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Pro-Hamas Student Group Launches Legal Offensive Against Universities
Anti-Zionist protesters being arrested at Pomona College on April 5, 2024. They had taken over an administrative building. Photo: Screenshot/Students for Justice in Palestine via Instagram
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has launched a major lawfare offensive apparently aimed at securing a right to break school rules on college campuses and promote anti-Israel hatred, which has contributed to a surge of antisemitic incidents at universities across the US.
On Monday, SJP at the University of Vermont (UVM) filed a federal lawsuit alleging that school officials violated the constitution and perpetrated anti-Palestinian bias by suspending the group for breaking multiple rules, local media reported. Meanwhile, SJP filed a separate civil rights complaint against the University of Georgia (UGA), where some nine students were arrested in April for illegally occupying school property, claiming that its members were victims of “extreme differential treatment.”
The lawsuit against UVM followed SJP’s latest suspension for violating what the university called “the code of student conduct,” a “solicitation and posting policy,” and other offenses. In excerpts of court documents shared by Valley News on Tuesday, the lawyer representing the group, John Franco, said the accusations were false and intended to squelch speech which is critical of Israel.
“In a word, as a state instrumentality, the defendants have invoked state power to muzzle UVMSJP, to delegitimize it, and to give anyone else second thoughts about associating with it,” Franco wrote in the complaint, which is seeking an injunctive reversal of the suspension. Elsewhere he said UVM has “chosen to weaponize procedural permitting issues and the student misconduct process to bully and intimidate UVMSJP and other students, chilling the exercise of their protected First Amendment rights.”
First reported by Athens Politics Nerd, SJP’s civil rights complaint against UGA lodges accusations of racism.
“UGA’s targeted discriminatory investigation of students and student organizations that are made up of mostly Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslim members, perceived to be Palestinian, affiliated with, or advocating in support of Palestinians amounts to a McCarthyist campaign to punish students for their identity and/or expressive activity,” a copy of the complaint shared by Athens says. “There is simply no justification for UGA’s differential treatment of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.”
The legal actions come amid National Students for Justice Palestine’s, as well as its affiliate groups’, sustained and unrelenting campaigns to intimidate university officials into boycotting Israel and banning expressions of Zionism from higher education. As The Algemeiner has previously reported, SJP also regularly traffics in hate speech, destroys property, and trumpets its support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and overthrowing the government of the United States.
Last week, the SJP chapter of Pomona College promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories falsely accusing Israel and the US of spreading the Covid-19 virus to commit genocide and maintain “colonial” rule over people of color.
“Pandemics are a tool of the colonizer,” said an SJP pamphlet distributed during a club fair at the school, according to a Jewish students club, Haverim, that acquired a copy the document. “By bomb or by pathogen, these attacks on Palestinian life are man-made, intentional policy choices … The american [sic] state and israeli [sic] settler colony have found a dress rehearsal for more targeted genocides in their construction of today’s eugenicist normalcy wherein everyone is expected to sustain repeated covid infections indefinitely until death.”
Earlier this month, National Students for Justice Palestine (NSJP), which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, publicly discussed its grand strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US in a now-deleted tweet that was posted to X/Twitter.
“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said last week. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
In August, on the first day of school, SJP affiliated anti-Zionist students at Cornell University vandalized an administrative building, shattering the glazings of its front doors and graffitiing “Blood is on your hands” and “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” on it. Eleven days earlier, the SJP chapter of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced the beginning of what it described as an “armed rebellion,” claiming a right to use political violence as a tactic for achieving its objective of destroying Zionism, Israel, and capitalism.
“We emphasize our support for the right to resistance, not only in Palestine, but also here in the imperial core,” the group said in a manifesto — which was reportedly crafted with the help of anti-Zionist UNC professors — posted on social media. “We condone all forms of principled action, including armed rebellion, necessary to stop Israel’s genocide and apartheid, and to dismantle imperialism and capitalism more broadly. The oppressors will never grant full liberty to the oppressed; the oppressed must seize liberty with their own hands.”
Columbia University in New York City is still dealing with the legal repercussions of refusing to rein in SJP’s behavior. According to a lawsuit filed February, students linked to SJP beat up five Jewish students in Columbia’s Butler Library. Another attacked a Jewish students with a stick, lacerating his head and breaking his finger, after being asked to return missing persons posters she had stolen. In June, the school settled a lawsuit in which it was accused by a student of neglecting its obligation to foster a safe learning environment amid riotous pro-Hamas protests that were held at the school throughout the final weeks of the academic year.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
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