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Watchdog Launches Campaign to Warn of Pro-Hamas Faculty Groups Fueling Campus Antisemitism

A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
Higher education antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative has launched a “National Campaign to Combat Faculty Antisemitism,” which aims to bring awareness to the correlation between increases in antisemitic incidents on college campuses and the presence of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters that act as “foot-soldiers” for the anti-Israel movement.
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.
In September, AMCHA published a groundbreaking new study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Unlike many studies on campus antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative researchers drew their conclusions from quantitative rather than qualitative, data, which tend to rely on anecdotes and self-reported responses. Using data analysis, they said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses 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.
FJP, AMCHA’s researchers added, also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. They said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty — who, they noted, spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools — were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students. Additionally, FJP facilitated the proposing and adopting of student government resolutions demanding adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which aims to isolate Israel culturally, financially, and diplomatically as the first steps towards its destruction. Wherever FJP was, the researchers said, BDS was “4.9 times likely to pass” and “nearly 11 times more likely to be included in student demands,” evincing, they continued, that FJP plays an outsized role in radicalizing university students at the more than 100 schools — including Harvard University, Brown University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University — where it is active.
AMCHA is now converting scholarship to action by sending over 170 presidents of colleges with an active FJP chapter a letter, signed by over 120 nonprofit and academic groups, which outlines the imminent threat FJP poses to Jewish students and university life. Signed by groups such as Alliance of Blacks and Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the World Jewish Congress, the missive calls on college presidents to create “safeguards” which protect not only the physical safety of Jewish students but the university’s mission to be a haven for scholarship and the pursuit of truth.
“The primary mission of FJP chapters is to promote on their campuses an academic boycott of Israel — a boycott whose implementation denies your own students and faculty crucial educational opportunities and academic freedom and can’t help but incite animus and violence towards Jewish members of your campus community,” the letter says, noting that FJP is the project of the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) group, which is affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — all internationally designated terrorist groups.
It continues, “Faculty members should be free to speak their mind and to advocate for the positions that they support. However, it is essential for universities to establish robust safeguards and enforcement mechanisms to prevent those faculty members from using their academic positions and departmental affiliations to promote ideologically motivated activism that directly targets their own students and colleagues — your own campus community members — for harm.”
On Tuesday, The Algemeiner spoke with AMCHA founder and executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin about what inspired the new campaign. She explained that since last Oct. 7, experts and media outlets have focused their energy on tracking and reporting on the outrageous behavior of pro-Hamas students — as well as the administrators who coddled them — but neglected studying the extent to which their teachers use the classroom to inflame their passions against Israel and Jews. For example, she noted that one of the most insidious behaviors of pro-Hamas professors is instructing students in methods for concealing the antisemitic roots of anti-Zionist activism by denying that Zionism is a component of Jewish identity at all. Such a rationale, she said, arms pro-Hamas students with an ostensible academic argument which, despite being contrary to the opinions of the vast majority of the world’s Jews, allows them to engage in antisemitic behavior while denying that they are doing so.
Using a phrase popularized by millennials, Rossman-Benjamin said that this strategy is effectively the act of “gaslighting”: the insistence that an account of one’s observed behavior is fictional or imagined even as they continue it, causing them to question their sanity and perhaps concede, unsuspectingly, to further victimization.
“One of the important functions of these groups is to give academic legitimacy to the notion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that’s a hugely important trope being trafficked on campuses right now,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “So when scholars say that ‘anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,’ how could it be otherwise? When faculty, [anti-Zionist] Jewish faculty say that ‘Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism,’ who is anyone to say otherwise?’ When faculty are the ones to say that Jews who report being subject to antisemitism that is motivated by anti-Zionism are in reality bad actors attempting to quell free speech of pro-Palestinian activists, who can argue with that? If a faculty member or organization claims that, it seems true to someone whose knowledge of the issue is only surface level. Essentially, what they are doing is giving academic legitimacy to gaslighting.”
Rossman-Benjamin explained that in addition to denying their antisemitism, anti-Zionist faculty argue that it is protected by the intellectual and academic freedoms granted to professors. However, promoting ethnic hatred, in her view, disqualifies anti-Zionist professors from those protections and privileges, as they are the exclusive rewards of legitimate scholars who advance knowledge and thereby reduce prejudice and bigotry. She added that if university presidents cannot make such an important discernment then lawmakers must intervene and do so on their behalf.
“Congress should come in and tell universities to put in place and enforce safeguards and that they will lose their federal funding if they don’t,” she concluded. “If they don’t, I’m afraid that, in short order, universities in the United States will no longer be welcome to Jewish students or faculty.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Watchdog Launches Campaign to Warn of Pro-Hamas Faculty Groups Fueling Campus Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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After False Dawns, Gazans Hope Trump Will Force End to Two-Year-Old War

