SJP’s goal of destroying the Jewish state. After Jewish student groups complained about the banner, charging that its content was intrinsically anti-Semitic and that its placement directly in front of Barnard Hall implied university endorsement, it was ordered removed and a new banner policy for all groups was instituted.
During October 2010, Columbia officially opened the Center for Palestine Studies, the first American university to dedicate an institute to the study of Palestinian Arabs. Specifying that its mission is “supporting and defending the academic freedom of students, faculty and schools in the Occupied Territories,” the Center makes no pretense of intellectual objectivity and makes clear through its events and the faculty it hires that it supports the BDS movement which was designed to further the goals of terrorist groups like Hamas to delegitimize, weaken and destroy the Jewish State.
The original co-directors of the Center were Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi and Barnard College professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. Khalidi is known for his extreme hostility to Israel which he has called “racist” and “basically an apartheid system in creation.” El Haj has condemned academic researchers in Israel, claiming that the work of archaeology in Palestine/Israel is a screen for the “ongoing practice of colonial nationhood” and that the assumption that ancient Israelite kingdoms were once located in the land that constitutes modern-day Israel is a “pure political fabrication.”
The official Center website states that it was created to honor “the specific scholarly legacy of Professor Edward Said at the university where he taught for forty years.” The late Edward Said was a Columbia professor who preached in his academic writing and his extra-academic activities that Israel was both illegitimate and also a colonialist state. He was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Palestinian National Council until 1991 when he resigned because he thought Yasser Arafat’s policies were too moderate towards Israel.
Events hosted by the Center have included a speech from BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti, who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, on “Palestine’s South Africa Moment?” and a Teacher’s Workshop on “Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine” which included the false Hamas series of maps—a form of cartographic genocide which depicts the invasion and colonization of Arab “Palestine” by the Jews—on its event poster.
On September 24, 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction and said that the Jewish homeland will be “wiped off the map,” spoke at Columbia at the invitation of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. During his talk, Ahmadinejad claimed that there are no homosexuals in Iran, raised questions about the factuality of the Holocaust, and urged the audience to investigate “who was truly involved” in the September 11 terrorist attacks, implying that Jews were responsible
During 2004-2005, Columbia Professor Joseph Massad, who teaches in the department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), was accused by several Jewish students of making anti-Semitic remarks and treating them unfairly because they refused to criticize Israel. One Israeli student who had previously served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stated that Massad asked him in class how many Palestinians he had killed. Massad reportedly told another student, “If you’re going to deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my classroom.”
Massad has described Israel as a “Jewish supremacist and racist state” and stated that “[e]very racist state should be destroyed.” He has also said that “it is only by making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give it [Israel] up.”
DePaul University
DePaul University is not widely recognized for its promotion of Jew hatred, but the Catholic university located in Chicago has a big anti-Semitism problem. When a tenured DePaul professor dared to defend Israel in a non-campus publication last spring, it sparked a hew-and-cry from numerous student groups and university departments who held rallies calling for him to be censured. The DePaul Faculty Council then passed a resolution in defiance of the principle of academic freedom which condemned the professor’s statements as “factually inaccurate” and characterized them as advocating “war crimes and ethnic cleansing.”
DePaul is home to a chapter of the Hamas-linked student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which hosts an annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus to promote Hamas propaganda and delegitimize and demonize Israel. The chapter has also hosted numerous events featuring anti-Semitic speakers who promote the Hamas-funded, anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and have promoted the so-called “Great Return March” which was actually a Hamas-led attack on Israel’s borders. DePaul SJP also held a fundraiser on behalf of convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh and led the effort to pass a campuswide referendum urging the University to divest from “companies that profit from Israel’s discriminatory practices and human rights violations.”
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In August 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine at DePaul promoted a Chicago-area event with Janna Jihad, a 13-year-old who is billed as “Palestine’s Youngest Journalist ‘Reporting from the Front Lines.’” Jihad is a relative of the terrorist Ahlam Tamimi who planned and helped carry out a Sbarro pizzeria suicide bombing 18 years ago. The news site Legal Insurrection describes the teenager as having “been groomed for years by the Tamimis to succeed her cousin Ahed Tamimi as the youthful, innocent face tasked with hiding the clan’s murderous hatred of Israel.”
In May 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine at DePaul University held its annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus. The apartheid week is part of a national campaign to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. During the week, SJP displayed an “apartheid wall” plastered in Hamas propaganda including a map of Israel with a Palestinian flag covering it, suggesting that the entirety of Israel belongs to Palestine, again delegitimizing Israel.
In April 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine organized a rally to attack a gay, Jamaican immigrant professor who voiced contrary views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in an off-campus publication. That professor, Dr. Jason Hill, wrote in The Federalist that Israel has the “moral right to annex all of the West Bank” and argued that “There can be no such thing as legitimate ‘Palestinian Territory’ in a geographic region legally seized in a defensive war instigated by a foreign aggressor.” SJP’s response was to call for the Dr. Hill’s censure by the university and demand that he undergo mandatory “racial sensitivity training.” At the anti-Hill rally, SJP members threw flyers over stair bannisters and shouted chants including “Jason Hill, you can’t hide, we know you want genocide!” DePaul SJP issued a joint statement with other campus groups including United Muslims Moving Ahead, DePaul Socialists, Students Against Incarceration, CAPA, Lambdas and the College Democrats in which they objected to a pattern of “”racist, anti-Palestinian, xenophobic, sexist and Islamophobic”” statements made by Hill.
