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How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect
JACKSON, Mississippi — Parishioners pass under large banners reading “Embrace Diversity” and “Serve Others” as they file into Sunday mass at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church just north of town.
The church is where Stephen Spencer Pittman, the 19-year-old arrested for starting a fire at Beth Israel Congregation, was confirmed and where his parents and younger brother still belong.
“Nobody had any idea what was going on or what would happen,” Monsignor Elvin Suds said during his sermon a week after the attack on Beth Israel. “He and his family were altar servers and very normal in all respects.”
That sentiment — that the arson against Jackson’s only synagogue came out of nowhere — has been prevalent among the city’s Jews, who say they’ve experienced little antisemitism and that the crime did not seem to fit neatly into the white supremacist violence that has historically afflicted Jews in Mississippi.
Sarah Thomas, a vice president at Beth Israel, said she was shaken by Pittman’s everyman appearance. “When I first saw his picture, I did start to cry because I was like, ‘This could be anyone,’” Thomas recalled as she stood outside the synagogue library where Pittman allegedly broke through a window with a hatchet. “People can be radicalized in so many ways — but knowing it could be anyone is really scary.”
Even as a team of investigators have pieced together Pittman’s drive from his home in a gated community in nearby Madison to a run-down gas station where he purchased the fuel and removed the license plate, the question of why someone would try to burn down the city’s lone synagogue has remained murkier.
That was the main question Rachel Myers’s Hebrew school students at Beth Israel had the day following the attack; she encouraged them to wait for more information.
The details that trickled out in the days that followed suggested Pittman was driven by antisemitism, telling police that Beth Israel was “the synagogue of Satan.”
But that didn’t explain how a white honor roll student from the local Catholic high school, who had just finished his first baseball season at one of the state’s historically Black colleges, had landed on the antisemitic slogan, decided to strike and found himself in federal court Tuesday clutching a Bible in his heavily bandaged hands after allegedly spilling gasoline on himself while starting the fire.
“Anybody who’s in this area will tell you that if he belonged to a Klan branch and did all that, then you got it, right?” Rep. Bennie Thompson, who has represented Jackson in Congress for the past 30 years, mused during a tour of the damaged synagogue. “But if he played baseball? Went to St. Joe’s? I mean for all intents and purposes that’s an all-American boy.”
A ‘spiritual psychosis’
Most perpetrators of major violence against Jews in recent years have been guided by at least a loose ideology. The shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 had long kept a shotgun by his front door that he trained to aim at the government jackboots he feared would bust down his door, before eventually embracing white supremacist views that blamed Jews for mass immigration. And the man who shot four people at a Chabad in southern California the next year had been radicalized more quickly, but his extremism began with visiting fringe online forums and setting a local mosque on fire after being inspired by the white nationalist who massacred Muslims in New Zealand.
Less is known about the perpetrators of last year’s deadly attacks in Colorado and Washington, D.C., but both suspects allegedly shouted anti-Zionist slogans during the incidents and the suspect charged in the Capital Jewish Museum shooting posted a manifesto justifying violence against supporters of the Israeli government.
Investigators have released little information about Pittman, and law enforcement did not respond to interview requests. But a review of Pittman’s social media presence and conversations with those who know him suggest an extremely rapid turn toward extremism sparked by a mental health crisis that had led him down an erratic online path that included attempts to sell a Bible-inspired fitness plan.
“It just seemed like he had started to go into spiritual psychosis,” said a friend who met Pittman during high school at St. Joseph’s Catholic Academy. “He was a really normal person until a few months ago.”
It’s a profile that defies the simplest political explanations offered by figures like Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar, who initially said the attack was “another step in the globalization of the intifada,” or Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president who said during a prayer vigil in Jackson after the attack that the White House had enabled Pittman’s violence by “other-izing our communities.”
Pittman, though, expressed little interest in politics, according to both his high school friend and his social media activity, which until recently was almost exclusively focused on baseball and hanging out with friends.
“He was actually a really great guy, very genuine, honest,” the high school friend said. “Guy you could talk to about anything and he would listen.”
But another friend told Mississippi Today that Pittman had started to change over the course of several years, beginning to post 10-15 times per day on social media, including images of him speeding down the highway in a Porsche and injecting steroids.
Pittman’s parents first noticed a change at the start of winter break in early December when he arrived home from community college and began behaving in “erratic” ways, according to interviews they gave to the FBI.
Tricia, Pittman’s mother, told police that her son had been scaring the family pets and that she and her husband, Steve, were considering starting to lock their bedroom door at night because they were afraid of their son.
