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San Diego State U sent an email supporting students after Oct. 7. It’s now being investigated for Islamophobia.
(JTA) – Two days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, the president of San Diego State University did what many other college leaders were doing: She sent a campus-wide email supporting her students.
In the email, Adela de la Torre noted “the horrific reports of killings and kidnappings following the Hamas attacks on Israel during Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, a major Jewish holy day,” and said the university was “grieving for all those who are suffering in the wake of this outburst of violence.”
The president included tips on how students could seek support and counseling, and added a note of concern for all of the conflict’s victims: “We are deeply struck by the sheer scale of the loss of life – of innocent Israelis, Palestinians, and countless others. We also recognize that this follows a long history of loss of life of civilians in this region.”
Now that email, according to a university spokesperson, is at the center of a federal civil rights investigation into SDSU — tied to a complaint that the school “promoted hate and racism against Arabs and Muslims.”
It’s a reversal of the complaints behind many of the 42 other civil rights investigations that the Department of Education has opened against universities and K-12 schools nationwide since Oct. 7. Instead of Jewish groups alleging that the school failed to protect Jewish students, as has been the case in at least a dozen open investigations, the probe into SDSU will determine if the university, 48 hours after the Hamas attacks, should have done more for its Muslim students.
While it’s unclear who sent the complaint that triggered the investigation, the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine had harshly criticized the email in question on its Instagram page in the days after it was sent.
The Department of Education, which opened the investigation Tuesday, declined a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment. Its Office for Civil Rights has said that the opening of such investigations does not mean the department believes they have merit, only that the complaint falls under its purview. Investigations focus on whether administrators responded appropriately to allegations of student discrimination. The department does not usually announce the causes of its investigations publicly.
The SDSU case is not the first Islamophobia-related investigation the department has opened since Oct. 7; it previously announced that at least two other schools have been investigated for perceived discrimination against Muslim students, alongside many more confirmed to involve allegations of anti-Jewish discrimination. But SDSU officials gave the clearest picture yet of how a renewed interest in discrimination based on shared ancestry on campus — a prime tool of Jewish and pro-Israel legal groups since before Oct. 7 — can also be used to advocate for Muslim students.
In an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a university spokesperson revealed the reason for the investigation and stringently disputed the allegation that the president’s email was Islamophobic.
“The email, which you can read in full online, does not promote hate or racism,” the school’s statement reads. It listed steps the university has taken to help Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, including through a task force designed to combat Islamophobia. The university also has one devoted to antisemitism.
“Student Affairs and Campus Diversity team members have and continue to reach out to individual students, advisors and student organizations who have been impacted by the violence in Israel and Gaza,” the school’s statement said.
On Oct. 13, days after the university president’s email went out, the campus SJP chapter said in a statement that the school “has failed to acknowledge the emotions and well-being of its Palestinian and Muslim students.”
That statement has been co-signed by more than a dozen groups, including SJP chapters at other universities. The group added that it is “DEMANDING” that de la Torre “reassess this hateful and divisive rhetoric being spewed all over campus.”
Among the group’s issues with the email: “The lack of acknowledgment and condemnation of the settler-colonial state of Israel that has inflicted apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing upon the Palestinian people.” The group also pushed SDSU to divest from “corporations that are complicit in Israeli human rights violations.”
Nationwide, several colleges including Rutgers, Brandeis, Columbia and the Florida state university system have suspended their campus SJP chapters.
The Department of Education’s civil rights office announced four other new investigations Wednesday: one at the University of Virginia, and three at different K-12 school districts in Georgia, Missouri and California. The investigations fall under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at federally-funded institutions
A spokesperson for the Georgia district, City Schools of Decatur in suburban Atlanta, told JTA it “will cooperate fully” with the investigation but did not offer further details on its origins. The district recently came under fire after an equity commissioner sent an Oct. 25 unauthorized email to staff that called Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide” and urged teachers to “support Gaza” and “facilitate conversations on this topic.” The email included links to articles by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and the progressive magazine Jewish Currents.