While the DePaul Administration tepidly defended Prof. Hill’s right to free speech, the Faculty Council passed a highly irregular resolution which “condemns in the strongest possible terms both the tone and content of Professor Hill’s article, and affirms the claims that it expresses positions that are factually inaccurate, advocate war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and give voice to racism with respect to the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Arabs generally.” One DePaul faculty member who opposed the faculty vote censuring Hill wrote that the Faculty Council violated its own bylaws in several different ways including by failing to provide proper notice of the vote and by allowing the author of the proposal to censure Hill to direct debate over his own resolution. SJP at DePaul held a Celebratory Dinner/Iftar to celebrate the fact that “#HillWasCensured.” “We celebrated the power and impact of the student’s collective action against hate,” read SJP’s announcement. SJP also thanked its cosponsors for the dinner which included several university departments and other student organizations including, “International Studies, Islamic World Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Art Media and Design, and Political Science.”
In February 2019, SJP at DePaul held a “Palestinian Legislation Teach-in” to protest anti-BDS legislation in the U.S. Congress. Protest signs displayed at the event demonized and delegitimized Israel. These signs included ones condemning “Israeli apartheid” and promoting the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel. One sign claimed that the Israeli company Sabra (which makes humus) “is made from Palestinian blood,” a form of anti-Semitic blood libel.
In January 2019, SJP at DePaul hosted an event titled “Chicago to Palestine Delegation: Report from the Frontlines.” Multiple speakers at this event demonized and delegitimized Israel. One speaker said, “I can’t even tell you the number of reports of beatings, psychological torture or physical torture, as well as sexual abuse of children [by the Israeli military]…When we defend the people who have given their lives to the liberation of their homeland we’re defending the very right for the people to resist the continued ethnic cleansing and genocide of [the Palestinian people].”” Another speaker claimed, “the construction of Jewish settlements, illegal Jewish settlements, in Jerusalem in particular, but in Palestine as a whole is very strategic…Some people…ask what excuses do the Israelis use to steal land in the first place….And the answer is that Israel has specific policies and specific laws designed to legalize the confiscation of land…All of these policies of land theft, settler expansion and overall oppression in Jerusalem [are] within the context of what’s called the greater Jerusalem plan…”
In November 2018, SJP at DePaul held a “Palestine 101 Teach-In.” The event description promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel and lauded the “Great Return March” which was actually a Hamas-led attack on Israel’s borders.
During its May 2018 “Israeli Apartheid Week,” DePaul SJP distributed flyers on the campus quad which demonized the Jewish state and falsely claimed that the founding of Israel resulted in “”~5,000,000 Palestinians Killed.”” Advertisements for the rally featured a drawing of Israel contained within a Palestinian flag, implying that all of Israel belongs to Palestine and denying the Jewish right to self-determination. The ads also falsely claimed that “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.”
In January 2018, SJP at DePaul held a rally and march through campus to protest President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Signs held by the protestors demonized and delegitimized Israel. One sign featured an outline of the borders of Israel with the word “Palestine” scrawled repeatedly throughout, implying that all of Israel is Palestine. A speaker at the protest claimed that “”The U.S. is the primary political and financial sponsor of Israeli settler terror, land theft, and military occupation of Arab land and all of historic Palestine.””
In May 2016, SJP at DePaul issued a press release objecting to an art exhibit on campus sponsored by the Midwest Consulate of Israel. The press release demonized Israel, claiming that the exhibit “disguises the active apartheid settler colonial state of Israel as one of concordance and peace in our student library.” It added, “there is nothing Vincentian, humane or productive about showing the figure of Catholicism engaging with zionists, war criminals and human right abusers” and “The exhibit ignores the many discriminatory laws, illegal settlements and human rights violations against Palestinians and ultimately normalizes the brutal military occupation and colonization of Palestine by the Israeli state.”
In February 2015, DePaul SJP held a fundraiser to benefit convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted by an Israeli military court in 1970 for her involvement in two fatal terrorist bombings.
In May 2014, the student body at DePaul passed a campuswide referendum urging the University to divest from companies “that profit from Israel’s discriminatory practices and human rights violations.” The referendum was part of the Hamas-funded BDS campaign against Israel which aims to weaken and isolate the world’s only Jewish state.
DePaul University is the academic home of Professor Taurean Webb, an adjunct professor of Black History at the University and a featured speaker at the 2018 American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference. AMP has been unmasked in congressional testimony as a front group for Hamas which funnels Hamas funds into promoting the BDS movement on American campuses. Webb is the author of the infamous “Journey Toward Justice” training program which has been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups as theological anti-Semitism. The training program teaches that the creation of Israel was “evil” and a “structural sin” and claims that American Jews have exaggerated the evils of the Holocaust in order to harm African-Americans.
Pitzer College (Claremont Colleges)
Pitzer College is a small private liberal arts college in Southern California. One of the Claremont consortium of academic institutions, the school promotes itself as celebrating “cultural diversity and intercultural understanding.” But in recent years this intercultural understanding has become remarkably intolerant of Jews and their homeland of Israel. Last spring the Pitzer College Council attempted to impose the Hamas-funded and anti-Semitic BDS movement on the College by voting to suspend the study abroad program at the University of Haifa in Israel. When the College’s president vetoed the discriminatory measure, he was rewarded with calls for his censure and claims that he was “weaponizing institutionalized Islamophobia.” The Pitzer Student Senate also promoted the BDS movement by passing a budgetary amendment prohibiting the use of Student Activities Funds to pay for goods or services from companies or organizations associated with Israel.
The Pitzer chapter of the Hamas-linked organization Students for Justice in Palestine is highly active, holding frequent events during which speakers spread Jew hatred by demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and promoting the genocidal BDS movement. The chapter has also targeted Jewish students with illegal “mock eviction” flyers on their dorm room doors. Jewish students on campus report receiving “threatening and bigoted messages” and a mezuzah, a Jewish prayer box, was stolen from a student’s door.
