Click here to learn more about the Freedom Center’s Stop the Jihad on Campus Campaign.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Brandeis University’s Mandel Center for the Humanities recently hosted Gideon Levy. Levy, the author of articles such as, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”, is yet another in a line of Students for Justice in Palestine speakers who have justified the racist murder of Jews.
Last year, SJP’s Israel Apartheid Week included Max Blumenthal, an advocate of the ethnic cleansing of Israel, whose views even critics of the Jewish State find horrifying. A Forward reviewer wrote of his previous book that, “It could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”
One of Blumenthal’s attacks on Israel was cited by the Neo-Nazi gunman who tried to murder Jews outside the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City. Blumenthal was deemed too hateful by the German Communists who had invited him to speak. And yet he was not too extreme for Brandeis’ SJP.
Jewish students at Brandeis are forced to cope with a campus where Students for Justice in Palestine campaigns for Rasmieh Odeh, who took part in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket before the Sabbath. Leon Kanner and Edward Joffe, two Hebrew University roommates who had come there to buy canned food, the way so many college students do, were torn to pieces by bombs hidden in coffee cans.
This murderous act of hate recalls for many Jewish students the recent ISIS massacre of Jews at a Kosher supermarket in Paris that also took place before the Sabbath. They have to ask themselves whether SJP Brandeis would also support a terrorist who murdered them the way that Ezra Schwartz was just killed.
Would Brandeis permit a campus group to campaign for of any of the racists who bombed black churches in the sixties? If not, why does it allow Students for Justice in Palestine to do the same thing?
At Brandeis, Students for Justice in Palestine has carried on an unrelenting campaign of hate and demonization of Jews and the Jewish State. SJP even protested Israel Peace Week. If SJP at Brandeis is incapable of even tolerating a peace week, is there anything of the Jewish State it can coexist with?
While Brandeis SJP officially claims it “does not have a stance” on the one-state solution, a euphemism for the destruction of Israel, its Facebook page has advocated for it. This dog whistle for genocide is typical of Students for Justice in Palestine groups which use chants such as “from the river to the sea” and false maps as codes for the necessity of destroying the Jewish State and its Jewish population.
Events like these are why Brandeis has been listed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as one of the top ten colleges that are friendliest to terrorists and the most hostile to Jews; especially those Jews who are an organic part of their national and international communities.
This is a sad development for an institution named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
It was Justice Brandeis who said, “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists”. Through its hosting of the SJP hate group, Brandeis is preventing its Jewish students from living fulfilled lives as good Americans and better Jews. It is making the expression of their full Jewish identities incompatible with attendance.
Brandeis University joins three notorious University of California campuses, Irvine, San Diego and Los Angeles, where conflicts between Jewish students and the SJP hate groups have made them notorious to Jewish families deciding where their children should attend college.
Also on the list are San Francisco State University, Rutgers, Columbia, Harvard, the University of New Mexico and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. These colleges were listed by the Freedom Center as part of its Stop the Jihad on Campus campaign because the hate spread on their campuses must stop.
In the words of David Horowitz, “These terrorist supported organizations are afforded campus privileges, including university offices and the right to hold events on campus grounds that would be denied to any other group that preached hatred of ethnic groups or supported barbaric terrorists who slaughter men, women and children as part of a demented mission to cleanse the earth of infidels.”
Numerous reports have exposed the hateful ideology of Students for Justice in Palestine. Harassing Jewish students who identify as part of their community continues to be the hate group’s agenda.
Together with the Muslim Students Association, a group which has contributed disproportionately to Al Qaeda as chapter president after chapter president joined it and other Islamic terrorist groups, these organizations often act as the political campus arm of terrorist groups like Hamas and the PFLP, celebrating terrorists such as Leila Khaled and Rasmieh Odeh as icons while promoting BDS and calls for the destruction of Israel through the so-called one-state solution.
This isn’t activism. It’s terrorism.
Like their terrorist counterparts, they choose disruption over dialogue, harassing, intimidating and shouting down Jewish students and speakers. On these ten campuses, the SJP and MSA hate groups have become particularly virulent forces of destruction selling a distorted narrative that meets the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism for its demonization of Israel and the Jewish community.
SJP has no end goal except the destruction of Israel. It is not fighting for any other final outcome. Its various forms of activism are aimed at harming Israel to provide aid and support to its favorite terrorists.
When it brings speakers like Max Blumenthal to campus, who advocate for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel, and celebrates terrorists like Rasmieh Odeh who helped kill Jewish students, SJP Brandeis makes the university complicit in the murder and mass murder of Jews. By housing and funding SJP, Brandeis has provided space and support to those who dehumanize Jews and justify their murders.
And that must stop.
In 1915, one hundred years ago, Louis Brandeis spoke powerfully of how Zionism had endowed Jewish students with the courage to stand up to anti-Semitism at their universities, quoting, he said, “Until then they had been despised and often ill-treated… If struck or spat upon by ‘Aryan’ students, they rarely ventured to return the blow or the insult. But Zionism gave them courage.”
It is this courage, this identity that the SJP bigots want to strip away from today’s Jewish students. While their heroes, like Rasmieh Odeh, murder Jewish students, they seek to make Jewish students a “despised” group, an object of hate, who have been too intimidated to even defend themselves.
The Freedom Center’s work aims to help students find the courage to defend themselves while confronting the universities whose support for hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine has revived the old anti-Semitism even in a place named after the man who dedicated his life to fighting it.
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