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University of California Bans Encampments, Face Masks on All Campuses
Law enforcement officers detain a demonstrator, as they clear out a pro-Hamas protest encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Los Angeles, California, US, May 2, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Swanson
The University of California (UC) system has announced a ban on encampments, a major policy decision aimed at preventing student protesters from illegally occupying and living on school property in the wake of the anti-Israel demonstrations of this past spring semester.
Writing in a mass email, UC President Michael Drake said officials will uphold the “freedom to express diverse viewpoints” while enforcing “policies impacting expressive activities, including policies that prohibit camping or encampments, unauthorized structures, restrictions on free movement, making to conceal identity,” and disobeying lawful orders to present identification.
Drake added, “Some of this work has already begun, and you will hear more about it from your campus leadership in the coming weeks. Our ultimate goal is for all of our community members to feel supported in their ability to express themselves, and to pursue their studies, research, patient care, and other work on our campuses. We also want our community members to understand what’s expected of them, including a clear understanding of the principles, policies, and laws that govern our behavior on campus.”
The missive came ahead of a new academic year and followed a tumultuous one in which pro-Hamas demonstrators, including some faculty, upended UC campuses, morphing them into what Jewish students and civil rights groups described as hubs of antisemitic discrimination and support for terrorism. Setting up “Gaza Solidarity” encampments on school ground was the most disruptive behavior in which the protesters engaged, and universities in some cases protected it.
At UC Los Angeles (UCLA), chancellor Gene Block ordered that an encampment there be protected by physical barriers and campus police, allowing the area to become the site of violent clashes between pro-Hamas and pro-Israel protesters and a zone of nullification in which federal civil rights laws prohibiting the exclusion of individuals based on their racial or religious identity were, according to a US federal judge, flagrantly flouted. Throughout the encampment’s existence, Jewish students were barred from walking near or through the area on their way to class unless they denounced the Zionist component of their Jewish identities, a policy which UCLA police upheld without compunction.
The federal judge ruled last week that UCLA’s actions violated the law. Drake appeared to be addressing such concerns regarding the “restriction of movement” on UC campuses in Monday’s statement.
UC is not the only higher education system acting preemptively to deter misconduct in the new academic year. In just the past week, George Washington University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for the entire fall term, Barnard College ordered the arrest of a pro-Hamas protester who made a scene while students moved into their dormitories, and Harvard University mounted signs across its property which explicitly state that “erecting or maintaining a tent or temporary structure” violates school rules.
“An individual who assists others in engaging in a prohibited act will be treated as if they committed the prohibited act themselves,” the signs say.
However, critics argue that such policies may lack teeth, pointing to the dozens of pro-Hamas protesters whose disciplinary charges were dropped over the summer. Columbia University punished only a few of the students who were involved in occupying an administrative building and staging a riot after vowing to expel them, according to a new report. Harvard University “downgraded” the disciplinary sanctions it levied against several pro-Hamas protesters it punished for illegally occupying Harvard Yard.
Other students evaded being held accountable by the criminal justice system, according to a July report by The New York Times. The State Attorney’s Office of Cook County, Illinois dropped criminal charges filed against three Northwestern University faculty and one graduate student who allegedly obstructed law enforcement’s efforts to clear an unlawful demonstration at the Deering Meadow section of campus. Prosecutors in Travis County, Texas chose not to pursue over 100 charges of criminal trespassing filed against University of Texas at Austin protesters, and 60 other Northwestern University protesters saw their charges dismissed, with prosecutors calling them “constitutionally dubious.” The Times added, however, that some charges will stick, including those filed against someone who bit a police officer.
Commenting on Columbia University’s amnestying its protesters in a statement issued on Monday, US Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) maintained that protesters must be punished when they violate school rules.
“More than three months after the criminal takeover of Hamilton Hall, the vast majority of the student perpetrators remain in good standing. By allowing its own disciplinary process to be thwarted by radical students and faculty, Columbia has waved the white flag in surrender while offering up a get-out-of-jail-free card to those who participated in these unlawful actions,” she said. “Breaking into campus buildings or creating antisemitic hostile environments like the encampment should never be given a single degree of latitude — the university’s willingness to do just that is reprehensible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Bans Encampments, Face Masks on All Campuses first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Zionist Faculty ‘Barometer’ Exposes Worst Schools for Jewish Students
Graduating students rise in support of 13 students not able to graduate because of their participation in anti-Israel protests during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative has released a new “Anti-Zionist Faculty Barometer” which contains measurements of the severity of professors’ anti-Israel activism at over 700 US college campuses.
