[Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes on its website how, during the Nazi era, the National Socialist German Student League “directly targeted Jewish students” as well as Jewish faculty members who had not already been purged from their teaching positions. “Paramilitary student groups often interrupted lectures, provoked skirmishes, and physically intimidated Jewish students,” the website added.
The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization’s chapters on numerous campuses across the United States are today’s version of the Nazi National Socialist German Student League. SJP serves as a shill for the fascist Hamas terrorists and their cohorts who want to see the Jewish State of Israel destroyed and kill as many Jews as possible.
SJP storm troopers harass Jewish students to shut down their expression of their Jewish identity and pro-Israel opinions on campus. Jews are regularly subjected to anti-Semitic slurs, intimidation, and exclusion from campus activities. SJP and other Hamas sympathizers have turned Zionism, the ideological foundation for the creation, development, and protection of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, into a dirty word connoting “racism,” “apartheid,” and “colonialism.”
According to a 2022 study published by AMCHA Initiative, entitled Campus Antisemitism & the Assault on Jewish Identity, “anti-Zionist student groups like SJP, whose members are very often implicated in the perpetration of verbal and physical acts that target Jewish students for harm, were the largest overall contributor to behavior that threatened Jewish identity, as well as the only reliable contributor to incidents of suppression, which involve active efforts to silence Zionist expression on campus.”
Shamefully, school administrators concerned about fostering “inclusion” and preventing “micro-aggressions” against other minority groups turn their backs on Jewish students, who are the frequent targets of inflammatory hate speech and are ostracized because of their religion and beliefs.
Following Hamas’s invasion of Israel and massacres of Israeli civilians on October 7th, Students for Palestinian Justice organized rallies in support of Hamas’s invasion and savage attacks on Israeli civilians. SJP described Hamas’s massacres and abductions of Israelis as “a historic win for Palestinian resistance,” and called for “Not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.” SJP chapters distributed a toolkit stating that “liberating colonized land is a real process that requires confrontation by any means necessary.”
SJP called for its chapters to organize “National Day of Resistance” protests on October 12th. Pro-Palestinian students at numerous universities and colleges around the country followed SJP’s marching orders, aligning themselves in boisterous rallies with Hamas’s mission to destroy the Jewish State of Israel.
As just two of many examples, Hamas sympathizers at George Mason University chanted “they’ve got tanks we’ve got hang gliders glory to the resistance fighters,” “smash the Zionist settler state,” and “tear down Israel’s border wall.” At Brooklyn College, Hamas sympathizers shouted, “globalize the intifada,” “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free,” and “hey hey ho ho Israel has got to go.”
Jewish students who did not want to risk confrontation and harassment at pro-Israel rallies decided to keep their grief over the loss of lives on October 7th and their prayers for Israel’s survival to themselves.
Jewish students say that they are often afraid to share their thoughts and concerns about the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict not only at demonstrations on campus, but also in class to avoid reprisals from vehemently pro-Palestinian professors.
Indeed, radical faculty members, who teach the Marxist oppressor-oppressed, colonizer vs. colonized ideology in their classrooms as the only acceptable way of thinking, brand Zionists as the oppressors/colonizers and the Palestinians as the oppressed/colonized victims. These anti-Semitic professors treat any students who dare to speak up in favor of Israel as evil co-conspirators in Israel’s alleged “oppression” of the Palestinian people.
Some of these professors have formed “Faculty for Justice in Palestine” groups on various campuses to stand “in solidarity” with Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestinian “resisters.”
NYU faculty members, for example, have just formed their own Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter, which they decided to do in light of the ongoing siege of Gaza and what they charge is “murder of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government.” Their statement, while at least condemning “the brutal killing of civilians that occurred in Israel on October 7th,” placed the ultimate blame on Israel for Hamas’s brutal violence against innocent Israeli civilians:
“We recognize that Israeli state violence against the Palestinians subject to its control has its roots in a well-documented history of colonization, stretching back at least 75 years, that has produced what human rights groups today describe as an apartheid regime, characterized by ongoing processes of occupation, expropriation, ethnic cleansing and the denial to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza of the most basic human and civil rights – and of their right as a people to self-determination. These are the root causes of the current wave of violence; history did not begin on October 7, 2023, however horrific the massive killing of Israeli civilians on that day was.”