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In March 2019, Pitzer SJP erected an “apartheid wall” on campus which demonized and delegitimized Israel and spread false Hamas propaganda about the Jewish state. The wall was part of SJP’s “Palestine Freedom Week,” the college’s version of “Israel Apartheid Week” which is an international hate movement to promote Jew hatred and pro-terrorist propaganda. Advertisements for the week claimed that students would “learn more about Zionist violence.” The Facebook event page promoting the wall stated that “Each panel of the mock apartheid wall contains images, facts, and statistics about Israeli occupation and Zionist violence…”
In March 2019, the Pitzer College Council, a governing body consisting of students, faculty and staff, attempted to impose the Hamas-funded and anti-Semitic BDS movement on the College by voting to suspend the study abroad program at the University of Haifa in Israel. The measure passed by a vote of 67-28, with 8 abstentions. Pitzer College President Oliver then vetoed the measure and issued a statement explaining his belief that the College as an official entity should not take an official position on the highly controversial Israel/Palestine conflict.
University of Haifa President Ron Robin issued a statement asserting that “The Pitzer boycott is particularly misguided given the fact that at University of Haifa, 35 percent of our students are Arabs, and that our Israeli and Arab students work together harmoniously on extracurricular activities and community service. This is diversity, coexistence, and tolerance at its finest.”
Robin added “Further, such boycotts meet the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism by ‘applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’ Sadly, the Pitzer College Council today gave its seal of approval to contemporary anti-Semitism.”
President Oliver’s decision not to suspend the study abroad program greatly angered many student groups on campus, resulting in further actions and anti-Semitic reactions. The Pitzer College Student Senate passed a resolution to censure President Oliver and demand that he reverse his decision. Claremont College SJP released a statement further demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and promoting the Hamas-funded and genocidal BDS movement against Israel. The statement claimed that President Oliver “affirmed his support not only for the University’s study abroad program with Pitzer College, but also for Israel’s deeply racist and violent policies towards the Palestinian people” and added “Oliver is callously weaponizing institutionalized Islamophobia that is embedded in the domestic and foreign policy of the United States, and manipulating its language and purpose for the intent of his pro-Israel agenda…The overwhelming vote in favor of suspending the study abroad program indicates that Oliver and his Zionist ideologies stands in the minority within the Pitzer community, and he is able to wield his disproportionate amount of power in order to impose them.” Claremont SJP also started a petition that garnered over 1200 signatures calling on President Oliver to rescind his veto.
Three Claremont Jewish organizations also released a statement sharing their concern about “threatening and bigoted messages that members of our community, on both sides of the debate, have received.” The organizations noted that “a Jewish student leader who has been a prominent opponent of the Haifa motion was targeted by menacing emails and had their name placed on a hate site.” The statement however went on to echo Hamas talking points by claiming that “There is no question that Palestinians live under occupation and are subject to discrimination.”
On March 3, 2019, Pitzer College SJP put out a press release objecting to a college-sponsored talk by Dr. Einat Wilf on “Zionism in the 21st Century.” The press release claimed that Dr. Wilf should not be allowed to speak because she “has constantly undermined, mocked, and disputed the existence of the right of return, has called it ‘Arab propaganda’, and has even written a book called ‘The War of Return.’ Wilf has called for the shutdown of the UNRWA because she believes that Palestinians who are living in the West Bank and Gaza cannot be considered ‘refugees.’” SJP’s press release also promoted the anti-Semitic trope that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “spends millions of dollars each year to buy U.S. political power and support for continued Israeli aggression, militarism, violence, and surveillance against the Palestinian people.”
In April 2018, the Pitzer Working Group on Israel Palestine received funding from the Office of the President to assist in holding an event titled “Perspectives on Colleges and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Speakers at the event made statements delegitimizing Israel, with one calling the Jewish state “a textbook example of apartheid,” and another claiming that “Israel is currently solidifying its hold on the apartheid regime that exists over the Palestinians… I think the situation is much worse in Palestine [than] in South Africa… in contrast [to South Africa] Israel actually wants to rid itself of the Palestinian burden.” Speakers at the event also promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel and the so-called “right of return” for Palestinians which would destroy Israel’s status as a Jewish state.
In March 2018, a mezuzah (Jewish prayer box) was stolen from a student’s dorm.
In April 2017, the Pitzer College Student Senate passed a budgetary amendment prohibiting the use of Student Activities Funds to pay for goods or services from companies or organizations associated with Israel. The amendment was a measure of support for the genocidal and Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel. No advance warning was given about the vote which occurred on Easter Sunday which was also the sixth day of Passover, resulting in many student senators being absent from the meeting.
Also in April 2017, Pitzer SJP erected a mock “apartheid wall” promoting the Hamas-funded BDS movement on campus. When a pro-Israel student responded by flying an Israeli flag from the roof of a campus building, SJP released a statement demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and echoing the false Hamas propaganda claims that Israel promotes aggression against the Palestinians. “This flag shows the ideological underpinnings of Zionism, a settler-colonial project to lay claim to Palestinian indigenous land without acknowledging the human rights abuses, the violence, the massacres, the apartheid, and the walls that are necessary to sustain this project…We hope that throughout the rest of IAW this year you attend our events, listen to our message, and think critically about this 20 foot flag that was hung in an attempt to cover up the horrors of Zionist violence,” claimed the statement.
In March 2016, Jewish students at Pitzer College reported being targeted with mock eviction flyers in violation of university regulations. The students felt that flyers were posted on their dormitory doors specifically because they were Jewish.
Wayne State University
Wayne State University, the alma mater of notorious freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, has only very recently begin to attract attention for promoting Jew hatred on campus. The attention the university is now receiving for promoting anti-Semitism is well-deserved. Leading members of Wayne State’s chapter of the Hamas-linked organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have repeatedly taken to social media to curse the Jews in both English and Arabic, and to promote anti-Semitic caricatures and Zionist conspiracy theories about the Jews controlling the media.
