Last Sunday, students on the campuses of UCLA, UC Irvine, Drake
University, the University of Virginia, DePaul, and UMass Amherst encountered
anonymously planted posters depicting the nationwide campus group Students for
Justice in Palestine (SJP) as being complicit in Jew-hatred and Arab terror. It
was an eye-opening act of guerrilla activism against an organization that
should be officially labeled a hate group.
One of the two types of posters depicts a photograph what appear to be a
pair of masked, armed Arab militants looming over a kneeling man with a bag over
his head – presumably a hapless informant or Israeli sympathizer. The text
reads, “Students for Justice in Palestine” with the hashtag “#JewHaters” at the
bottom. The same text appears on the other poster, a photo of a half-naked
corpse being dragged along behind a motorcycle, an obvious reference to this instance of Hamas dragging the body of a suspected
Israeli sympathizer through the streets of Gaza City.
College students require trigger warnings now for anything that could
conceivably disturb their tender psyches, so this surprise, graphic exposure of
SJP’s darker side no doubt unsettled many. JStreet President William Baker at
the University of Virginia said he was “shocked” and found the posters “disturbing.” “When I saw it I
was kind of shocked,” said one UCLA student. “It’s like hate speech, directed toward this one
specific group.”
Naturally, the SJP itself has declared that the posters constitute hate
speech: “They rely on Islamophobic and
anti-Arab tropes to paint Palestinians as terrorists,” reads the group’s
statement, “and to misrepresent Students for Justice in Palestine as
anti-Semitic.” In his own statement about the
controversy, David Horowitz, who calls SJP the spearhead of anti-Israel aggression against Israel on American
campuses, described this response as
“fictional” and “typical SJP deception.”
Accusations of hate speech, of course, are the kneejerk reaction of the
left and its Islamic partners in what Horowitz calls their unholy alliance to any
opinion with which they disagree. This anti-rational, go-to tactic for shutting
down opposition was very effective for many years, but it is becoming
increasingly shrill, desperate, and impotent in the face of truth – and the
truth in this instance is that SJP is a thinly veiled hate group that actively campaigns
for the demonization and destruction of the Jewish state via economic
divestment and even terrorism, through its support for the terrorist
governments of the West Bank and Gaza.
Charges of racism and the mythical Islamophobia are a similar tactic. Evan
Scribner, treasurer for the SJP chapter at UMass, said that the posters have Islamophobic and racist undertones and make SJP
members feel unsafe on campus. “We don’t like the implications that anybody who
cares about Palestine or anybody who is a Muslim or a Palestinian or an Arab is
a terrorist or is violent,” he said. Of course that wasn’t the implication of
the posters, but the fact is, if you truly care about “Palestinian” Arabs and don’t
want to be associated with violent terrorism, don’t support the violent
terrorists of Hamas.
For a full account of the many examples of SJP’s Israel-hating
radicalism, check out the group’s profile here on the Freedom Center’s Discover the Network
website. It relates the origins, development, funding sources and connections,
and activities of SJP including the campus staging of Israeli Apartheid Week designed
to portray Israelis as genocidal oppressors. That annual campaign includes
students simulating the rape or killing of pregnant Palestinian women by Israeli
soldiers, the establishment of mock checkpoints where the SJP harasses passing
students, the placement of fake eviction notices on the dormitory doors of
Jewish students, the display of “Apartheid” walls bearing images and text
accusing Israeli Jews of genocide, and the harassment of Jewish students.
The Discover the Network profile further notes that support for terrorist
groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades has been
common at SJP chapters across the United States, and that some chapters hold annual
commemorations for the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And yet the response of campus newspapers to the posters so far has been,
not to investigate these actions and connections, but to circle the wagons
around Students for Justice in Palestine. The University of Virginia paper’s response to the controversy was typical: it described SJP as “an organization
advocating for human rights” and quoted SJP President Yahiya Saad as asserting
that it is a humanitarian organization – no mention whatsoever of SJP’s radical
activism, proving that serious journalism is dead and that SJP wields
considerable nationwide influence on our nation’s campuses.
As for the timing of the posters’ appearance, Vice President of SPJP Luma
Abunimer said that “in the last few days, we made an event on Facebook, Israeli
Apartheid Week,” and that the use of the word “apartheid” can elicit strong
feelings from pro-Israeli groups. Really? Perhaps that’s because smearing
Israel, the only country in the Middle East that extends full rights to Arabs and Jews alike, as the equivalent of
the defunct, racist South African regime is a disgusting lie.
Saad said that a possible response to the posters could be hanging
posters adorned with the phrase “#loveheals.” Love heals. Tell that to the Arab
and Jewish victims and survivors of terrorist attacks against the “oppressor”
Israel, including 4-year-old Adele Biton, who finally succumbed to the brain-damaging wounds she received in an Arab rock-hurling
incident at the age of two.
Caught off guard by the posters, SJP and their defenders at campus
newspapers leapt to portray the group as eager to initiate “constructive
dialogue” on the issue – in other words, they see this as an opportunity for further
obfuscation about SJP’s real aims and means. The posters themselves actually constitute
the most constructive dialogue, in that the blunt simplicity of the images cuts
through SJP’s layers of deception and gets to the heart of the matter, which is
that the true oppressor of Israeli Arabs and Jews alike is not Israel, but Arab
terrorist entities and their supporters among campus groups like Students for
Justice in Palestine.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 2/25/15)