Faculty members at some campuses went to extreme lengths to vocalize their own brand of anti-Semitic hate in comments they made about the October 7th slaughter and abduction of Jews. Take Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies, ethnicity, race, migration, and religious studies at Yale, for example. “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity,” she posted on X (formerly Twitter). In Grewal’s twisted mind, beheading Jewish babies, shooting Jewish families to death at point blank range, raping women, and abducting children and the elderly are legitimate acts of “resistance” and “solidarity.”
Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, told students at a pro-Palestinian rally following the October 7th atrocities that he found Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians to be “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Apparently, the image of burnt and mutilated bodies of dead Jews, including of beheaded babies, turns Mr. Rickford on.
Aside from likeminded faculty members, one of Students for Justice in Palestine’s closest comrades in arms is a group that calls itself Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) – a gross misnomer if ever there was one.
SJP neither represents the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community nor does it stand for peace. It is a militant pro-Palestinian advocacy group that collaborates with Students for Palestinian Justice to demonize Israel and Jews who support Israel at campuses and elsewhere around the country.
Not only does JVP endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. It has honored and supported Palestinian terrorists and declared that “the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state.”
Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, claimed that the root cause of the genocidal massacres and abductions that Hamas cheerfully carried out on October 7th was “75 years of Israeli dispossession and discrimination and state violence on Palestinians. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock, you know, and while the Israeli government may have just declared war, its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago.”
Ms. Fox has turned reality and the history of what actually happened back then upside down. The Palestinians and Arab neighboring countries started the war on Israel to snuff it out as soon as the Jewish state became independent in 1948 – a war which Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists have continued to wage to this day.
The Palestinians wasted the opportunity for an independent state of their own more than 75 years ago by rejecting the United Nations’ compromise partition proposal – the original two-state solution- that Israel accepted. Moreover, the Palestinians squandered opportunity after opportunity since then to have their own independent state by repeatedly walking away from Israel’s generous offers for genuine peace. But truth means nothing to ideologues like Ms. Fox who are willing to make excuses for the actions of terrorists dedicated to their mission of destroying Israel and slaughtering Jews in genocidal rampages.
Ms. Fox took her pro-Palestinian militancy directly to Capitol Hill on October 18th where she organized a Jewish Voice for Peace rally that included a sit-in at the Capitol Rotunda. “We shut down Congress to draw mass attention to the US complicity in Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians,” JVP posted on X (formerly twitter).
Will the several hundred provocateurs who were arrested at the Capitol be punished with anything more than a slap on the wrist for attempting to shut down Congress? Not likely. Only MAGA Republicans, whom the Biden administration considers to be domestic terrorists, are dealt with harshly under the Biden administration’s double standard of “justice.”
President Biden loves to condemn those whom he calls “MAGA extremists” as dangers to democracy. But he has failed to denounce specifically the extremist Hamas sympathizers advocating for terrorists who pose a genuine threat to democracy in Israel and the United States.
Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib, whom JVP has endorsed, whipped up the crowd of pro-Hamas protesters who remained outside the Capitol. The Democrat Squad member knowingly spread disinformation by repeating the discredited allegation that Israel was responsible for the lethal explosion at a hospital in Gaza that allegedly took hundreds of Palestinian lives.
Video and audio evidence prove that an errant rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was the cause of the tragedy. Yet Rep. Tlaib has doubled down on her lies, engaging in the 21st century version of blood libel.
Tlaib should be censored and stripped of her committee assignments, at minimum. The Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other groups shilling for Palestinian terrorists should lose their non-profit tax-exempt status.
Any pro-Palestinian students found to have harassed any Jewish students or interfered with their right to peacefully protest in support of Israel should be immediately expelled. And any faculty members who incite hatred and harassment of Jews for standing with their homeland should be reprimanded and suspended by the presidents or chancellors of their colleges and universities, if not fired outright.
Those who lie and deliberately distort history in defending Hamas’s sheer evil are as evil as Hamas itself.