Wayne State SJP holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid” hate week on campus to spread Hamas propaganda and attempt to draw parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany, a classic form of anti-Semitism. The chapter has also praised numerous terrorist leaders including Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) member Leila Khaled, who helped orchestrate several airline hijackings. Wayne State SJP has also provided a platform for numerous campus speakers who promoted the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, an insidious attempt to weaken and destroy the Jewish state.
Instances of Jew Hatred:
Wayne State University’s chapter of the Hamas-linked hate group Students for Justice in Palestine hosts an annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” intended to demonize and delegitimize Israel. During the 2017 iteration of this hate week, SJP members posed in front of their “mock apartheid” wall which featured a quote often attributed to Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels stating “If you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes the truth.” The word “truth” is then crossed out and replaced by “politics” which is also crossed out and finally replaced with the word “Israel.” The word “Israel” is depicted as having red blood droplets dripping from it, a form of blood libel, a classic form of anti-Semitism. The wall also promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel, a genocidal campaign to weaken and destroy the Jewish state.
The official Facebook page for Wayne State SJP demonizes and delegitimizes Israel and calls for the Arab “right of return” which would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. The page reads, “Students for Justice… is committed to ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Separation Wall… It calls for respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.”
Wayne State SJP has repeatedly commemorated Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat on the anniversary of his death. One post in 2017 included a quote from Arafat intended to delegitimize and threaten Israel which stated “The victory march will continue until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem and in all of Palestine.”
WSU SJP has also posted images of artwork honoring terrorist Leila Khaled, a member of the terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who helped orchestrate multiple airline hijackings.
In February 2017, Wayne State SJP hosted the event “Resisting Trump’s Foreign Policy” with speaker Phyllis Bennis. During her address, Bennis delegitimized Israel and promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel. She also expressed support for eliminating Israel as a Jewish state, saying “…then you wouldn’t have Israel as a Jewish state. Yeah. Right. Why is that such a weird idea?””
In November 2016, WSU SJP used social media to promote the cause of convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh who was later convicted of immigration fraud when attempting to gain U.S. citizenship.
Wayne State SJP has repeatedly delegitimized Israel by denying outright that Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish state. In October 2016, SJP tweeted a picture of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with the caption “Victory of Palestine against Israel: Jerusalem Holy Site Declared Muslim, Not Jewish, in United Nations Resolution.” After President Donald Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocated the U.S. embassy there, WSU SJP shared a video on Facebook featuring Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claiming that “Jerusalem is a city that is Palestinian, Arab, Christian, Islamic and the eternal capital of Palestine.“
A March 2018 investigation into Wayne State SJP launched by the Canary Mission, an organization which exposes hatred and anti-Semitism, found that 13 officers and activists associated with the organization expressed hatred against Jews and Israel on social media. These expressions of hate consisted of cursing Jews in both English and Arabic, praising terrorism, and drawing parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany.
Summer Baraka, the founder and former president of WSU SJP posted on twitter in Arabic, “May Allah curse the Jews, and that’s all.” She also tweeted, in Arabic, “we want a revolution that protects our nation and erases Israel.”
Sherin Shkoukani, a WSU SJP officer, tweeted many anti-Semitic comments including “I’m about to fuck this big nose mother fucking Jew in second if she keeps talking” and “once a Jew always a jew [laughing emojis] aka once a dumbass fuck always a dumbass fuck.”
Former WSU SJP President Mayssa Masri turned to social media to express anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. “We need to open our eyes to who controls the media. We need to open our eyes to #WhiteSupremacy and #Zionism” she tweeted. She also tweeted “There are more Jewish terrorists in the U.S than Muslims. Have you ever seen a headline that read ‘Jewish terrorist’? EVER?”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wayne State University is the alma mater of notoriously anti-Semitic freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Tlaib has promoted the Hamas-funded and genocidal BDS movement against Israel, stating “I personally support the BDS movement,” and defended Ahed Tamimi, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who assaulted an IDF soldier and voiced her view that “everyone must” attack Israeli Jews by means of “stabbings, martyrdom-seeking operations [i.e. suicide bombings], throwing stones.” When Tamimi was then imprisoned by Israeli authorities, Tlaib wrote that it was “Absolutely inhumane to target a young girl for fighting against racist policies,” without mentioning Tamimi’s exhortations to violence and terrorism.
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill
The extent and ferocity of Jew hatred at our nation’s academic institutions was put on full display last spring at a three-day conference on Gaza which was held at UNC-Chapel Hill. Numerous speakers at the conference praised and promoted the Hamas initiated-and-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and an official conference entertainer even amused the audience with what he titled “my anti-Semitism song.” That the conference was sponsored by over a dozen official university academic departments highlights the vast scope of UNC’s Jew Hatred problem.
UNC-Chapel Hill also fosters an active chapter of the Hamas-linked hate group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which in recent years has sponsored events promoting BDS, propagandizing for Hamas, and demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. UNC SJP also spoke out in defense of radical freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar, in the wake of Omar’s indefensible and anti-Semitic comments about how congressional support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.”
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In April 2019, anti-Semitic posters were discovered to have been placed on bookshelves and tables in the Davis Library on UNC’s campus. The flyers referred to “an evil Jewish plot” and urged readers to “do everything you can to fight the silent covert Jewish attempt to enslave and kill good Americans.”” Rabbi Zalman Bluming, Executive Director at Chabad of UNC and Duke, noted that, “It is particularly disconcerting that this reprehensible incident occurred as Jews are preparing to celebrate the Passover Holiday which represents freedom and unity.”
