The Campus War Against Israel and the Jews: Students For Justice in Palestine
By: John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The next investigative article in a series Frontpage is running about the individuals and organizations waging an all out war on American college campuses against Israel and the Jews.
Founded on the UC Berkeley campus in 2001, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) now has chapters on 25 major campuses throughout the United States, including Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Georgetown, and the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.
SJP is less about justice than hatred. It reviles Israel and Jews. In addition to denouncing what they call the “Israeli-controlled concentration camps” wherein Palestinians are purportedly forced to live, SJP members commonly harass Jewish students emerging from campus synagogues. In one incident at San Francisco State University, SJP supporters surrounded a small group of Jewish students and incited violence while shouting such epithets as, “Too bad Hitler didn’t finish the job!”
On April 9, 2002 (Holocaust Remembrance Day), pro-Palestinian groups on the San Francisco State campus protested Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and then circulated posters that depicted Jews devouring Christian babies. That same day, SJP members held a rally and a sit-in on the Berkeley campus, resulting in 79 arrests. A few months later, Yale University’s chapter of the SJP set up a mock Israeli checkpoint on campus, harassing Jewish students trying to pass with cardboard rifles.
A co-founder of the Students for Justice in Palestine is Snehal Shingavi, a onetime Berkeley graduate student who gained notoriety in 2001 for teaching a controversial course called “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance.” Explaining that his instruction would focus on “Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestine since 1948,” Shingavi –also a leader of the campus International Socialist Organization – urged conservative students not to bother registering for his class in the synopsis he wrote in the school course catalogue.
SJP’s national conference at the University of Michigan in November 2002 was sponsored by the Islamic Association for Palestine, a now-defunct, Illinois-based front group for the terrorist organization Hamas. The conference featured keynote speaker Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida who was the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad operations in North America.
By SJP’s telling, Israel’s birth in 1948 occurred when “Zionist militia groups violently took over the land” and “committed mass atrocities that led to the expulsion of approximately 700,000 indigenous Palestinians from their homes.” This version of events is typical of the group’s view of history: partial, rhetorically violent, and mendacious. The account makes no mention of the fact that on the very day of Israel’s birth, five Arab armies joined forces and launched a war of annihilation against the nascent state; their purpose was to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and to expel or exterminate its entire Jewish population.
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