Under the Obama administration, Jewish student complaints were routinely ignored by the Department of Education. But now civil rights are being taken seriously in the Trump era. And that’s bad news for bigoted leftist hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine.
An NYU pro-Palestinian group whose leader blamed Chelsea Clinton for the New Zealand mosque attacks has created a “hostile atmosphere” for the school’s Jewish students, according to a complaint.
The school has allowed “extreme anti-Semitism” to fester on the Greenwich Village campus, claims Senior Adela Cojab, 22, in a complaint filed last week with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
SJP “has caused Jewish and pro-Israel students to feel unwelcome and unsafe,” Cojab said in her complaint, which cites SJP violently protesting a pro-Israel gathering in Washington Square Park last spring. Two SJP supporters were arrested, one for assault.
Cojab told The Post she warned the university about the brewing tensions before the spring protest, and claims the administration’s complacency amounts to a violation of the federal Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in programs and institutions receiving federal money.
“I hope the university starts taking students who approach them with concerns seriously,” Cojab told The Post. “I hope they revise what it means to be a club at NYU and holds them to those standards.
“If you physically assault or continually intimidate another organization, you do not deserve to be an organization on this campus.”
The identity politics campus police claim that speech is violence. And that they need safe spaces from speech. Meanwhile they engage in actual violence.
When harassment turns violent, that’s when campus administrators should come forward. But SJP has been getting a pass across the country.
Now that may be about to change.
NYU actually honored SJP despite, or perhaps because of, its history of hate.
This year, this SJP chapter announced that it had been selected to receive a President’s Service Award, granted to organizations that “have had an extraordinary and positive impact on the University community.”
What has SJP done to have such an extraordinary and positive impact? The greatest impact they’ve had in recent months was on the passage of a boycott resolution by NYU’s student government. SJP members introduced and fought for it. That resolution, though limited in its reach, explicitly supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and made use of easily exposed propaganda.
NYU President Andrew Hamilton—presumably, the “president” in “president’s service award”—has repeatedly said that boycotting Israel, which is very nearly the sole purpose of SJP, is “contrary to” NYU’s “core principles of academic freedom” and “antithetical to the free exchange of ideas.”
Or, apparently, not.
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