But it wasn’t until around a week before the arson that Pittman began making antisemitic comments, according to FBI Special Agent Ariel Williams, who testified at a court hearing Tuesday during which Pittman pleaded not guilty to the arson.
One friend who worked out with Pittman at a local gym called police after seeing news of the fire at Beth Israel to say that Pittman had said he “wanted to burn down a synagogue” the day before the attack.
A new kind of violence
Shortly after Beth Israel opened a new synagogue building in 1967, with two long wings and an elevated roof at the center meant to evoke the Israelites’ tents, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan as part of a violent campaign against school integration.
As antisemitic violence in Mississippi mounted the following year, the Jewish community raised funds at the behest of the FBI to pay Klan informants, which ultimately helped successfully break up the ring of nighttime bombers.
The 1967 bombing, and a subsequent attack on the rabbi’s house, have become an integral part of Beth Israel’s history and are memorialized on a plaque outside the synagogue that describes Jewish support for the Civil Rights Movement.
But today Jews in Jackson say they experience little to no antisemitism and, at least locally, there’s no organized political movement aligned against them like there was in the 1960s, making the arson especially bewildering.
The members of Beth Israel are committed to rendering the arsonist’s attack irrelevant. The fire, fueled by five gallons of gasoline, destroyed the library and caused structural damage to one wing of the building. And yet W. Abram Orlansky, a former synagogue president, said that no services had been scheduled the Saturday when the fire took place and a local church quickly offered space to hold all of Beth Israel’s scheduled programming while repairs took place. “This guy succeeded at canceling literally zero planned events,” said Orlansky, who grew up in Jackson. “I’m pretty proud of that.”
Some have pondered what Pittman’s motives may have been, though, and they generally figure that whatever drove Pittman to violence must have come from elsewhere — and people had a good hunch as to where.
“It’s that damn phone,” said Vivienne Diaz, a teacher who belongs to Beth Israel.
Pittman certainly spent a lot of time on his phone. He was a prolific social media user with accounts on X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube. According to a Forward review of his public posts, he did not share any antisemitic content until hours before police say he started the fire at Beth Israel, when he reposted a meme of a cartoon character shoving a Jew into a swimming pool.
His high school friend said that Pittman had never discussed Jews or Judaism until the week leading up to his arrest.
But Pittman followed several Instagram accounts that promoted a forceful brand of Christianity, including The Christianity Pill, which declares “CHRIST IS KING” in its bio — Pittman told the judge “Jesus Christ is Lord” during his initial court hearing — and claims that “Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.”
He followed another account called The Final Stand that boasts it is “spreading what is labeled ‘misinformation’” and warns against a plot by an unnamed group seeking to wipe out Christians. “But we are HEALING,” the account posted in July. “We are waking up from this deep coma we’ve been in since WW2.”
(Pittman’s father told police that he “finally got them” after being confronted about the burns on his hands and ankles the morning after the fire.)
In court Tuesday, Pittman carried a jailhouse Bible and crossed himself several times during the proceeding and bit his nails.
In addition to the Christian content, Pittman engaged with accounts promoting conspiracy theories, like Conspiracy Theories, Inc. and Whispers of Truth, which shares claims that NASA faked the moon landing alongside a defense of Mel Gibson and critique of the World Trade Center’s Jewish owner.
It’s not clear exactly when Pittman began following these accounts or engaging with more overt antisemitic content, like the meme he shared shortly before the attack, but friends and acquaintances say the change appeared to happen sometime over the summer after his first year at college.
During that time, he created a new social media account focused on fitness that he populated with shirtless videos and pleas to help his followers “get shredded” and earn $7,000 per week. He abandoned the account a couple weeks later, around the time he started his second year at Coahoma Community College, a school in the Mississippi Delta where 92% of the students are Black.
On the last day of classes at Coahoma, he registered One Purpose, a website advertising “scripture-backed fitness” that mixed Hebrew terms with advice to limit your diet to “God-made fats.”
Pittman told police that around the same time he began earning money through day trading stocks, though his lawyer dispelled that this was generating any income for his client in court Tuesday: “There is no income.”
An unnamed family friend told a local radio station that Pittman had started struggling with mental health during his third semester at Coahoma this fall and was not planning to return after winter break, a break that his parents — who both work at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson — hoped to use to get him psychiatric help.
“They condemn the terrible sin of this incident,” Suds, the priest, said in his sermon. “They’ve lost the son that they knew and loved.”
