by Matthew Vadum
“From the moment the SJP conference began, they were not given a moment's quiet.”
More than 200 pro-Israel activists picketed what Haaretz described as the "largest ever pro-Palestinian student conference held at UCLA," letting members of the Hamas-backed anti-Semitic hate group Students for Justice in Palestine know that their radicalism and violence against Jews and Israel supporters will no longer go unchallenged on campus.
Groups supporting Israel gave the campus Left a taste of its own medicine. Turn-about is, after all, fair play.
Students Supporting Israel (SSI), Reservists on Duty (RoD), and other pro-Israel groups came together in Los Angeles to protest a recent weekend conference. Literature documenting the role of Students for Justice in Palestine as a front for the terrorist organization Hamas was provided by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC). The DHFC literature documented the fact that the Hamas-funded, anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement on campus is a terrorist operation, created by Hamas, funded by Hamas and advancing Hamas’ chief political operation: the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) claimed 500 people registered for the conference, which was titled, “Radical Hope: Resistance in the Face of Adversity.” When it announced the conference, the group bragged about disrupting pro-Israel events, stating, “Other instances of our perseverance include disruptions of pro-war, Zionist, and racist guest speakers.” The anti-Semitic SJP’s agenda is demonizing Israel spreading genocidal lies about its creation, and justifying Hamas terrorist attacks on civilian populations.
Amit Deri of Reservists on Duty said his group demonstrated using flags and signs provided by DHFC outside the conference from the Friday it began through Sunday, Nov. 18. RoD is an Israeli nonprofit created by Israeli reserve soldiers who wished to combat the BDS movement and anti-Semitism.
“From the moment the SJP conference began, they were not given a moment's quiet,” Deri said.
“This is the first time that so many pro-Israeli organizations are collaborating and are able to raise an effective demonstration at the annual conference of SJP at UCLA,” he said. “SJP were afraid to get their heads out of the hall where the demonstration took place.”
“If we will be strong enough on every campus, SJP will not dare to be violent against Jewish students!”
Two members of Students Supporting Israel infiltrated the conference, walking onto the main stage. One held up a sign reading "Jews are indigenous to Judea" while the other held an Israeli flag.
SSI posted a video of the infiltration on Facebook, accompanied by this statement: “Students Supporting Israel refused to stay silent as SJP hosted their national conference at UCLA, promoting the destruction of Jewish self-determination and inciting violence against an entire group of people.”
Promoting the conference, SJP’s national website likened support for Israel to Nazism. The site lectured readers that: “There is a massive power disparity between Zionism and its victims. Zionism is perverse in all aspects of Palestinian life and aims to destroy Palestinian existence and culture.”
“Zionism,” according to the website, “is ethnic cleansing, destruction, mass expulsion, apartheid, and death.” Israel is guilty of “cementing apartheid into law” and “the everyday oppression of Palestinians at all levels of life.”
The website implicitly praised Muslim terrorists, stating that Palestinians have “stared Zionist violence and death in the face and pushed forward––even when the outcome of such defiance was uncertain, or even when an unfortunate, grim outcome was almost certain.”
National Jewish organizations, UCLA students and alumni, and the Los Angeles City Council condemned the conference. Nearly 35,000 people had signed a petition at time of writing calling on UCLA’s administration to cancel the event “to help prevent the next Pittsburgh,” a reference to the murder of 11 Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue during Shabbat morning services on Oct. 27.
Students for Justice in Palestine “is “a terror-supporting, anti-Semitic network that harasses and intimidates Israel-friendly students and operates with autonomy and impunity at scores of colleges and universities across the United States,” according to Dan Diker of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
“For nearly two decades, SJP has promoted Hamas lies and propaganda in order to establish a beachhead of support for anti-Israel terrorists on American campuses, resulting in a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents and the harassment of Jewish students,” said David Horowitz Freedom Center founder David Horowitz.
The strong showing on the UCLA campus was unprecedented, according to Horowitz.
“We have been saying they are an arm of Hamas for years but other groups have been reluctant to join us,” he said. “This is a big breakthrough and our years of agitation have paid off.”
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block’s behavior earned him a spot on DHFC’s “Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror.”
The other nine are:
Lee Bollinger, President, Columbia University
Angel Cabrera, President, George Mason University
Beverly Warren, President, Kent State University
Leslie Wong, President, San Francisco State University
Carol T. Christ, Chancellor, University of California-Berkeley
Howard Gillman, Chancellor, University of California-Irvine
Robert Zimmer, President, University of Chicago
Renu Khator, President, University of Houston
Lee Bollinger, President, Columbia University
While Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California system, failed to make the list, she has nevertheless supported SJP activities on campus.
