US professors are fueling antisemitic violence against Jewish students - study - Clint Van Winkle

 

by Clint Van Winkle

A report from the AMCHA Initiative links increased antisemitic violence to the US campuses to Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), showing FJP-led protests correlate with threats, attacks.

 

Anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University broke into the iconic Hamilton Hall building at Columbia University

(photo credit: GETTY IMAGES)

A report recently released by the AMCHA Initiative provides evidence that an anti-Israel faculty group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) has led to faculty-driven anti-Israel protests on campuses.

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The report states that campuses with FJP chapters have experienced more violence against Jewish students and longer-lasting anti-Israel protests, with death threats significantly higher in these locations. “Thorough quantitative analysis confirms what was painfully evident throughout the last academic year: College campuses have become a laboratory of academic-sanctioned antisemitism,” Republican political consultant Brian Seitchik told The Media Line.

“Academic administrators ignored the obvious as FJP chapters fueled a significant rise in harassment and violence for the crime of being a Jew.” Since Hamas attacked Israel last October, 120 FJP chapters have formed on US college campuses. The ten campuses with the most active FJP chapters include the University of Minnesota, NYU, UC Santa Cruz, The New School, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Columbia, CUNY, Georgetown University, and University of Chicago.

The study was co-authored by Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, both affiliated with the AMCHA Initiative. Contributors included Susan Orbach and Ilan Benjamin. Beckwith is a professor emeritus at UCLA and the co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative.

Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the AMCHA Initiative, was a faculty member in Hebrew and Jewish studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1996 to 2016. Rossman-Benjamin told The Media Line that she and Beckwith had never seen a faculty organization so closely tied to an international movement with the explicit goal of dismantling the Jewish state.

Pro-Palestinian protesters rally on campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in Stony Brook, New York, on May 8, 2024. (credit: James Carbone/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

The report details frequent instances of professor-led antisemitism on college campuses. “The rise of FJP chapters represents a dangerous new front in the battle against campus antisemitism. Faculty members, empowered by the BDS movement, are using their academic positions to organize against Israel and promote antisemitism (often disguised as anti-Zionism) on a scale we have never before witnessed,” researchers warned. “The presence of FJP chapters correlates strongly with the rise of violent antisemitic behavior on campuses, including physical assaults and death threats.”

FJP urges action against BDS groups

In a 2024 “Back to School” statement, FJP asked chapters to respond to decisions made by the BDS leadership in Palestine. “These are genocidal organizations. They are not just fighting for justice in Palestine. They are fighting to absolutely destroy, dismantle, the Jewish state and to wipe the Jews off of [the map]. … This is the nature of those groups,” Rossman-Benjamin said.

AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit group, monitors more than 600 US college campuses for antisemitic activity as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the US government. Researchers gathered data from 103 US campuses, primarily from schools on Hillel International’s list of institutions with the largest Jewish student populations.

The researchers note that FJP chapters were formed at the direction of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), part of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, which has alleged ties with at least two Iranian-backed terrorist organizations, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The researchers said that they had never seen faculty organize like this, with such a powerful international network focused on “bringing down a sovereign nation and harming its inhabitants and those who support them on US campuses, including their own students and colleagues.” They described it as an “extremely alarming development, which shows no sign of diminishing.”

“The mantle has been taken up by faculty, who are so powerful. Students are just pawns, students are foot soldiers, and students are at the bottom of the totem pole with respect to the power they have to affect change. The truth is that faculty are at the top of the totem pole,” Rossman-Benjamin said.

The report advises parents to avoid sending their children to schools with active FJP chapters, citing safety concerns for Jewish students. “The first step to correct course is a genuine acknowledgment that the FJP represents a growing malignancy on college campuses. If ignored, a new generation of students will view violence against Jews, or anyone else, as conventional behavior,” Seitchik said.

Clint Van Winkle

Source: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-823463

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