In the Decatur case, an internal investigation at the district recommended the employee be terminated, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that he was still employed as of last month and his LinkedIn profile still lists him as a district employee.
Eytan Davidson, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League and a parent of a child in the district, wrote in a letter to a local blog that the email was objectionable because “that employee shared unvetted, unauthorized, and misleading political resources under the guise of education that frightened and outraged Jewish families who were reeling from the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”
Reached for comment, neither the ADL’s office nor the local Jewish federation said they knew about the Title VI investigation.
Little has been reported publicly about the likely roots of the discrimination cases at the other institutions. At the Lammersville Unified School District in California, a spokesperson told JTA that the district is “surprised to learn of an investigation as no complaints about shared ancestry concerns have been raised with the District’s administration. As a result, the District cannot comment on the origins or existence of any concerns.”
Representatives of other institutions did not return JTA requests for comment; some were still on holiday break. The Jefferson Council, a conservative alumni group promoting “intellectual diversity” at the University of Virginia, posted a detailed allegation of what it said was “a hostile environment for Jews” on campus days after the school’s own investigation was opened.
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Drexel University Professor Stole Signs From Synagogue, Police Say
Illustrative: People pass a cluster of signs outside a pro-Hamas encampment at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. on April 28, 2024. Photo: Max Herman via Reuters Connect
A Drexel University professor allegedly participated in a mass theft of items from a synagogue in a suburb outside Philadelphia, a local NBC affiliate reported on Tuesday.
Mariana Chilton, 56, a professor of health management and policy at Drexel, has been accused of stealing pro-Israel signs from the Main Line Reform Temple in Lower Merion Township, traveling there from her neighborhood of residency, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. Chilton allegedly drove the getaway car while two other accomplices, Sarah Prickett and Sam Penn — who is from New York — trespassed the synagogue and absconded with the loot.
“We are just taking them because we feel like it is a representative of genocide,” Chilton told law enforcement after being caught in the act, the report stated. She then, after offering to “just put them back,” refused to identify herself and comply with other lawful orders.
Video evidence provided by a local resident placed Chilton and her accomplices at the scene of the crime, and a Main Line Reform Temple official identified the signs recovered from her car as the temple’s property. That was enough for law enforcement to charge her with several offenses, including conspiracy and theft. She is also charged with driving without a license and not registering her vehicle.
Drexel University has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment for this story.
Experts have told The Algemeiner in the past academic year that while the conduct of anti-Zionist students should be reported on, the role of faculty in fostering and engaging in antisemitic acts should be closely scrutinized. Last semester, anti-Zionist faculty attached themselves to anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations, sometimes breaking the law by preventing officers from dispersing unauthorized demonstrations and detaining lawbreakers.
At Northeastern University in Boston, professors formed a human barrier around a student encampment to stop its dismantling by officers, and at Columbia University, anti-Zionist faculty at the school, as well its affiliate Barnard College, staged a walkout in support of the demonstrations and demanded the abeyance of disciplinary sanctions against anti-Zionist students — dozens of whom cheered Hamas and threatened more massacres of Jews similar to Oct. 7 — who violated school rules.
Chilton’s case is unlike any other reported in the past year, however. While dozens of professors have been accused of abusing their Jewish students and encouraging their classmates to bully and shame them, none are alleged to have resorted to stealing from a Jewish house of worship to make their point.
Mass participation of faculty in pro-Hamas demonstrations marks an inflection point in American history, Asaf Romirowsky, an expert on the Middle East and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told The Algemeiner in April.
Since the 1960s, he explained, far-left “scholar activists” have gradually seized control of the higher education system, tailoring admissions processes and the curricula to foster ideological radicalism and conformity, which students then carry with them into careers in government, law, corporate America, and education. This system, he concluded, must be challenged.
