By: FrontPageMag.com
Editor’s note: The following report released by the David Horowitz Freedom Center documents the malignant spread of Jew-hatred in our nation’s academic institutions. This year’s 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.
“Jew hatred is no longer solely the purview of academic outliers, those institutions known for radical activism and absurdist teachings,” the report explains. “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.”
Read the introduction to the report below and click on the links to see a profile of each school.
Campuses Already Notorious for Jew-Hatred:
- University of California-Los Angeles
- San Francisco State University
- Columbia University
- University of California-Irvine
- University of South Florida
Campuses which SHOULD be Notorious for Jew-Hatred:
- The University of Minnesota
- DePaul University
- Pitzer College
- Wayne State University
- 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 Barghouti 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.
(FrontPageMag)
