by Sara Dogan
The Freedom Center’s campaign against Hamas supporters at both schools has touched a nerve.
A Freedom Center campaign to raise awareness of the genocidal intentions of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and its link to the anti-Israel terror group Hamas has been met with resistance and charges of hate speech by two University of California campuses.
As part of its mission to confront increasing Jew hatred and pro-terror activities on American campuses, the Freedom Center put up posters on both campuses linking the BDS movement and campus activists whom it identified by name Hamas’s campaign of terror against Israel. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is, in fact, a Hamas-inspired and funded genocidal campaign to destroy Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. The chief campus sponsors of BDS are two university funded organizations – Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association, both of which were created by the Muslim Brotherhood. Several of the posters named prominent BDS activists – students and faculty - on each campus and exposed their alliance with the Palestinians’ genocidal war against Israel. The posters were not well-received by students and administrators at California’s public institutions of higher education. To put it mildly.
Instead university officials declared them hate speech which no place at their institutions even though Students for Justice in Palestine is an actual hate group whose sole purpose is demonizing Israel and its Jews, and supporting the propaganda campaigns of the terrorist organization Hamas whose charter calls for the extermination of the Jews.
At Berkeley, the Daily Californian reported the appearance of the posters this way: “At least five hate speech posters — with at least two naming six current and former UC Berkeley students for their involvement in either the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement or Students for Justice in Palestine — were found plastered at various sites around campus Monday.” Berkeley’s chancellor, Nils Gilman, sent an email to the entire campus community in response to the posters, quoting the Daily Californian and affirming that the university “is committed to opposing all forms of discrimination.” All forms, except that against Jews.
Members of t Students for Justice in Palestine and their supporters didn’t feel the Chancellor’s email went far enough. “They [the posters] are threatening; they are defamatory. And that kind of intimidation tactic should have no place at the University of California,” Palestine Legal attorney Liz Jackson is quoted as saying to the Daily Cal. “(The university) needs to provide protection for the students targeted.”
At UCLA, the Freedom Center’s posters inspired even more heated rhetoric and condemnation. The University’s Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang sent an email attacking David Horowitz – who officially claimed responsibility for the posters - to the entire UCLA community, which includes some 50,000 individualism, calling them “repulsive” and “personalized intimidation” and stating that they produce “chilling psychological harm” that “cannot be dismissed as over-sensitivity.” Piling on the epithets, Vice Chancellor Kang also pronounced them “hateful” and “thuggish” and claimed that they utilized the “tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially tinged fear”—in other words, that they were racist.
The Vice Chancellor began his attack with a defamatory falsehood, characterizing a similar campaign the Freedom Center had waged last year as “accusing two student organizations — the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — of being murderers and terrorists.” The Freedom Center had not accused student members of SJP and MSA of being terrorists, but of supporting terrorists, which is an easily established fact.
Freedom Center chairman David Horowitz responded immediately to both attacks. In an email to the UC-Berkeley Daily Californian, Horowitz questioned the paper’s journalistic ethics in failing to interview him before savaging his reputation for the crime of telling the truth.
Horowitz wrote:
How can you write a news column attacking me without interviewing me to get my side of the story? What kind of journalism is this? The BDS movement was inspired by Hamas and is funded by a Hamas network. Here is congressional testimony to that: http://docs.house.gov/meetings.... BDS has been characterized as an anti-Semitic campaign by such liberal figures as Alan Dershowitz, Larry Summers and Hillary Clinton. In other words, SJP supports a hate campaign against the Jews of Israel. What is offensive or intolerant or hateful about identifying the activist supporters of a hate campaign against the Jews? Why is the University of California funding a hate group like SJP and providing it with campus privileges? And why can't the Daily Cal report this story fairly, instead of loading it up in favor of the Jew haters?
Horowitz also responded to UCLA Vice-Chancellor Jerry Kang in an article titled “Reply to Slander”: “The posters did not accuse SJP of being an organization of murderers and terrorists, as the Vice Chancellor claims. They accused SJP of being ‘Jew-haters’ because they support the murderers and terrorists of Hamas, which they do… [I am calling on] UCLA to remove the campus privileges and university funding of SJP because they are a hate group and their activities routinely violate UCLA’s ‘Statement of Principles Against Intolerance,’ which [you] profess to champion.” Horowitz also challenged the Vice Chancellor’s claim that the posters constitute intimidation, stating “There is no intimidation on the posters, just a list of names of activists who support SJP and BDS…”
Horowitz continued: “This disgraceful performance by a top university official demands a retraction and apology from the University of California and some serious reflection by Vice Chancellor Kang about the hateful content of his letter and the focused, personalized intimidation directed at myself and all those involved in putting up posters he happens to disagree with,” Horowitz concluded, noting that Kang might “also benefit from a re-reading of the First Amendment and learn to live with opinions he doesn’t like.” Horowitz’s full response to Vice Chancellor Kang may be read here.
The posters are part of a larger on-going Freedom Center campaign Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus, which seeks to confront the instigators of campus anti-Semitism and refute the genocidal lies about the Jewish state spread by Palestinian terrorists and their campus allies. These lies include the claims that Israel occupies Palestinian land and that Israel is an apartheid state. These lies and rebuttals to them may be found on the campaign website, StoptheJewHatredonCampus.org.
In an intriguing twist, one of the students quoted in the Daily Californian condemning the posters has already made a name for himself in the Israel-hating community.
The Daily Cal quotes Berkeley graduate student and Students for Justice in Palestine member Kumars Salehi as stating “(Being defamed is) often going to be a death sentence for that person’s professional prospects … if you’ve been publicly smeared as a bigot.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) notes that the student, Kumars Salehi has appeared at least four times on Iran’s “Press TV” which it describes as “the Iranian government’s primary propaganda tool to promote a wide range of pernicious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in English to a worldwide audience.” The ADL goes on to note that “Press TV has provided a platform for some of the most well-known anti-Semites, including anti-Semite David Duke, anti-Semitic columnist Kevin Barrett, and Holocaust-denying book publisher Michael Santomauro, among others” and that during Salehi’s last appearance, “the program’s host described the U.S. Congress as being ‘controlled by the likes of AIPAC and the other pro-Israel lobbies.’”
In an ironic twist given the hate-filled and bigoted rhetoric they espouse, several of the campus BDS activists named on the Freedom Center’s posters plan to file an official “hate crime report” with UC-Berkeley. After years of plastering the campus in genocidal rhetoric and Hamas propaganda slogans targeting Jewish students, these BDS activists obviously can’t take the heat when the tables are turned.
Sara Dogan
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262628/jew-haters-berkeley-and-ucla-strike-back-sara-dogan
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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