“The cost of trading scholarship for political propagandizing has been a zeal and pride among faculty who esteem and cheer terrorism, a historical development which is quite telling and indicative of the evolution of the Marxist ideology which has been seeping into the academy since the 1960s,” Romirowsky said. “The message is very clear to all of us who are looking on from the outside at this, and institutions have to begin drawing a red line. The protests are not about free speech. They are about supporting terrorism, about calling for a genocide of Jews.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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White House Cites Biden Clash With Netanyahu Over Iran as Proof of President’s Mental Fitness
US President Joe Biden hosts the 2023 Teacher of the Year event at the White House in Washington, US, April 24, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Amid growing concerns over US President Joe Biden’s mental fitness, key White House officials are suggesting his foreign policy discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including a clash over how to respond to Iran’s unprecedented military attack on the Israeli homeland earlier this year, serve as evidence that he is still capable of leading from the Oval Office.
Biden and Netanyahu engaged in a heated back-and-forth in the immediate aftermath of Iran launching a massive missile and drone salvo at Israel in April, according to a new report by the New York Times. The US and other allies helped Israel shoot down nearly every drone and missile. The attack caused only one injury.
However, the Times revealed that while Netanyahu initially wanted to respond to Iran in a forceful way, Biden threatened to withhold US support in the event of a major Israeli retaliatory strike, arguing it would risk sparking a regional conflict in the Middle East.
“Aides present in the Situation Room the night that Iran hurled a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel portrayed a president in commanding form, lecturing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone to avoid a retaliatory escalation that would have inflamed the Middle East,” the Times reported. “‘Let me be crystal clear,’ Mr. Biden said. ‘If you launch a big attack on Iran, you’re on your own.’”
“Mr. Netanyahu pushed back hard, citing the need to respond in kind to deter future attacks,” the report continued. “‘You do this,’ Mr. Biden said forcefully, ‘and I’m out.’ Ultimately, the aides noted, Mr. Netanyahu scaled back his response.”
Israel’s military response was small and appeared aimed at minimizing the risk of escalation.
The Times report, headlined “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome,” came on the heels of Biden delivering a widely-panned presidential debate performance last Thursday against former US President Donald Trump. Biden’s performance, which oftentimes appeared incoherent and muddled, set off alarm bells in Democratic circles, sending the president’s allies scrambling to extinguish concerns over his age and mental acuity.
While highlighting rising concerns, the news story also noted instances in which, according to aides, Biden appeared coherent and capable, citing the exchange with Netanyahu and his handling of the Iranian missile attack more broadly as one such example.
However, an anonymous Biden administration official told the Times that they are unsure whether Biden could hold his own against adversarial foreign leaders such as Vladimir Putin of Russia.
On Wednesday, the White House directly attributed quotes to Netanyahu in which the Israeli premier reportedly said he found Biden “very clear and very focused” during his visit to Israel following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. According to a White House spokesperson, Netanyahu also reportedly cited the “more than a dozen phone conversations, extended conversations with President Biden” as evidence of the commander-in-chief’s vitality.
“Some White House officials adamantly rejected the suggestion of a president not up to handling tough foreign counterparts and told the story of the night Iran attacked Israel in April,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Biden and his top national security officials were in the Situation Room for hours, bracing for the attack, which came around midnight. Biden was updated in real time as the forces he ordered into the region began shooting down Iranian missiles and drones. He peppered leaders with questions throughout the response.”
During its first direct attack on Israeli territory, Iran in April launched roughly 300 missiles and drones at the Jewish state.
Leading up to the attack, Iranian officials had promised revenge for an airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria that they attributed to Israel. The strike killed seven members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a widely designated terrorist organization, including two senior commanders. One of the commanders allegedly helped plan the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the incident.
“After it was over, and almost all of the missiles and drones had been shot down, Mr. Biden called Mr. Netanyahu to persuade him not to escalate. ‘Take the win,’” Mr. Biden told the prime minister, without reading from a script or extensive notes, according to two people in the room. In the end, Mr. Netanyahu opted for a much smaller and proportionate response that effectively ended the hostilities,” the article added.
