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Anti-Zionists in University of California Ethnic Studies Department Promoting Hatred of Israel, New Study Finds
Illustrative: Thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators from the Midwest gather in support of Palestinians and hold a rally and march through the Loop in Chicago on Oct. 21, 2023. Photo: Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Activist scholars employed by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department of the University of California, Santa Cruz are using their classrooms to promote extremist anti-Zionist propaganda, according to a new study by antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative.
The university’s “CRES department has engaged in anti-Zionist advocacy and activism since at least May 2021, when CRES pledged departmental allegiance to ‘the struggle for Palestinian liberation’ and committed its faculty to bringing the academic boycott of Israel onto campus and into the classrooms,” AMCHA said in a press release on Thursday. “However, according to the study, incidents involving CRES’s anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism have drastically increased in frequency and intensity since Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.”
AMCHA’s new report cites a litany of what it describes as politically motivated decisions CRES leaders have made both before and after the Oct. 7 onslaught, including the creation of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which declares on its website that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” The organization was co-founded by a professor who said in a podcast interview last year that academics should “tie [Zionism] to this much larger Western supremacy and white supremacy” and “de-link the study of Zionism from Jewish studies.”
Among other incidents, CRES issued a statement rationalizing Hamas’ terrorism on Oct. 7, an act of mass violence in which Palestinian terrorists from Gaza murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 240 others during a rampage across southern Israel. There has also been mounting evidence showing the terrorists committed widespread torture and sexual violence, including mass rapes, against Israeli women and girls.
“What we are witnessing needs to be understood in the context of 75 years of settler colonial displacement, military occupation, and enclosure,” the department said in the statement cited in the AMCHA report. “As in the past, racialized media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians, delegitimizing their aspirations for freedom from militarism, colonial rule, and incarceration.”
Additionally, the department participated on Oct. 20 in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’ atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” On Oct. 24, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
“CRES’s commitment to anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism, as a department and as a core element of its discipline, can’t help but corrupt the academic mission of the university and violate students’ fundamental right to be educated and not indoctrinated,” AMCHA Initiative director and co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said on Thursday. “Our research has consistently shown that on campuses where individual faculty and departments use educational spaces for anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism, rates of antisemitic activity — including assaults, threats of harm, vandalism, and bullying — are significantly elevated.”
AMCHA, as well as other civil rights and educational organizations, have previously issued warnings about the allegedly political and even antisemitic motivations of Ethnic Studies departments throughout the University of California system (UC). Last September, about 100 such organizations called on UC to reject a proposal that would require applicants to schools in the UC system to take an ethnic studies course, arguing that anti-Zionist activists are developing and leading the effort to implement the measure.
Some of the leading academics pushing for mandatory ethnics studies courses are anti-Zionists. Christine Hong, chair of CRES at UC Santa Cruz, co-chairs the UC Academic Senate working group developing the admissions proposal. Another co-founder of ICSZ, Hong said on a podcast last August that ethnic studies should teach “the extraordinary violence of Zionism, the settler colonial violence, [and] the militarism that is inflicted on Palestine and Palestinian people.”
Rossman-Benjamin urged the public on Thursday to also focus its attention on CRES’s activities in their children’s school districts. If UC approves the proposal for mandatory ethnic studies, high schools across California would offer such courses based on the criteria developed by CRES faculty and other academics in the field of critical ethnic studies.
“Shockingly, these same professors who are using their university positions and resources to unabashedly promote anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the ones who our state has entrusted with developing what will be taught to every California student about Jews and Israel,” Rossman-Benjamin said.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Zionists in University of California Ethnic Studies Department Promoting Hatred of Israel, New Study Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Mississauga vigil for Hamas leader was called off, but the Jewish community says the mayor should apologize for defending it
The group said members were going to be volunteering on an urgent food security issue instead.
The post Mississauga vigil for Hamas leader was called off, but the Jewish community says the mayor should apologize for defending it appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Amsterdam Police Identify 45 Suspects Linked to Violent, Antisemitic Attack Targeting Israeli Soccer Fans
Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters are guarded by police after violence targeting Israeli football fans broke out in Amsterdam overnight, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 8, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ami Shooman/Israel Hayom
Dutch police said on Sunday that they have identified and are investigating 45 suspects of whom they have images in connection to the violent attacks targeting Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam earlier this month.
“Because of the seriousness of the crimes, but also because of the social impact, we immediately scaled up to a special investigation team,” Dutch police chief Janny Knol said in a statement.
All 45 suspects are being probed for serious violent crimes, according to Dutch media. Nine of them have been arrested so far and remain in police custody, authorities said on Sunday, including a suspect who reported to police on Saturday night after his unblurred photo was released to the public.
On Friday, police said they were investigating 29 more suspects, including two who ultimately turned themselves in and have been arrested. Unblurred photos of the some of the other suspects have been online since Friday night and more images of suspects will be released soon, according to a police spokesperson cited by the NL Times.
Following a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax in Amsterdam on Nov. 7, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian gangs violently attacked Israelis who attended the soccer game. The premeditated and coordinated attack took place in various parts of the city late that night and into the early hours of Nov. 8. Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv were chased, run over by cars, assaulted, and taunted with anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian slogans such as “Free Palestine.” Five people were reportedly hospitalized for injuries.