Pittman’s parents were not at Tuesday’s hearing and did not respond to a request for comment sent to the lawyers representing their son, who goes by Spencer, or to a call at the entrance to their gated community in Madison.
Pittman’s trial is set for Feb. 23. Until then, he was remanded to federal custody.
A difficult crime to prevent
Lone offenders, as investigators have described Pittman, are especially difficult to thwart. But other antisemitic perpetrators have left longer trails that offered the possibility of an earlier intervention. John T. Earnest’s 18-month timeline from his initial radicalization to the shooting at Poway Chabad appears to be common.
The Anti-Defamation League recently traced the radicalization of two school shooters and found that both had followed almost identical online paths leading up to the shooting. One took 18 months, the other 19 months.
Pittman appeared to move faster, although his attack on Beth Israel was limited to property damage.
“We thought it took 19 months,” Lindsay Baach Friedman, the ADL’s regional director covering Mississippi, said in an interview. “But it’s not a far cry to go from 19 months to three months.”
The contraction in time from when a perpetrator of violent extremism starts becoming radicalized to when they act has been shrinking for decades, which can make it harder for the network of organizations that seek to monitor antisemitic threats and prevent them.
“We need to move faster, and we need to be smarter about how we move,” said Michael Masterson, CEO of Secure Community Network. He said one of the most reliable ways to prevent attacks like the Beth Israel arson was for people to report friends or family making suspicious comments or threats, but that can be harder to do when a suspect attacks less than 24 hours after telling someone their plan — in Pittman’s case, telling a workout buddy that he wanted to burn a synagogue.
Masters added that there are growing attempts by online actors to encourage vulnerable people, especially those suffering from mental health issues, to commit violence. “The material we see online increasingly is designed to reach those individuals and motivate them to act,” he said.
Organized antisemitism in Mississippi is much lower than it was the last time Beth Israel was burned in the 1960s, when elements of the state’s powerful white supremacist movement of the era often blamed Jews for desegregation; the ADL tallied just a few dozen incidents in the state over the past few years, mostly stickers placed by a white nationalist organization.
The more diffuse path Pittman took toward allegedly striking the synagogue does not seem to have centered on the kinds of specific arguments about Jews that often animate antisemitic perpetrators — instead it drew more loosely on what Masters described as a “salad bar” of misinformation and conspiracy theories that often includes antisemitism but is much harder to pin down than the ideologies that motivate organized hate groups.
Orlansky, Beth Israel’s former president, said the synagogue had close ties with law enforcement and had been alerted in the past when the FBI noticed warning signs that might have signaled a threat to the congregation.
But Pittman, whose antisemitism only broke into the open in the days before the attack, never seemed to be on their radar.
“I think we did everything that a congregation can reasonably do,” said Orlansky, the former Beth Israel president. “Hate can come from anywhere — that’s my main takeaway.”
The post How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect appeared first on The Forward.
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Purim gets creative in Israel, with festivities driven underground
TEL AVIV, Israel — On the corner of a sun-bleached side street in Tel Aviv’s Shuk Levinsky, costumed mannequins stand guard over a half-dark shop, their painted eyes fixed on a street gone strangely still. Cardboard boxes of sequined capes and feathered wings spill onto the sidewalk, untouched. The neighboring businesses are shuttered, heavy padlocks fastened across their metal doors.
On any weekday, the quiet would feel unusual in this bustling pocket of south Tel Aviv. But this is Purim week — normally the market’s most frenetic stretch of the year. In ordinary times, the sidewalks would be clogged with parents and teenagers clamoring for last-minute costume details, with vendors shouting prices over the din.
That was precisely the scene just 48 hours earlier, on the Friday before the Purim madness was set to begin. Despite weeks of speculation about a looming confrontation with Iran, most Israelis pressed ahead with their plans. Hamentaschen were baked, school carnivals assembled, parties confirmed. A meme circulated in school group chats: “Can someone let us know if we are supposed to be buying costumes or canned goods?”
Early Saturday morning, an answer came via the piercing trill of the emergency alert system. The United States and Israel had begun what officials described as “preemptive strikes” against Iran. Within hours, thousands of reservists were called up. Citizens scrambled for shelter plans. WhatsApp groups filled with instructions and anxieties. And as Iran launched retaliatory rockets, Israelis absorbed a different blow: Purim was officially canceled.
Hence, the shuk’s current ghost town atmosphere. Inside the darkened shop, Rotem Avidan sat at the register, scrolling on his phone.