Last month, the organization launched a “National Campaign to Combat Faculty Antisemitism,” which aims to bring awareness to the correlation between increases in antisemitic incidents in higher education institutions and the presence of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) groups and other anti-Zionist professors who act as “foot-soldiers” for the anti-Israel movement. The “faculty barometer” continues that work, ranking hundreds of colleges on a 0-5 scale, from “negligible” to “extreme,” which indicates a “critical level of anti-Zionist faculty presence/activity.”
America’s most prestigious colleges and universities were categorized in the latter category, including Georgetown University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and Stanford University. Other highly regarded institutions registered in the runner up category — “severe”— such as Duke University, San Francisco State University, Brown University, and Dartmouth College.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, FJP is a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with links to Islamist terrorist organizations. FJP chapters have been cropping up at colleges since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, and throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.
These scholar-activists are too often ignored by the press and other watchdogs AMCHA Initiative executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner during an interview on Wednesday in which she discussed the importance of her organization’s latest project.
“The barometer is a versatile tool that actually looks at anti-Zionist faculty in their different manifestations on campus, which is an under-explored factor contributing to campus antisemitism and the hostile climate in which Jewish students live and study,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “And barometer is the right word for it as a metaphor for what we’re trying to do, which is to use information as a tool for quantifying what is in our estimation a determinative factor of campus antisemitism.”
She continued, “Measuring that factor, just like a barometer measures the barometric pressure and predicts the weather, has predictive value of what a campus climate might look or is likely to look like for a Jewish student, given the prominence, importance, and nature of contribution that anti-Zionist faculty make to campus antisemitism.”
AMCHA’s barometric measurements, Rossman-Benjamin explained, are based on four indicators: a campus’ having professors who publicly support boycotting Israel, academic departments that have issued anti-Zionist statements, an established FJP chapter, and FJP events and statements. This is important, she stressed, because, as The Algemeiner has previously reported, a previous AMCHA study discovered a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, it found that the presence of FJP on a college campus increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
“It wasn’t surprising to us that the schools with the largest presence of anti-Zionist faculty according to our barometer have also been in the news for high rates of antisemitism,” Rossman-Benjamin continued, linking the “barometer” to the group’s previous work. “What we see here is a confirmation of our studies discovery of faculty’s contribution — a mostly hidden contribution — to campus antisemitism.”
She added, “So much attention has been focused on, for example, Students for Justice in Palestine, the encampments, and all of the unrest. The primary face of that has been students and student groups, and they’ve occupied the attention of administrators, member of Congress, and the public, but if you look more deeply — behind closed classroom doors, at departmental events, and statements, or the activity of groups like [FJP], you find an even more important predictor and determinative factor precipitating antisemitism.”
AMCHA Initiative says that the this new information can help Jewish parents and prospective college students make smarter decisions about higher education. For Jewish students already enrolled in college, it will fully apprise them of what they have signed up for.
“We’re hoping that parents and students will get involved to stop this normalizing of hatred, to demand that universities and donors turn the situation around by reining in these out of control faculty,” Rossman-Benjamin concluded. “And we’re optimistic for knowing that there is growing recognition that the situation on the campus needs to change.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Zionist Faculty ‘Barometer’ Exposes Worst Schools for Jewish Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Dozens of US Democratic House Members Call on Biden Admin to Assess Israeli ‘Compliance’ With US Laws, Policies
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on March 21, 2024. Photo: Craig Hudson/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A group of 77 Democrats in the US House sent a letter dated Thursday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin demanding that the Biden administration provide an assessment of Israel’s “compliance with all relevant US policies and laws,” suggesting that the Middle East’s lone democracy and Washington’s closest ally in the region is violating international humanitarian law in Gaza.
