On December 9th, 2023, the Students for Justice in Palestine Chapter (SJP) at UCLA published an Instagram post claiming that “This fall, Palestinian, Muslim, SWANA and pro-Palestine” students have faced “targeted and violent harassment.”
All forms of discrimination should be condemned, and students who come forward with reports of harassment should warrant investigation and action. However, SJP is a known perpetrator of anti-Jewish bigotry, both on UCLA’s campus and beyond. Their inversion of the real bigotry that Muslim students are facing serves to portray SJP as an untouchable victim, whereas they repeatedly target Jews and Israelis.
Here’s the reality to put SJP’s allegations in perspective:
Since the October 7th massacre, the ADL has reported a nearly 400 percent increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes. As CAMERA’s David Litman points out, the United States has witnessed four times as many anti-Jewish crimes as anti-Muslim and anti-Arab crimes combined.
We have also seen this trend on campus. Since 2023, the AMCHA Initiative has documented 523 incidents of anti-Semitism involving SJP. Additionally, according to AMCHA’s 2022 report on college anti-Semitism, the presence of anti-Zionist groups and faculty boycotters of Israel on campus strongly predict the occurrence of threats towards and suppression of one’s Jewish identity.
Yet, university administrators have refused to address the rise in campus anti-Semitism, and instead allowed SJP to operate with impunity.
For instance, just a month before a congressional hearing regarding anti-Semitism on campus, SJP chapters across the United States participated in a Hamas-coordinated “Day of Resistance”, celebrating the vile actions of genocidal terrorists on October 7. In the weeks that followed, Jewish students witnessed calls for anti-Jewish violence, chants calling for ethnic cleansing, and even violent protests against Jews on campus.
On December 5th, nearly two months after Hamas brutally attacked, murdered, raped, and kidnapped innocent Israeli citizens, lawmakers held a congressional hearing with three Ivy League presidents to respond to the rise in anti-Semitic incidents on their campuses.
At the hearing, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania gave vague, evasive responses that proved that they fail to recognize anti-Semitism as what it is: the blatant hatred of Jews.
When Magill was asked whether or not chants in support of Jewish genocide violate the University of Pennsylvania’s code of conduct, she repeatedly refused to give a yes or no answer.
She rather explained that when “speech turns into conduct,” only then will it be categorized as punishable harassment. According to Magill, this “conduct,” such as the rape, murder, and genocide that the “speech” calls for, must be manifested for punishment to incur. Unfortunately, these verbal harassments seem excusable, so long as they are aimed towards Jews.
In a disturbingly clear incident of anti-Semitism on the UPenn campus, a pro-Palestinian crowd ignited smoke bombs and called for an “intifada revolution” while harassing the owner of a Jewish-owned restaurant, a threat that would likely not go unnoticed if directed toward another minority group, yet was left unaddressed by Magill.
The first and second intifadas were times of violent uprisings against innocent Israelis and Jews, and this phrase has morphed into a call for the murder of Jewish people globally.
When Sally Kornbluth was asked the same question, she answered elusively by explaining that anti-Semitic speech would only be looked into if it were “pervasive and severe”. Are posters in support of ethnically cleansing the land of Israelis “from the river to the sea” not pervasive and severe?
Since when is promoting the murder and expulsion of a people considered anything less than deplorable? Sadly, Jewish students at MIT have to endure these threats while their president turns a blind eye.
When asked whether Harvard applicants who use anti-Semitic rhetoric, such as calling for an “intifada,” (now former) President Gay responded by emphasizing Harvard’s policy of free speech. As I established above, this chant is a clear call for anti-Jewish violence, and Gay’s complete disregard of this meaning is extremely troubling.
Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s political leader, even emphasized this in a recent speech following the October 7th attacks, saying that “the [Palestinian] state will come from ‘resistance’, not negotiation,” proving that they will continue to terrorize Israelis until all of the Jews are out of their own land, which is echoed by the chants of Harvard’s BDS group.
This pattern of responding evasively to simple questions is indicative of a deeper issue – that these university leaders fail to even recognize anti-Semitism, much less address its uptick since October 7.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block has publicly acknowledged that the SJP chapter at UCLA can make “deeply objectionable” and “personally hurtful” comments, yet has allowed them to target Jews and Israelis with their bigoted propaganda and violent chants, glorify terrorism, and violate UCLA’s Student Group Conduct Code, which prohibits the “use or display of a weapon,” and “harassment in any form.”
If Harvard can uninvite a speaker for disagreeing with their views on transgender rights, rescind an offer of admission to a student who made racist comments years ago, and cancel a class on controversial policing techniques, why can’t these leaders even recognize that such incidents and activities are anti-Semitic?
The hypocrisy is glaringly evident: whereas threats against any other minority group are effectively dealt with, university leaders fail to even see the harassment of Jewish students as a problem, let alone meet them with the proper consequences. Jewish students can struggle with this double standard, ask all the right questions, and constantly wonder “why?”
The most horrifying part of it all is that we already know the answer.
The views expressed in this post reflect the views of the author(s) and not UCLA or the ASUCLA Communications Board.