In March 2019, UNC’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies cosponsored an infamous three-day conference with over a dozen university academic departments as well as the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies titled “”Conflict Over Gaza.”” The conference provided numerous demonstrations of anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist sentiment including a UNC student audience member who praised the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah as the “Palestinian Avengers.” Several speakers including anti-Semite Linda Sarsour and author Laila El-Haddad praised the Hamas-initiated-and-funded BDS campaign against Israel and demonized and delegitimized the Jewish state. Perhaps most egregiously, the conference featured an entertainer Tamer Nafar who addressed the audience from the stage stating, “This is my antisemitism song… don’t think of Rihanna when you sing it, don’t think of Beyonce, think of Mel Gibson [audience laughter]. Go that antisemitic… let’s try it together ’cause I need your help. I cannot be antisemitic alone. [Sings refrain] Oh! I’m in love with a Jew, I fell in love with a Jews [Audience repeats refrain multiple times]… Her skin is white and mine is brown. She was going up, up, I was going down down.[Audience repeats refrain]. You [audience members] look beautifully anti-Semitic.” Since $5000 in federal grant monies were allocated toward the conference, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has launched an investigation into whether UNC and Duke violated the conditions of that grant by holding an event showcasing explicit anti-Semitism.
On February 22, 2019, well known anti-Semite and former Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour presented the keynote address at the UNC Minority Health Conference. Sarsour took advantage of the opportunity to promote the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel.
On February 18, 2019, SJP at UNC posted a message of support for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in the wake of the Congresswoman’s much-derided comments which promoted anti-Semitic tropes including the idea that Jews use their financial influence to gain governmental support for Israel. “We stand in solidarity with Ilhan Omar,” SJP posted, alongside a longer statement attempting to defend Omar’s claims.
In April 2018, the UNC chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine erected a mock “apartheid wall” on campus. Slogans painted on the wall promoted the Hamas-funded and genocidal BDS movement against Israel and also portrayed the infamous series of false Hamas propaganda maps which purport to show the Jewish colonization and takeover of Israel.
In an April 2018 letter-to-the-editor of the Daily Tar Heel, UNC Students for Justice in Palestine demonized Israel and promoted the BDS movement by arguing that American police forces should cease all exchanges of ideas and tactical training with the Israeli military. “Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank has essentially been a 50-year experiment of how to come up with the most effective way to suppress, humiliate, and deprive a native population from living a dignified life,” the letter claimed.
In March 2016, UNC SJP hosted Laila Al-Arian, daughter of Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida who was indicted and pled guilty in 2006 of conspiring to aid the terrorist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The event also involved a screening of the film, “USA vs Al-Arian.” The film was promoted by SJP this way: “Is Al-Arian a threat to national security or is his First Amendment right to free speech at the heart of this case? At this time of heightened anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment, the film USA vs. Al-Arian is a sober reminder of the vulnerability of Arab Americans and Muslims living in the US and all of our civil rights.”
In March 2016, UNC SJP re-posted a link from anti-Israel activist Noura Erakat which celebrated the GS4’s decision to divest from Israel, thereby supporting the Hamas backed and funded BDS movement.
In December 2015, UNC SJP shared a video on social media about Israel’s security fence, which reduced Jewish deaths from terrorist attacks by more than 1,000 in its first year. The video labeled the security fence an “Apartheid Wall” and falsely claimed that its key purpose is not security but rather to occupy more Palestinian land.
On November 18, 2015, UNC SJP hosted a screening of the anti-Israel film “Occupation 101” which falsely claims that Israel is occupying Palestinian land. According to the Amcha Initiative, “The film contains several anti-Semitic themes, including that Israel is guilty of ‘ethnic cleansing;’ that Israel’s actions against the Palestinians are a form of colonialist aggression; and that Jews in America wield excessive power over American foreign policy.”
In October 2015, UNC SJP held a “Vigil for Palestine” on campus. The Facebook invitation for the event demonized and delegitimized Israel, accusing the Jewish state of a “violent military occupation” and claiming that “The recent spike in violence exposes the ugly reality of the occupation,” without making any mention of the Palestinian acts of aggression and terrorism provoking the Israeli response.
On March 10, 2015, UNC SJP promoted “Buycott” and BDS apps on its Facebook page. These apps make it easier for consumers to boycott Israeli products, and support the Hamas promoted and funded BDS movement against Israel.
In February 2015, disgraced former University of Illinois Professor Steven Salaita, who was fired for making anti-Semitic tweets, spoke at UNC on “Academic Freedom and the Corporate University.” During his address, Salaita demonized Israel, accusing it of war crimes and mass slaughter and also delegitimized Israel, accusing it of settler-colonialism. Salaita’s speech was sponsored by several UNC academic departments and also by SJP and by the group Faculty for Palestine.
On January 29, 2015, SJP at UNC-CH staged a mass walkout of about 70 students from a pro-Israel event hosted by Christians United for Israel which featured speaker Dumisani Washington. SJP’s refusal to engage and ask questions at a pro-Israel event echoes Hamas’s policy of anti-normalization under which they will not negotiate or agree to civil relations with groups supporting the state of Israel.
University of California-Irvine
The campus of UC Irvine is high atop nearly any list for promoting Jew hatred and demonizing Israel and Jews on campus. Nearly a decade ago, in February 2010, UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union made national news when it disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren on campus, which resulted in the arrest of nine of its members. The MSU members refused to cease their disruption, even after an administrator repeatedly begged for civility. For this heinous attack on free speech, Irvine MSU received only a one-year suspension, which was ultimately shortened to one semester after the organization and its lawyer appealed.
During the intervening years, despite feeble administrative attempts to intervene, Jew haters and supporters of anti-Israel terrorism have continued to push their agendas on the southern California campus. UC-Irvine’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine has twice been sanctioned and put on probation for disrupting pro-Israel events—a small step in the right direction—but it has yet to face more serious consequences.