“We strongly support Israel’s right to self-defense and condemn the brutal terrorist attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, in which Hamas killed over 1,200 people and took 235 people [sic] hostage,” the lawmakers wrote, using an incorrect figure for the hostages as 251 individuals were kidnapped during the onslaught. “We continue to call on Hamas to release all hostages and support the Biden administration’s efforts to broker a bilateral ceasefire that includes the release of hostages.”
The lawmakers also said they support efforts by the Biden administration to “reach a security agreement between Israel and Lebanon,” which would end fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah terrorist group and allow for civilians from both countries to return to their homes. The letter went on to condemn the “unprecedented Iranian attacks against Israel” in both April and October of this year.
However, the members of Congress also issued blistering criticism of Israel, sharing concern over the “level of civilian casualties and humanitarian suffering in Gaza.” They accused Israel of purposefully deteriorating conditions in Gaza by implementing “arbitrary restrictions on humanitarian aid and insufficient delivery,” asserting that Israel’s conduct has resulted in a “dire famine” ravaging the Gaza Strip.
“Therefore we request that your administration provide a full assessment of the status of Israel’s compliance with all relevant US policies and laws,” the lawmakers wrote.
Though critics have raised alarm bells over a potential famine in Gaza since last year, a United Nations committee in June said it was unable to prove the occurrence of famine in Gaza.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said in October that Israel had delivered over 1 million tons of aid, including 700,000 tons of food, to Gaza since it launched its military operation a year ago.
Nonetheless, the representatives lambasted Israel for allegedly ignoring a “30-day deadline” by the US government to “reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory” in the war-torn enclave.
In October, the Biden administration issued Israel a letter, demanding that the Jewish state increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza or risk cuts in US military aid. In the letter, Blinken and Austin openly called into doubt Israel’s commitment to providing humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians and questioned whether the Jewish state has used weapons in accordance with international law. The letter also called for temporary pauses in IDF military operations to enable aid deliveries.
Experts have hit back at the allegation that Israel has purposefully withheld aid from Gaza civilians, claiming that the Biden administration has provided “no evidence” of its claims. Following threats by the US, the Israeli government also greenlit an increase in Gaza aid. However, the Jewish state insists that Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that runs Gaza, has hijacked aid trucks and prevented distribution of humanitarian goods to the civilian population. In early December, the United Nations announced a pause of aid shipments into Gaza, citing danger posed by violent gangs ransacking trucks.
“We believe further administrative action must be taken to ensure Israel upholds the assurances it provided in March 2024 to facilitate, and not directly or indirectly obstruct, US humanitarian assistance,” the US lawmakers concluded in Thursday’s letter.
Among the letter’s signatories were strident opponents of Israel, such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA).
Democrats in Congress have grown increasingly critical of Israel in the year following Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians.
The letter, which was signed by roughly 40 percent of Democratic House lawmakers, could represent a growing fracture between American liberals and the Jewish state. In November, 17 Democrats voted to implement an arms embargo on Israel, effectively mainstreaming and destigmatizing a once-fringe policy position.
The post Dozens of US Democratic House Members Call on Biden Admin to Assess Israeli ‘Compliance’ With US Laws, Policies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Concordia Student Union faces legal action after trying to revoke StartUp Nation’s club status
The Concordia Student Union (CSU) is facing legal scrutiny after attempting to revoke the club status of StartUp Nation, a pro-Israel student organization at the Montreal university, following a Dec. 3 event featuring Yoseph Haddad.
StartUp Nation’s legal representatives have filed a demand letter and a provisional interlocutory injunction contesting the CSU’s actions, which they describe as “irregular, illegal and contrary to proper rules of order and procedure.”
Haddad, an Arab-Israeli journalist, pro-Israel activist and former IDF soldier, was scheduled to appear at a tabling event in the Hall Building Mezzanine on Concordia’s campus on Dec. 3.
On Dec. 1, StartUp Nation posted an Instagram reel announcing his appearance and the event’s location. After anti-Israel organizations denounced the appearance online, the CSU cancelled the reservation two days before the event, citing the club’s failure to disclose Haddad’s participation as an external guest.
Despite the CSU’s cancellation, StartUp Nation proceeded with the event in a public area separate from the reserved space, in the same building. “We did not use their space; we didn’t break any rules,” said Michael Eshayek, co-president of StartUp Nation, who pointed out that the CSU does not have jurisdiction over all of Concordia campus.