“There’s no real reason to be open,” he said. “Mostly I was just bored at home. I’ll probably close up in a couple of hours.”
Avidan has been selling costumes in the shuk for more than 15 years and relies heavily on Purim sales. The day before the holiday is typically his busiest of the year. Instead, he estimates he’ll make about 80% of his usual income.
“It’s not terrible,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s just one more irregular year. We had corona. We had two years of war. This was supposed to be the year things finally went back to normal.”
The past two Purims were indeed subdued, shadowed by the war in Gaza and the fight to bring hostages home. Even celebrations that went ahead felt muted. With the last living hostages returned in October, many had hoped this would finally be an uncomplicated holiday.
To fully grasp why the cancellation hit so hard, one must understand Purim in Israel. This is not a single-event celebration. It is a multi-day spectacle that spills from nursery school classrooms into city streets. Municipal adloyadas — elaborate parades with floats and marching bands — draw families by the thousands. Teenagers roam in coordinated group costumes. It is not uncommon to find yourself seated on a bus beside an elderly woman in full clown makeup, or handed paperwork at the bank by a teller wearing butterfly wings.
None of which would be happening this year.
Children feel the loss most acutely. For many, Purim is the highlight of the school calendar: themed dress-up days, costume parades, parent-run carnivals, and the exchange of mishloach manot before a three-day vacation. On Sunday morning, children across the country woke to the bad news.
Teachers scrambled to salvage what they could. Virtual parades were arranged over Zoom. Students were asked to send photos in costume. Mishloach manot became neighborhood drop-offs.
In some cases, the children made their own Purim joy. In one Tel Aviv apartment building, the kids organized a costume party, complete with printed invitations for guests. Playgrounds around the country — at least those equipped with shelters — were filled with rambunctious children dressed as superheroes and princesses, their bleary-eyed parents dragging slightly behind them.
If children are Purim’s most visible protagonists, they are hardly its only devotees. For young adults, the holiday is the high point of Israel’s nightlife calendar — a sanctioned blur of themed raves and packed bars. This year, the bomb shelter became a stand-in for the nightclub.
Within hours of the first rocket fire, twentysomethings in Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood had organized an impromptu party in a public shelter, complete with makeshift costumes and an amateur DJ. When video of the event went viral, social media flooded with young people asking about the nearest mesibat miklat — a “shelter party.”
Not everyone approved.
“Wow. How disconnected can you be?” one commenter wrote. “People have been killed and you can’t give up your Purim party for one year?”
By nightfall, hundreds had gathered — some in small, shared building shelters for private parties, others in larger municipal bunkers — determined to carve out a pocket of joy, even as Iranian missiles soared overhead.
Shahar Rubin, 24, hadn’t planned on going to a party when he and his friends noticed a stream of people heading into the Dizengoff Center parking garage. “We figured, why not?” he said.
Four stories underground, in one of the city’s largest public shelters, a DJ blasted music as costumed revelers danced beneath the fluorescent lights and exposed concrete.
“This is exactly why we come to Tel Aviv,” said Rubin, who is originally from the north. “There’s nothing like the Purim atmosphere here.”
After more than 400 days of wartime reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces, the celebration felt like a rare exhale — and perhaps a brief one, before he is called up again. “It was a last hurrah of sorts,” he added, as he and his friends headed off in search of their next mesibat miklat.
Beyond the costumes and parties, Purim is anchored in four religious obligations: a festive meal, the exchange of food gifts, donations to the poor and — most famously — the public reading of Megillat Esther.
“According to Jewish law, men and women are required to hear the reading of the entire Megillah from a kosher scroll,” said Rabbi Nadav Berger, head of Hadar’s Beit Midrash in Jerusalem. “Because the obligation is about publicizing the miracle of Purim, there is a strong preference to do it in public, in a group of at least ten people.”
That preference became complicated as soon as Home Front Command restricted public gatherings.
By the time Shabbat ended, observant Jews were organizing small readings in private homes and shelters. Hadar put out a call for community members who owned kosher megillot.
“Owning a personal megillah isn’t as rare as owning a Torah scroll,” Berger explained. “Many people inherit one or receive one for a bar mitzvah or wedding. Hearing the Megillah in person is still our first recommendation, so we wanted to help facilitate that safely.”
For those unable to attend, Hadar is also offering Zoom options, drawing on halachic guidance developed during the pandemic. “The rulings get into the technical question of how to understand electronically transmitted sound,” Berger said. “But it goes without saying: no one is required to risk their life to hear the Megillah — or to fulfill any other Torah commandment. Safety overrides everything.”