Police are “looking at all crimes committed in the run-up to the game and in its aftermath,” Knol said after the violence erupted in the Dutch capital.
A Dutch court last week arraigned eight suspects, including minors, who were arrested in connection to the violent attack in Amsterdam, the NL Times reported. Those suspects include a 21-year-old man from Almelo, a city in eastern Netherlands; a 37-year-old man from Amsterdam suspected of pulling someone off his bicycle; two men, ages 19 and 21, who were arrested over the weekend; and two 26-year-old men, one from Amsterdam and one from Utrecht, who are suspected of publishing posts on social media that incited violence against the Israeli soccer fans.
The post Amsterdam Police Identify 45 Suspects Linked to Violent, Antisemitic Attack Targeting Israeli Soccer Fans first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Tufts University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Until 2027
A statue of the school’s mascot, “Jumbo,” stands on the campus of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, US, Nov. 27, 2017. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect
Tufts University in Massachusetts has extended a suspension of its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter until January 2027, a school spokesman confirmed with The Algemeiner on Monday.
Tufts first temporarily deactivated the group in October, citing “multiple violations of university policies,” including SJP’s promoting violence and calling on peers to participate. According to a disciplinary letter shared by SJP, days ahead of a celebratory demonstration it planned for the anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, the group posted a picture of “individuals with assault rifles, instructing students to ‘Join the Student Intifada’ and to ‘escalate’” during its event. The inciting content left school officials “no choice but to impose interim suspension,” the university said in the letter.
SJP has said that the university’s adding 27 months to its initial suspension represents “an attempt to fracture the strength of our movement” and accused it of “bankrolling” conflicts in the Middle East. Additionally, in a gesture which aimed, unsuccessfully, to turn the tables on Tufts, SJP proclaimed its “formal break and disaffiliation from tufts university [sic].”
It continued, “As the zionist [sic] genocide of Palestine and Lebanon has escalated over the past year, tufts [sic] in turn has sought to repress our solidarity movement,” the group charged. “The administration has threatened to suspend individuals over Instagram posts and vigils …We are done justifying our action against this university’s role in the genocide of the Palestinian people. We will not apologize.”
Tufts University spokesman Patrick Collins defended the school’s decision in a lengthy statement shared with The Algemeiner. It explained that SJP has violated nearly a dozen prohibitions on gambling, communicating violent threats, and unauthorized assembly.
“The complaint is now resolved, resulting in a disciplinary suspension that takes into account the group’s actions, their impact on other community members, the group’s repeated refusal to cooperate with university policies and expectations, and its refusal to follow through on sanctions arising from previous conduct policy violations,” Collins wrote. “The suspension also follows multiple attempts over the last year by the university’s student life staff and other administrators to work and communicate with SJP and its leaders, who have rejected these efforts.”
Collins noted that SJP can apply for re-recognition by the university, pending its compliance with certain “terms,” which include observing its suspension, something it has failed to do so far. If it is reinstated by the university, SJP will be placed on a “one-year probationary period,” during which school officials will determine if it has truly reformed. He added that what SJP is experiencing is not, as the group has maintained, personal or ideological.
“The Student Code of Conduct for the Schools of Arts & Sciences and Engineering considers and addresses student and student organization behavior regardless of their viewpoints,” he continued. “Individuals and groups that violate university policies face a range of disciplinary actions, up to and including suspension or expulsion from the university for individuals, and suspension or permanent revocation of university recognition for student organizations.”
SJP’s suspension comes amid concern that it and similar pro-Hamas organizations are using college campuses as recruiting grounds for domestic terrorist operations.
“The movement contains militant elements pushing it toward a wider, more severe campaign focused on property destruction and violence properly described as domestic terrorism,” Capital Research Center researcher Ryan Mauro wrote in a groundbreaking report, titled “Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement,” which was published last week. “It demands the ‘dismantlement’ of America’s ‘colonialist,’ ‘imperialist,’ or ‘capitalist,’ system, often calling for the US to be abolished as a country.”
Drawing on statements issued and actions taken by SJP and its collaborators, Mauro made the case that toolkits published by SJP herald Hamas for perpetrating mass casualties of civilians; SJP has endorsed Iran’s attacks on Israel as well as its stated intention to overturn the US-led world order; and other groups under its umbrella have called on followers to “Bring the Intifada Home.” Such activities, the report explained, accelerated after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, which pro-Hamas groups perceived as an inflection point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an opportunity. By flooding the internet and college campuses with agitprop and staging events — protests or vandalisms — they hope to manufacture a critical mass of youth support for their ideas, thus creating an army of revolutionaries willing to adopt Hamas’s aims as their own.
“Groups in the pro-terrorism, anti-Israel movement co-exist as our concentric circles of increasing malevolence,” Mauro explained. “Groups in the outermost circle avoid risks as they recruit new protest members and seek to integrate as many political causes as possible under the anti-Israel umbrella … Some militants aspire to incorporate the campaign into a broader wear on law enforcement if not an insurgency.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Tufts University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Until 2027 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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