Anti-Israel protestors have significantly and repeatedly disrupted pro-Israel events in violation of campus regulations, chanting slogans promoting terrorism such as “Intifada, Intifada/long live the Intifada” and “when people are occupied/resistance is justified.” Irvine hosts an annual Israeli Apartheid Week which includes the display of a mock “apartheid wall” papered with pro-terrorist propaganda. One section of a recent apartheid wall glorified convicted hijacker Leila Khaled, a member of the murderous terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and also depicted a map of Israel with the entire nation labeled as “occupied territory.” A recent speaker brought to campus by the Muslim Student Union demonized Israel and prayed to Allah for “the courage to fight Zionism.”
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In May 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine at UC-Irvine, a group that has previously been placed on probation for violating university regulations and attempting to suppress the free speech of Jews and pro-Israel students on campus, held an event featuring notorious San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi. The purpose of the event was to commemorate the “Nakba,” an Arabic term meaning “catastrophe” which is used by Hamas and its allies to describe the creation of Israel. During her speech, Abdulhadi demonized and delegitimized Israel and promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel. Abdulhadi also claimed that “it wasn’t really the Holocaust survivors who [hurt] the Palestinians… It was Zionist leaders from the 19th century from Poland [and] Russia, who actually set up the Zionist movement and helped the Zionization of Palestine and actually abused the memory and misused the memory of the Holocaust and misused anti-Semitism in order to push for a specific agenda.”
Also in May 2019, SJP at UC-Irvine participated in a so-called “Anti-Oppression Week,” the last day of which functioned as a mini “”Israeli Apartheid Week”” such as are held on other campuses to demonize the Jewish state. SJP erected a mock apartheid wall on campus featuring images showcasing Israel’s alleged mistreatment of the Palestinians. SJP members at the event chanted pro-terrorist slogans including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a genocidal call to destroy the whole of Israel and “Intifada, Intifada we support the Intifada!”
Another “Anti-Oppression Week” event organized by the Irvine chapter of the Muslim Student Union featuring a sermon by Sheikh Osman during which he demonized Israel and the IDF, claiming that “[The IDF] military sprayed herbicides all over [Palestinian] plants before the harvest so the Palestinians … have to throw away their entire crop…” and praying “I ask Allah … to give us the courage to fight Zionism. I ask Allah … to free the Palestinians from the oppression… We are here as anti-Zionists… We are against a foreign body, a foreign entity, coming into our land occupied by existing people. … We will fight you, we will speak out against you, we will boycott you, and we will raise enough awareness until you will fall.”
In January 2019, the School of Humanities, School of Social Sciences and the School of Social Ecology at UC-Irvine co-hosted a screening and discussion of the film “1948: Creation and Catastrophe.” The film demonizes the founding of Israel and the concluding commentary from San Diego State University Professor Farid Abdel-Nour states: “Here’s the question: Was the establishment of the state of Israel so important, that no matter what price Palestinians had to pay for it, it was worth it? Or, was there something fundamentally wrong with a project that can only be realized by displacing hundreds of thousands of people? If the establishment of the state of Israel was a historic wrong, than the question now arises, how does one redress this wrong? [End video].”
A May 2018 event hosted by the UCI College Republicans with Reservists on Duty (a pro-Israel group of IDF reservists) was disrupted by an organized group of anti-Israel protestors who brought a bullhorn (a violation of campus rules without a permit) and screamed genocidal and pro-terrorist chants such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” and leveled blood libel accusations at the ADF by chanting “IDF, What do you say? How many kids have you killed today?” Despite the presence of UCI’s Dean of Students and at least three police officers at the event, the chanting continued for at least three minutes, temporarily shutting down the event, until at last the protestors were removed. After their removal, the protestors continued chanting pro-terrorist slogans from outside the room including “Long live the intifada,” a reference the Hamas campaign of terrorist violence against Israel. After the event, the speakers and organizers left under a police escort.
UC Irvine declined to conduct a student disciplinary hearing, stating, “to our knowledge, the protestors were not UCI students, so there will not be a student conduct review.” The campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine was still on probation at this time for their disruption of a similar pro-Israel event the previous year, and so it is thought that outside protestors were brought to the campus in their place so as not to further risk the organization’s status on campus. The University did not investigate whether the campus chapter of SJP coordinated with the outside protestors to disrupt the event, although pro-Israel students on the campus consider this coordination likely. And it appears that the protestors, after being escorted out of the event, were not even asked for their names, and did not face arrest or any other negative consequences, facts that seem like gross oversights given the likelihood that the protestors were openly cooperating with UCI’s SJP chapter.
In May 2018, UCI SJP posted a link to a Lebanese singer’s hymn “honouring victims of Israeli massacres in Gaza” in response to deaths resulting from the Hamas led attack on the Gaza border known as the “Great Return March.” In doing so, UCI SJP was taking the Hamas propaganda position that Israel is at fault for deaths resulting from this Hamas attack on its borders.
In early May 2018, UCI SJP held “Anti-Zionism Week” on campus. The poster for the week depicted Israel with the words “We Will Return” in large letters over the whole of the nation, an image meant as a genocidal statement toward Israel’s Jews. The featured speaker for the week, Anis Zubi, was described as a “Nakba survivor.” “Nakba” is an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that is used by Israel’s enemies and terrorist adversaries to describe Israel’s creation in 1948.
