On Sunday night, posters targeting the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine appeared at colleges across the United States. Those posters featured pictures of members of Hamas participating in atrocities in Gaza, with the caption: “STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE #JEWHATRED.”
Members of the supposedly pro-Israel student body at UCLA, where some of the posters appeared, quickly condemned the posters as intolerant and helped SJP take them down, despite the fact that SJP is indeed a hate group linked with Hamas.
SJP students routinely chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; they cheer for the destruction of Israel and the mass murder of Jews. SJP at UCLA expressly uses the hashtag #FreeRasmeaNow in support of terrorist murderer Rasmea Odeh. The same group has hosted SJP co-founder Hatem Bazian, who allegedly raised money for Hamas, Taher Herzallah, who said that Hamas rockets “are an oppressed people’s cry for help,” and Alison Weir, who trafficked in blood libels, according to Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag.com.
Nonetheless, the Jewish community, intimidated by a politically correct notion of the world that led them to effectively roll over for the recent UCLA boycott, divestment, and sanctions from Israel movement, stood with SJP. Several Jewish student groups released an op-ed in the UCLA Daily Bruin complaining of the “malicious intent” behind the posters and the “hostility and offensive language.” They added, “there is no room for these actions or this language on our campus.”
Following suit, the chancellor of UCLA, Gene Block, sent a statement to the entire UCLA student body comparing the posters to a recent event during which members of the Undergraduate Students Association Council grilled a Jewish student on whether her religion should disqualify her from serving as a USAC Judicial Board member. Because apparently condemning anti-Semitic groups is exactly the same as actual anti-Semitism. Block wrote, “we should also be concerned that these incidents took place at all,” and vowed that the UCLA Police Department would “vigorously investigat[e] the matter of the posters,” since the First Amendment presumably does not apply at a taxpayer-funded university. Block would later admit that such speech is “constitutionally protected” and refer students to campus resources if they feel they have been “subjected to an incident of bias or hate.” He concluded:
UCLA will not be defined by intolerance. We will strive to create a community that will honor the dignity of all its members even if we struggle with one another’s ideas. We will strive to create a community in which all of us can fully take part in campus life and express our views and identities, safe from intimidation, threat or harm. Let us all work together to do the good work of creating that community.
Block issued no statement for two weeks about the persecution of the Jewish USAC applicant.
Late on Tuesday night, David Horowitz of the David Horowitz Freedom Center announced that his new Jew Hatred on Campus campaign was behind the poster campaign. He added, “I have no apologies for the posters. They were done in a sort of surprise way to attract attention, which they have succeeded in doing. I’m proud of being behind this. I hope that some of these Jewish students will wake up and join us.”
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