Two weeks ago in Boston,
Northeastern University suspended a student group — Students for Justice in
Palestine (NU SJP) – for an assortment of infractions against Jewish students
and those who support Israel. The stunts that got them suspended were consistent
with the strategy of anti-Israel forces at universities around the
country: Campus enemies of Israel directly target the free speech of pro-Israel
student groups by having their speakers disinvited, their members intimidated,
and their events shouted down. So it is with a fair amount of gall that SJP has
now launched a shrill campaign, aided by Massachusetts media, claiming that free
speech is a value they cherish and that theirs has been abrogated by the
University.
The reason this duplicitous campaign
has gotten a warm response in some circles has to do with a double standard in
academia and the media. When it comes to certain protected groups, free speech
is trumped by “sensitivity.” Two-thirds of universities have speech codes meant
to provide a safe environment for minority groups. The use of certain offensive
words is forbidden and the use of certain offensive symbols can shut down a
campus. However, these protections hypocritically do not extend to pro-Israel
Jews.
Anti-Semitism is defined as treating
Jews as you would treat no others. SJP attacks the only Jewish state. It does
not deny post-WWII Germans or genocidal Sudanese or Rwandans their right to
self-rule. Only the Jewish people may not have a state. SJP is an anti-Semitic
organization and anti-Semitism is the only hatred still accepted on American
campuses.
On February
16th, members of a Mississippi State University student
group vandalized the statue of Ole Miss’s first black alumnus with a
noose and a Confederate-type flag. Campus police posted a $25,000 reward for
finding the suspects, the three students were caught and the FBI is planning to
charge them with hate crimes. Their student group was suspended. The
students’ actions were widely covered and roundly condemned in the national
media.
Tori Porell’s “favorite thing ever.”
Among the infractions
that got Northeastern SJP suspended was vandalizing the statue of a Jewish
alumnus twice in two days by taping over the statue’s mouth with the message:
“Zionism Racism” superimposed over a Jewish star. Upon seeing a photo of the
vandalism posted to Facebook, the group’s president, Tori Porell, commented,
“This is my favorite thing ever.” National and local media also covered the act of
racist vandalism at Northeastern and SJP’s suspension, but in this case, media
sympathy (led by the Boston Globe, of course) was not for the victimized minority
group, but for the punished victimizer’s supposed loss of “free
speech.”
In the current campus
climate, ‘free speech” arguments are typically invoked on behalf of those who
offend and intimidate Jews, Christians and conservatives. When NU SJP marched across campus a little over a year ago shouting
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a genocidal call for the
destruction of the only Jewish state, nothing was done in response. In contrast,
when Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity members marched across campus in 2010
shouting, “No means yes, yes means anal,” Yale suspended the
frat for 5 years and the US Department of Education forced the university to
institute greater protections for female students.
When Arizona State
University’s Tau Kappa Epsilon posted pictures of themselves at an MLK party
this past January dressed in urban street clothes and sipping alcohol from
watermelon cups, the university immediately suspended the
chapter.
Yet SJP leaders have posted photos of
themselves posing with terrorists’ machine guns. They come to protests wearing
t-shirts glorifying gun violence and designated terrorist groups like Hezbollah,
Islamic Jihad, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These
terrorist groups explicitly call for the murder of all Jews and have murdered
hundreds of Israelis (and in the case of Hezbollah, Americans as well). Yet
nothing has been done to sanction these particular Northeastern University
students.
The offense that finally
earned SJP its suspension was what Northeastern terms “dorm storming” in the
student conduct list of don’ts. They entered student dorms in the middle of the
night and slipped fake eviction notices under bedroom doors telling students
that they are being kicked out for no reason, because that’s exactly what Israel
does to the Palestinians. Even the ACLU considers the violation of privacy with
the intent to intimidate and single out students to be outside the bounds of
free speech at universities. In 2013, three San Jose State University students
were charged with hate crimes for writing racial slurs on a black student’s dorm
room message board. Nobody would dare call that “free speech.”
NU
SJP protest against free speech for pro-Israel students.
Indeed,
SJP’s message
wasn’t meant for the uninvolved student, who will maybe take a half second look
at the piece of paper before throwing it away. This action was aimed directly at
Jewish pro-Israel students. The clear message was: “We who hate you can reach
you at the very door to your room. We can come back again. And we will try to
make others hate you as we do.”
While
demanding freedom of speech for themselves, SJP and its supporters are perfectly
happy to suppress the free speech of pro-Israel Jews. An SJP violation that
contributed to its suspension was the disruption of a Holocaust Awareness Week
event put on by Huskies for Israel in 2013. In this case, NU SJP actively
plotted to violate the free speech rights of Jewish students. SJP sent an email
to its members calling for a “creative disruption” of the event. The goal: “we
need to show them that war criminals are NOT welcome at Northeastern,” emphasis
theirs. At the event, SJP memberschanted slogans en-masse and disrupted the free speech of the
speakers.
Speaking to an SJP
meeting in 2013, SJP faculty advisor M. Shahid Alam braggedhow he
has made pro-Israel students in his classes afraid to argue with his anti-Israel
lectures, “because they can sense that they will get no support from the
class.”
Northeastern Law
School’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which is closely affiliated with
SJP, has put out a poorly-argued legal brief about supposed violations of SJP’s free speech
rights. Yet the brief demands the suppression of free speech rights for Zionist
groups like Americans for Peace and Tolerance:
At the same time, it is important
that groups such as ZOA and APT not be allowed to marginalize politically
oppressed student groups through hate speech. To that end, we ask the University
to adopt a more comprehensive hate speech policy that provides for
transformative justice, anti-oppression training and, at the prerogative of the
victim, disciplinary action.
(Stalin must be smiling in his
grave.)
Anti-Semitic cartoon posted by NU SJP.
The National Lawyers
Guild even invoked a standard anti-Semitic smear, claiming that Northeastern has
bowed to pressure from wealthy Jewish donors when it suspended SJP. (“No free speech
for rich Jews!”) This was echoed by NBC News “journalist” Nona Aronowitz, who
interviewed us, NEU’s Hillel director and pro-Israel students and then simply
ignored in her “report” every
one of our points which did not fit her preconceived
narrative.
On March 19th, as
Northeastern SJP held a rally demanding that the university reinstate it, a
Jewish student was watching. Here is his reaction:
I stood across the street and watched
in complete awe as they shouted messages of hate, screamed how Zionism was
racism, and that they were in no way being anti-Semitic. They continued with
their chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When I hear
that, I hear anti-Semitism, I hear a call for the complete destruction of the
Jewish state and all that they call home.
I am what they call a member of the
“Zionist war/propaganda machine,” and while I stood across the street and
watched this rally, I kept a folded Israeli flag underneath my jacket. I kept on
wanting to unfold it and hold it up high, but I was scared. I was afraid for one
of the first times in my life as I heard their chants of anti-Semitism, full of
hatred and shouting for intifada and increased violence. I was scared, but I am
even more afraid of the idea of what happens when nothing is done, when nobody
stands up.
When it comes to women, blacks,
Latinos and gays, hate speech that creates a “hostile campus environment” is
punished. Their right to live hostility-free limits the free speech rights of
those who hector them. Yet the right to hate and hector Jewish students, argue
the mainstream media and the National Lawyers’ Guild, is “protected free
speech.”
Jewish students need our help.
Brownshirt tactics cannot be tolerated even when masquerading as free speech or
academic freedom.
It is about time that the only hatred
still acceptable on college campuses – the hatred of Jews and the only Jewish
state – is treated like all other hatreds. The entire Jewish community must
publicly stand up and fight to protect our students.
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