An event hosted by UCI’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) featuring a panel of Israeli Defense Reservists in May 2017 was disrupted by a contingent of approximately 40 protestors from UCI SJP—some clothed in t-shirts stating “UC Intifada,” a call to terrorist violence—who shouted slogans urging violence and the destruction of the Jewish state. SJP’s chants included: “Israel, Israel what do you say, how many kids have you killed today?” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” A woman identified as a former president of SJP yelled, “These people are occupiers, they’re colonizers; you should not be allowed on our f–ing campus!” The head of SSI also reported that assistance from campus police was inadequate. Despite every expectation that SJP would attempt to disrupt the event, campus police showed up late and then proceeded to lead the Israel supporters out through a crowd of protestors, increasing the risk of attack against them. The next day, one of SJP’s student leaders bragged that the organization had gone “to disrupt the event” in order “to let them (the panelists) know that we refuse to allow the normalization of their presence here.”
In September 2017, UC Irvine’s Office of Academic Integrity and Student Conduct released a statement explaining that SJP would be sanctioned “with disciplinary probation for two academic years, ending June 16, 2019” for disrupting the SSI event. Although this decision did result in some limited consequences to SJP, it did not prevent the disruption of pro-Israel events over the following year. And SJP successfully appealed some terms of the sanctions.
In May 2017, UCI SJP held “Anti-Zionism Week 2017: On This Land.” The week included the erection of a mock “apartheid wall” threatening terrorist violence against Israel. Panels included in the wall declared “When people are occupied, resistance is justified” and the quote “The colonizer brings pure violence in the homes and minds of the colonized”—both justifications of anti-Israel terrorism. Other panels advocated for the Hamas-backed BDS movement against Israel and accused Israel of genocide.
An anti-Trump rally held on campus in January 2017 morphed into a denial of Jewish self-determination when a student speaker declared to the crowd, “I want you guys to be about anti-Islamophobia; I want you guys to be anti-Zionism; and I want you guys to be anti-Israel because Trump didn’t come up with these things on his own, he got the idea of the wall from Israel.” The student then led the crowd in a chant of, “from Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go.”
On May 18, 2016, Irvine SJP succeeded in disrupting a pro-Israel film screening that was co-sponsored by the campus chapters of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) and Hillel. SSI reported on its Facebook page that, “Tonight one of our events was disrupted by certain student organizations. They were in violation of UC Regents Hate Speech policy and were shouting various anti-Semitic statements. The police had to escort attendees out of the event for their own safety.” Video of the event reveals students shouting their support for anti-Israel terrorism, screaming “Intifada, Intifada/long live the Intifada,” “displacing people since ‘48/there’s nothing here to celebrate!” and “when people are occupied/resistance is justified.” Following this event, UCI SJP was put on probation until March 2017.
During May 2-5, 2016, Irvine’s chapters of SJP and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) collaborated with other student groups to hold an “Anti-Zionist Week” on campus. The week featured a huge mock “apartheid wall” which celebrated anti-Israel terrorism in multiple panels. One panel depicted an image of convicted hijacker Leila Khaled holding a gun with the slogan “Women Leading Resistance” below it. “Resistance” is a euphemism for anti-Israel terrorism. Another segment of the wall repeats the slogan, “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.” Another segment depicted a map of Israel with the entire nation labeled as “occupied territory,” an allusion to Hamas’s genocidal goal to rid Israel of its Jews. The wall also endorsed the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel.
In addition to the apartheid wall, Irvine’s anti-Zionist week featured a mock funeral procession for a Palestinian “martyr.” One of the students participating in the funeral procession held a sign proclaiming “Long Live the Intifada.” Another event featured a speech by anti-Israel Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss who comes from a fringe Jewish sect. During his address, Weiss resorted to anti-Semitic caricatures, claiming that Zionism is “a Madoff scheme” and Zionists use their “billions and billions of dollars” to intimidate “the media” and “any politician who dares …to show too much sympathy for the Palestinian cause.” He also claimed that “newspapers are conglomerates that are owned or controlled by Zionist organizations.”
On February 19, 2016, SJP held an event titled “Unlearning Zionism: A Workshop and Discussion” with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. The Facebook page for the event featured side-by-side photos labeled “Warsaw 1944” (an image of the Warsaw ghetto) with “Gaza 2009,” implying an equivalence between the Holocaust and the treatment of Palestinians.
On October 12, 2015, an event featuring former Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak at Irvine was interrupted by 20-30 anti-Israel protestors, forcing police to interrupt the event and escort Barak and the other attendees out of the event.
During May 4-7, 2015, UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union staged an “Anti-Zionism Week” on campus. As part of the week’s activities, SJP and MSU sold T-shirts emblazoned with “UC Intifada,” openly stating their allegiance to Jew-killing terrorists. The back of the T-shirt read “End Settler Colonialism” (a core Hamas fiction) and depicted a genocidal Hamas map which falsely alleged that an Arab nation called “Palestine” existed in 1947 and was over-run by Jews.
On April 23, 2015, a pro-Israel festival held by Anteaters for Israel (the “Anteater” is the school mascot) was disrupted by anti-Israel protestors, who used their bodies and large signs to block a walkway and loudly chanted pro-terrorist slogans such as “Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” an attempt to whitewash terrorism.
In March 2015, UC-Irvine professor Rei Terada was among the signatories of an op-ed appearing in the Daily Californian urging the administrators of the UC system to support the Hamas-sponsored BDS movement against Israel.
In December 2014, UC Irvine SJP held an event in defense of terrorist Rasmeah Odeh, with law professor Marjorie Cohn, calling Odeh “our comrade and sister.” Odeh was convicted by an Israeli military court in 1970 for her involvement in a supermarket bombing which killed two Jewish students: “Join us as we host Marjorie Cohn, Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former President of the National Lawyer’s [sic] Guild and current Deputy Secretary of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers as she discusses the implications of the U.S.’s targeting of our comrade and sister, Rasmea Odeh.