She ignored a letter David Horowitz wrote her in 2016 urging her to kick out Students for Justice in Palestine.
In the letter Horowitz explained that SJP “continues to accept funding and aid through the Hamas front group American Muslims for Palestine” while it holds events “preaching the genocidal values of Hamas on university property.”
“These privileges would normally be denied to groups that preach hatred of any other ethnic group, let alone one that supports barbaric terrorists who slaughter men, women and children with the goal of cleansing the earth of people who disagree with them.”
“In light of these facts, we ask that you withdraw all university privileges granted to SJP and other campus groups who promote the genocidal Hamas agenda, and that you put an end to the terrorist influences which have infiltrated your campus and which threaten the security not only of Jewish students on your campus, but of all Americans.”
Since Block became chancellor in 2007, the University of California Los Angeles campus has become a hotbed of pro-terrorist, anti-Israel activity.
As Frontpage documented in a recent report, Block and the campus administration have gone to great lengths to support SJP, bully pro-Israel students, and counter the efforts of the David Horowitz Freedom Center to expose the fact that SJP is a terrorist front group.
For example, in March 2015, when DHFC’s Stop Jew Hatred on Campus campaign put up posters depicting SJP as “#JewHaters,” Block referred to the posters as “another example of intolerance” and likened them to swastikas found on Jewish fraternity buildings.
In May of this year anti-Israel protesters, including with UCLA’s branch of SJP, disrupted a pro-Israel event, ripping down flags and shouting pro-terrorist slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is recognized as a genocidal call to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. UCLA officials condemned the protest, but said they couldn’t do anything about it unless a police report was filed—a step they had never suggested to pro-Israel students whose event was disrupted. And then when more than a dozen pro-Israel students filed official police complaints with campus police, SJP still didn’t face repercussions for disrupting the pro-Israel event.
BDS activists hounded the university’s graduate student body president, Milan Chatterjee, out of office. In his resignation letter he wrote that he had been “relentlessly attacked, bullied and harassed by BDS-affiliated organizations and students.” But when DHFC conducted a postering campaign on campus to expose the links between SJP and Hamas, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang sent a mass email to the 50,000 members of the UCLA community describing the posters as “repulsive” and claiming they produce “chilling psychological harm” that “cannot be dismissed as over-sensitivity.” Kang also called the posters “hateful” and “thuggish” and asserted they relied on the “tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially tinged fear.”
Block has allowed professors at UCLA to preach hatred of Israel.
At a May 2018 SJP event titled “Teaching Palestine with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi & Dr. Robin Kelley,” Kelley, a history professor at UCLA, claimed that “the Nakba” (an Arabic term opponents of Israel use to characterize Israel’s founding as a “catastrophe”) was “the ethnic cleansing operation that turned three-quarters of the Palestinians into refugees and transformed the top-ranked wealth and even the intellectual and cultural capital into the hands of Israelis. So it's like a gangster operation. Armed robbery sanctioned by the world.”
In April 2016, UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies hosted an address by Noga Kadman on her book, Erased From Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948.
During her talk, Kadman accused Israel of carrying out a “massacre” of
the Palestinians, a claim that is historically false and a staple of
anti-Israel propaganda.In November 2015, UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a conference on “Palestine and Pedagogy” at which speakers likened Israel to the Nazis, praised anti-Israel terrorism, and expressed support for the BDS movement against Israel. UC Irvine Professor and Director of the UC Institute for Humanities Research Theo Goldberg claimed Israel practiced “eliminationist racism” such as used by the Nazis and said Israelis view Palestinians as “vermin, cockroaches, rats, snakes … that take boots on the ground to get rid of,” and of possessing “a commitment to purification.” Goldberg’s libels also included the false claim that Israelis produce “snuff films” featuring the deaths of innocent Palestinians which go viral resulting in “an orgasm of feeling” for Israelis.
This is not an exhaustive list. Click here to read the full report.
Holding UCLA to account is vitally important, according to David Horowitz.
“American universities like the University of California allow these terrorist allies to use their authority and prestige to lend this genocidal offensive an aura of respectability,” he said. “Our campaign intends to expose SJP and other supporters of BDS as fronts for Hamas and to press universities to cease their funding and support of these organizations.”
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272113/pro-israel-students-stare-down-hamas-backed-sjp-matthew-vadum
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