Haddad’s appearance was quickly met with protests from anti-Israel groups. Eshayek said one protester directed inflammatory remarks at a participant, saying, “I hope your mom will die.” Another video shows a protester wearing a keffiyeh pointing at Haddad and making a throat-slitting gesture.
Other videos shared online show Haddad attempting to engage with Concordia’s dean of students, Kate Broad, who declined to speak with him and left the scene. “You don’t have the respect to speak to me?” Haddad said in the video, addressing Broad, who turned her back on him.
The CSU later claimed StartUp Nation had violated policies. “On Dec. 3, a CSU club violated both Student Union and university policy by withholding essential information in their booking application regarding external guests,” the CSU said in a statement.
The CJN emailed the CSU for further comment on the cancellation of the tabling event and their motion to revoke the club status of Startup Nation, but did not receive a reply.
Legal implications
A demand letter dated Dec. 10, issued by Michael Hollander, a lawyer representing StartUp Nation, accuses the CSU of violating its own policies and failing to follow a fair decision-making process. The letter highlights the CSU’s “Policy on Clubs” and Robert’s Rules of Order, which require organizations to provide fair hearings before making substantive decisions. The letter describes the motion to revoke StartUp Nation’s status as “ultra vires”—beyond the CSU’s authority—and therefore invalid.
“The motion passed on Dec. 4, 2024, was irregular, illegal and in direct violation of my client’s rights,” the letter states. It further criticizes the CSU for citing Concordia University’s policy that governs external guest approvals and is enforceable only by the university, not the student union.
In the letter, Hollander demanded the CSU confirm within 24 hours that StartUp Nation’s club status remains intact, warning of further legal action if this is not done.
Watch a few moments from my visit to Concordia University in Montreal, which is occupied by anti-Israel terror supporters! pic.twitter.com/UcHsyafniL
— יוסף חדאד – Yoseph Haddad (@YosephHaddad) December 5, 2024
StartUp Nation also filed a legal application for a provisional interlocutory injunction in Quebec Superior Court on Dec. 11, seeking to annul the CSU’s motion. The court filing claims the CSU’s actions breached basic principles of fairness by failing to provide StartUp Nation with an opportunity to respond to complaints.
“These procedural irregularities rendered the motion not only invalid but also a breach of fundamental fairness and equity,” the filing states. The legal team argues these violations undermine the integrity of the decision and calls for adherence to proper procedural norms.
On Dec. 12, StartUp Nation posted on Instagram announcing the CSU had complied with the court order, blocking their attempt to ban the pro-Israel organization from campus. In a video taken during a CSU meeting, Dana Ballantyne, the external affairs and mobilization coordinator for the CSU, read a statement proposing a motion to strike the revocation of StartUp Nation’s club status until a council meeting on Jan. 22, 2025. Ballantyne cited claims that prior motion procedures had been invalid.
‘A double standard’
Critics have accused the CSU and Concordia University of applying double standards to pro-Israel events. “When pro-Hamas students block classes or chant ‘intifada,’ they’re allowed to stay,” Eshayek said. “But when we peacefully protest or hold an event, we’re told to leave.”
Jewish faculty and students at Concordia, who chose to maintain anonymity, have described the revocation of StartUp Nation’s status as part of a larger pattern of marginalizing pro-Israel voices on campus. Similar incidents occurred at McGill University this month, where anti-Israel activists opposed a conference featuring Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas leader turned critic, and Elisheva Ysabella Hazan, the founder of a Jewish empowerment movement. Although McGill cancelled the in-person event, it proceeded virtually.
The CSU has a history of controversies involving Jewish and pro-Israel groups. A November 2023 class-action lawsuit against Concordia and the CSU alleges that a hostile environment has been fostered for Jewish students, citing incidents of antisemitism and growing animosity towards pro-Israel students.
The CJN emailed the Concordia administration for comment on CSU’s recent decisions, asking how the administration balances student union autonomy with the university’s commitment to free speech and inclusivity, but did not receive a reply by press time.
Meanwhile, Haddad has criticized the situation in interviews and on social media, describing it as “an example of the growing intolerance toward pro-Israel voices on university campuses.”
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