In February 2010, UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren on campus, which resulted in the arrest of nine of its members (and another two from the UC-Riverside chapter). MSU members stood up one at a time and shouted accusations at Oren including, “Mr. Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech” and “Israel is guilty of 101 war crimes.” The MSU members refused to cease their disruption, even after an administrator repeatedly begged for civility and ultimately scolded the students: “Shame on all of you!” The tactics used by the MSU are in keeping with Hamas’ prohibition on the “normalization” of relations with Israel and supporters of Israel. For its violation of campus rules of civility, the MSU received a one-year suspension, which was ultimately shortened to only one semester after the organization and its lawyer appealed.
University of South Florida
The University of South Florida is well known as the former academic home of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian, who asked attendees at a rally to donate $500 to sponsor a Palestinian terrorist to kill Israeli Jews. In the years since Al-Arian was ultimately fired from the university, USF has continued to serve as a haven for Jew haters and promoters of the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. BDS proponent and terrorist supporter Ali Abuminah spoke at the university with the support of numerous academic departments. Jew hater and former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour also spoke at USF to promote BDS.
USF’s chapter of the Hamas-backed hate group Students for Justice in Palestine has also held many events demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and promoting BDS. The university’s student government voted for a resolution supporting BDS by a wide margin. In 2018, the only Jewish student senator on campus resigned from his position after receiving anti-Semitic death threats when he opposed a resolution condemning President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In October of 2018, Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of South Florida held a screening of the film “The Occupation of the American Mind.” According to the Facebook event page, the film purports to explain “how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces to shape American media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in Israel’s favor.” Narrators in the film demonize Israel, claiming its government is guilty of “murderous attacks,” “terrorism,” and “acting like a monster,” while defending actual terrorism against Israel as “resistance.”
Also that October, members of SJP at USF erected a mock “apartheid wall” on campus which promoted the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. One panel of the wall featured a woman stating “we will return,” a call for the so-called Palestinian “right of return” which would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.
In January 2018, the only Jewish student senator in USF’s student government resigned from his post. His resignation letter cited death threats and ongoing anti-Semitism among his reasons for leaving office. “”It is clear to see that being Jewish and a Zionist comes with repercussions in Student government ranging from death threats to being alienated in all aspects,” stated the letter. “I have experienced so much hatred spearheaded by senate leadership in the past few months and I will be doing everything in my power to hold you accountable, it is clear to see that it’s simply not possible to do this in senate.”” When the senator had opposed a pro-BDS “Hands Off Jerusalem” resolution he received a death threat on social media which stated, “You will die by our hands and we will take Jerusalem and fill Palestine with your impure blood. Jerusalem is for us, and death for you.”
In January 2018, members of the student government at USF took the community by surprise when they suddenly added a resolution to the body’s agenda which would condemn President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Titled “Hands off Jerusalem,” the resolution was closely based on the wording of a similar resolution proposed by the Palestinian American Congress, a non-campus organization with 10,000 members that has lauded terrorist Palestinian leaders. The USF resolution also contained anti-Semitic language demonizing Israel and denying Jews self-determination. It asked the student senate to state that it “”refutes the Israeli justification for Palestinian occupation under the religious context of a ‘promised land’ that is repeatedly provided,”” and also condemned the Balfour Declaration, a statement by the British government supporting the creation of a Jewish state.
In October 2017, USF’s pro-BDS coalition, which calls itself USF Divest, hosted anti-Israel activist and (now former) Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour on campus. Sarsour is well known for her promotion of the Hamas-funded BDS movement and for using her platform to make anti-Semitic comments and promote anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories. USF Divest also hung a banner on campus reading “United We Divest,” to promote the BDS movement.
In April 2017, USF SJP held “Al Nakba Remembrance Day.” The “nakba” is an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that enemies of Israel use to describe—and therefore delegitimize—the founding of the Jewish state. T-shirts distributed at the event called for the Palestinian “right of return,” a policy that if enacted would eliminate Israel as a Jewish homeland.
In February 2016, anti-Israel activists disrupted a pro-Israel campus talk that was presented by two Israeli students who were brought to the campus by the organization StandWithUs. The demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and sported banners demonizing the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) while interrupting the speakers repeatedly and hurling insults such as “murderers” and “child killers” against them. It was necessary for the Israeli students to be escorted out by the police.
In January 2016, the USF student government succeeded in passing a resolution supporting the Hamas-initiated-and-funded BDS movement against Israel. After the student body president and vice president vetoed the resolution, a new resolution was introduced in a different form that did not require the signatures of the executives to pass. It also passed by a vote of 32-15.
In August 2015, anti-Israel activist Ali Abuminah, who is known for his frequent statements demonizing Israel and his support for the Hamas-funded BDS movement, spoke at USF. Abuminah was brought to campus with the sponsorship of several university departments, including those of English, Ethnic Studies, Geography, History, and Political Science, as well as the Center for Asian Studies. During his address, Abuminah promoted the BDS movement, a genocidal and Hamas-funded initiative to weaken and destroy Israel.
The University of South Florida is notorious for harboring Sami Al-Arian, even while he was being investigated by the FBI for promoting terrorism. Al-Arian served as the North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a specially designated terrorist organization. He was videotaped urging attendees at a rally to donate $500 in order to sponsor a Palestinian terrorist who would then kill an Israeli Jew. Though Al-Arian had been under investigation for terrorism by the FBI since 1996, it wasn’t until September 2001, after proof of the allegations against him was offered on air by Bill O’Reilly, that USF finally suspended him—with pay. When the USF president and board of trustees moved forward with the process of firing Al-Arian, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution condemning the move as an affront to academic freedom. He ultimately was not terminated from his position until February 2003. Al-Arian eventually pled guilty to a charge of conspiracy to assist PIJ, a specially designated terrorist organization. When he refused to comply with subpoenas to testify in other federal cases, he was again imprisoned and later put on house arrest and was eventually deported to Turkey in 2015.
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