Days later, Israel responded to the Iranian aggression by launching a modest missile attack on an airbase near Isfahan. The Jewish state sought to show that it could effectively target key strategic locations in Iran while not escalating the conflict any further. Netanyahu insisted on launching a retaliatory attack against Iran, arguing that ignoring the Iranian strikes would incentivize more attacks against the Jewish state.
IRGC Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said that Iran is waiting for “the opportunity” to launch a new round of strikes against Israel, Iranian media reported on Tuesday, potentially boosting Netanyahu’s argument that a smaller response would invite further attacks.
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Journalist at US-Based Nonprofit Promoted Stabbing Israelis, Depicted Rescued Hostage as Pig Drinking Blood: Report
Palestinian terrorists ride an Israeli military vehicle that was seized by gunmen who infiltrated areas of southern Israel, in the northern Gaza Strip, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot
A journalist at a US-based nonprofit posted tutorials on how to commit stabbing attacks and depicted a rescued Israeli hostage as a pig drinking blood, according to newly surfaced social media posts.
Eitan Fischberger, a communications analyst and former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) staff sergeant who first broke the story on X/Twitter, alleged that Mahmoud Ajjour, a correspondent for The Palestine Chronicle, posted disturbing images and videos to his Instagram page.
Fischberger posted screenshots and screen recordings of the posts.
According to The Chronicle‘s website, Ajjour is a photojournalist and correspondent for the outlet, which is a US-based 501c3, or nonprofit organization.
One of the posted images depicted Noa Argamani — an Israeli who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival during Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in southern Israel, and then rescued in an IDF special operation last month — as a pig drinking blood from a Coca-Cola bottle.
Here, for example, Ajjour posted a picture of Israeli hostage Noa Argamani, portrayed as a pig drinking the blood of Palestinians.
Noa, as you recall, was freed by Israeli forces in the same rescue operation in which Ajjour’s terrorist colleague was killed pic.twitter.com/oiLCqekxbl
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
In Oct. 2015, Ajjour posted a picture of a masked Palestinian holding up a knife, with the caption, “I declare it a revolution.”
That time — from approximately Sept. 2015 to June 2016 — was referred to as the “knife intifada,” as there was an uptick in Palestinian terrorist attacks, particularly using knives, against Israelis in Jerusalem, along with other parts of Israel and the West Bank.
Ajjour also seems mighty fine endorsing stabbing attacks pic.twitter.com/xi2MnZVddl
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
During that same month, Ajjour also reportedly posted a two-part tutorial on how to carry out stabbings with the caption, “May Allah protect them,” likely referring to those who were engaging in such attacks.
So much, in fact, that he uploaded a two-part instruction video showing off some best practices for stabbing Israelis pic.twitter.com/Z12rVo4Enx
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
Then, in 2023, after the son of a Hamas preacher was killed when a device he was trying to launch at Israel exploded, Ajjour mourned his death on Instagram. “Your father’s legacy is proud of you,” he wrote alongside a picture that included what appeared to be a Hamas flag.
And here, Ajjour mourns the death of Bara’a al-Zard, son of Hamas preacher Wael al-Zard.
Silly Bara’a died in an explosion caused by a device he was trying to launch at Israeli forces near the Gaza security fencehttps://t.co/vZR6IW0shF pic.twitter.com/ipQw55BYd7
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
This is not the first time a journalist from The Palestine Chronicle was alleged to have either supported or partaken in terrorism.
Abdallah Aljamal, who was a correspondent for The Chronicle, allegedly held three Israeli hostages in his home, according to the Israeli government. He was killed during a raid that rescued four hostages, including Argamani. After the allegations came to light, The Chronicle changed Aljamal’s status on its website from a correspondent to a contributor.
The Palestine Chronicle did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Fichberger wrote that he wants the US House Ways and Means Committee to investigate The Chronicle for what seems to have become a pattern.
“If The Chronicle is let off the hook for employing an actual terrorist hostage-taker, it would prove that the American counter-terror legal apparatus really is irreparably broken,” he wrote.
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