Palestinians walk past a residential building destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, after Hamas agreed to release hostages and accept some other terms in a US plan to end the war, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Exhausted Palestinians in Gaza clung to hopes on Saturday that US President Donald Trump would keep up pressure on Israel to end a two-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced the entire population of more than two million.
Hamas’ declaration that it was ready to hand over hostages and accept some terms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict while calling for more talks on several key issues was greeted with relief in the enclave, where most homes are now in ruins.
“It’s happy news, it saves those who are still alive,” said 32-year-old Saoud Qarneyta, reacting to Hamas’ response and Trump’s intervention. “This is enough. Houses have been damaged, everything has been damaged, what is left? Nothing.”
GAZAN RESIDENT HOPES ‘WE WILL BE DONE WITH WARS’
Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, displaced from a suburb in northern Gaza City where Israel launched a full-scale ground operation last month, said: “We want President Trump to keep pushing for an end to the war, if this chance is lost, it means that Gaza City will be destroyed by Israel and we might not survive.
“Enough, two years of bombardment, death and starvation. Enough,” he told Reuters on a social media chat.
“God willing this will be the last war. We will hopefully be done with the wars,” said 59-year-old Ali Ahmad, speaking in one of the tented camps where most Palestinians now live.
“We urge all sides not to backtrack. Every day of delay costs lives in Gaza, it is not just time wasted, lives get wasted too,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza City businessman displaced with members of his family in central Gaza Strip.
After two previous ceasefires — one near the start of the war and another earlier this year — lasted only a few weeks, he said; “I am very optimistic this time, maybe Trump’s seeking to be remembered as a man of peace, will bring us real peace this time.”
RESIDENT WORRIES THAT NETANYAHU WILL ‘SABOTAGE’ DEAL
Some voiced hopes of returning to their homes, but the Israeli military issued a fresh warning to Gazans on Saturday to stay out of Gaza City, describing it as a “dangerous combat zone.”
Gazans have faced previous false dawns during the past two years, when Trump and others declared at several points during on-off negotiations between Hamas, Israel and Arab and US mediators that a deal was close, only for war to rage on.
“Will it happen? Can we trust Trump? Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time? He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now,” said Aya, 31, who was displaced with her family to Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
She added: “Maybe there is a chance the war ends at October 7, two years after it began.”
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Mass Rally in Rome on Fourth Day of Italy’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
Large crowds assembled in central Rome on Saturday for the fourth straight day of protests in Italy since Israel intercepted an international flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and detained its activists.
People holding banners and Palestinian flags, chanting “Free Palestine” and other slogans, filed past the Colosseum, taking part in a march that organizers hoped would attract at least 1 million people.
“I’m here with a lot of other friends because I think it is important for us all to mobilize individually,” Francesco Galtieri, a 65-year-old musician from Rome, said. “If we don’t all mobilize, then nothing will change.”
Since Israel started blocking the flotilla late on Wednesday, protests have sprung up across Europe and in other parts of the world, but in Italy they have been a daily occurrence, in multiple cities.
On Friday, unions called a general strike in support of the flotilla, with demonstrations across the country that attracted more than 2 million, according to organizers. The interior ministry estimated attendance at around 400,000.
Italy’s right-wing government has been critical of the protests, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggesting that people would skip work for Gaza just as an excuse for a longer weekend break.
On Saturday, Meloni blamed protesters for insulting graffiti that appeared on a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside Rome’s main train station, where Pro-Palestinian groups have been holding a protest picket.
“They say they are taking to the streets for peace, but then they insult the memory of a man who was a true defender and builder of peace. A shameful act committed by people blinded by ideology,” she said in a statement.
Israel launched its Gaza offensive after Hamas terrorists staged a cross border attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.
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Hamas Says It Agrees to Release All Israeli Hostages Under Trump Gaza Plan

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation in Gaza City, as seen from the central Gaza Strip, October 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signaled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.