RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent to the presidents of the ten campuses named in the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists.” In alphabetical order, the ten campuses are: Brooklyn College (CUNY), San Diego State University, San Francisco State University, Tufts University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Chicago, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Vassar College.

Dr. Janet Napolitano President
University of California

Dear Dr. Napolitano,

Your school purports to promote the values of diversity, inclusiveness and tolerance yet provides resources, funding and legitimacy to Students for Justice in Palestine. Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus organization whose sole purpose is to conduct hateful propaganda against Jews and the Jewish state for the terrorist organization Hamas. The explicit goals of Hamas are the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state and genocide against its Jewish population. For these reasons, among others, three campuses of the University of California—Irvine, Los Angeles, and Berkeley—have been named among the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists” by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. You may read the full report here: http://www.stopthejewhatredoncampus.org/news/top-ten-schools-supporting-terrorists-fall-2016-report

While it masquerades as a typical campus cultural group, SJP is an integral part of Hamas’s efforts to annihilate Israel through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. This is an insidious effort that attempts to delegitimize Israel, and smear it as a rogue “apartheid” nation. These claims are ludicrous. More than a million Palestinians enjoy Israeli citizenship including the rights to vote and to sit on the Israeli courts and parliament. Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz has said of the BDS movement, “It is anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-human rights, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-negotiation, anti-peace, anti-compromise, and anti-Palestinian workers when they are denied opportunities to work.” Both Larry Summers and Hillary Clinton have denounced BDS as anti-Semitic Jew hatred. Yet your school provides a platform and funding for its sponsors.

With university support, SJP also conducts “Israeli apartheid” hate weeks on campus quads. These events feature pro-Hamas advocates, the construction of “apartheid walls” featuring pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic propaganda, and the creation of mock checkpoints and die-ins that disrupt student movements on campus. SJP actively disrupts pro-Israel campus events—a threat to free speech and a violation of your university’s stated values and rules of conduct.

In addition to being scripted by Hamas terrorists, SJPs pro-terror campaign is funded and guided through a Hamas front called American Muslims for Palestine. In recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, who worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury from 2004-2007, described how Hamas funnels large sums of money and provides material assistance to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) through the Hamas front group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) for the purpose of promoting BDS campaigns on American campuses. AMP was created by SJP co-founder Hatem Bazian, a pro-terrorist lecturer at UC Berkeley who called for a suicide bombing “Intifada” inside the United States. It employs high-ranking officials from other Muslim “charities” that were previously shut down for providing material assistance to terrorists.

There are many ways to suppress free speech, the right to which is the foundation of all our other rights, and our democracy as well. Many leftists would like to outright suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree. But given the fact that most Americans still believe that the First Amendment is important, they are forced to resort to other measures. One of these is to obstruct speakers who challenge them by disrupting their events and shouting them down. An even more effective and more common tactic is to slander those whom they disagree with and call them “extremists” and “racists” and the whole bag of “deplorables” that Hillary Clinton so imprudently identified.
Across the country campus activists are seeking to make universities “safe spaces” for facts and ideas that make them uncomfortable and which they can’t refute. The University of Chicago recently took a small but brave step to oppose the regressive environment of the university culture by announcing it did not support “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces” – both of which are antithetic to a university education and to a democratic society in general.

Unfortunately, the U of C’s ham-fisted response to the poster campaign conducted by my organization represents a giant step backwards. It is an indefensible attempt to make the university a safe space for supporters of terrorists in the Middle East and their hateful propaganda. To justify destroying our posters, the university administration said, “While the University of Chicago encourages the free exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives concerning a wide range of issues, these flyers are defamatory and inconsistent with our values and policies.” This is hypocrisy at its worst. The student government supported by the U of C recently passed a resolution to boycott the only democracy in the Middle East, and the only inclusive and tolerant state there. The BDS resolution was designed to isolate, delegitimize and strangle the Jewish state.

Even liberals like Hillary Clinton and Larry Summers have denounced the BDS resolutions as anti-Semitic – Jew hatred. Evidently, the university is okay with that defamatory campaign. It even provides university facilities and funds to the campus hate groups that sponsored the resolution. Yet it condemns and destroys our posters whose sole purpose is to hold the individuals who did this accountable. What can a reasonable person conclude but that Jew-hatred is consistent with the U of C’s values and policies while opposing it is not?

Founded two centuries ago, Saint Louis University began as a Roman Catholic institution, but given its antics in recent years, one could be forgiven for believing that it might be better classified as an Islamic university. The most recent example of this transformation took place last month when more than a hundred students, egged on by campus administration, walked out of a speech by black former congressman Allen West because he dared to use the phrase “radical Islam.”

“Radical Islam” is the same expression that Muslim sympathizer President Barack Hussein Obama refuses to say. Obama, who claims to be a Christian, famously waxes poetic on the Muslim call to prayer, describing it as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” With his head firmly planted in the sand, the president is also reluctant to label Muslim terrorist attacks as such, preferring to use the fuzzy abstraction “violent extremism.”

At Saint Louis University the campus administration tried to dictate the contents of the national security-themed speech in late September sponsored by Young America’s Foundation (YAF), but West, an outspoken conservative who represented a Florida district in the U.S. House from 2011 to 2013 as a Republican, refused to buckle under pressure. An SLU administrator told conservative and Republican students promoting the event that advertisements for it could not contain the words “radical Islam.”

SLU president Fred Pestello called West a “provocateur” and said in an email to students that he stood in “solidarity” with them.

Student Claire Cunningham whined to the Riverfront Times about her hurt feelings.

“Our administrator made a request for him to tailor his speech to our community, and in response he made a lot of hateful comments about our students,” she said.