He added: “Typically, one would perform a mitzvah all in one sequence, from beginning to end. But if a siren goes off while you are reading the megillah, it is perfectly acceptable to pause the reading, even for a few hours, until it is safe to return.”
For Berger, the tension between caution and celebration may be truer to Purim than one might expect for a holiday typically associated with pure, unadulterated joy. When he sent out Hadar’s revised Purim plans, he opened with Mordechai’s words to Esther: “Who knows. Perhaps it was for just such a moment that you attained royalty?”
“Meaning, you have to be responsible right now,” Berger explained. “You have to think about your situation and respond accordingly. That’s what we’re trying to do in light of all that’s happening.”
He went on, “If you read the Megillah, most of it is actually anxiety-provoking. It is a very tense story. The joy comes only at the end.”
“The hope,” he said, “is that this, too, is only the middle — and that Israel will once again return to celebrating Purim happily, joyously, as we do every year.”
The post Purim gets creative in Israel, with festivities driven underground appeared first on The Forward.
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Fears of Iranian Sleeper Cell Retaliation Grow in the West as Middle East War Escalates
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei listens to the national anthem as Air Force officers salute during their meeting in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 7, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Fears of Iranian-backed terrorism are intensifying across Western countries, with officials warning Iran could mobilize terrorist sleeper cells and proxy networks in revenge for the unprecedented US-Israeli strikes on Saturday that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — prompting governments to raise threat levels and bolster security for Jewish and Israeli communities abroad.
Sleeper cells are covert operatives or terrorists embedded in rival countries who remain dormant until they receive orders to act and carry out attacks.
As the war in the Middle East continues to spread and escalate, officials in Germany have warned of potential Iranian retaliation targeting Jewish and Israeli institutions nationwide, prompting several federal states to step up protections and issue alerts as threat concerns mount.
“Retaliatory measures — including the possible activation of Iranian sleeper cells in Europe — cannot be ruled out,” Marc Henrichmann, who chairs the parliamentary oversight committee of the intelligence services in Germany, told the local newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
“The Iranian regime has repeatedly shown that it extends its use of terror beyond its own borders,” Henrichmann said. “Federal and state security authorities remain on the highest alert level and will adjust protective measures whenever necessary.”
Roman Poseck, the interior minister of the German state of Hesse, added to German outlet Die Welt that it should “be assumed that there will be an increase in the abstract threat situation, especially for Jewish, Israeli, and American institutions.”
Meanwhile, Felix Klein, the German government’s commissioner for combating antisemitism, warned to the Funke media group that, following the outbreak of conflict with Iran, “we must assume an increased threat to Jewish life in Germany.”
In France, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez also issued a heightened alert, warning of potential threats and urging regional authorities to reinforce security around Jewish places of worship.
“In light of the current international situation in the Middle East, I reiterate my instructions to remain vigilant and ask you to immediately implement enhanced security measures for Jewish places of worship and religious gatherings,” Nuñez told French newspaper Le Figaro.
The United States and Israel carried out a series of strikes on military and leadership targets across Iran — including senior officials and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders — after negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs failed to yield results.
Shortly after reports emerged that the US–Israeli joint operation may have killed Khamenei, US President Donald Trump released a message urging Iranians to consider a future beyond the current regime and expressing guarded hope that the moment could lead to meaningful change.
The escalation came weeks after the Iranian regime killed tens of thousands of civilians in a sweeping crackdown on last month’s anti-government protests. The outbreak of fighting also followed last June’s 12-day war between Iran and Israel, which concluded after the US joined and bombed Iranian nuclear sites.
Beyond Europe, fears of Iranian retaliation are rising in the US, as counterterrorism agencies warn that additional resources are being rushed into efforts to detect and disrupt potential revenge attacks on American soil.
Although no specific credible threats have been publicly disclosed, FBI Director Kash Patel said Saturday that US counterterrorism and intelligence agencies were operating under heightened alert, with personnel “working 24/7 … to address and disrupt any potential threats” on US soil.
“While the military handles force protection overseas, the FBI remains at the forefront of deterring attacks here at home – and will continue to have our team work around the clock to protect Americans,” Patel wrote in a post on X.
Amid growing fears of possible retaliation, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem also said authorities are “in direct coordination with our federal intelligence and law enforcement partners as we continue to closely monitor and thwart any potential threats to the homeland.”
Concerns over the activation of Iran’s sleeper cells have surged even further after a deadly mass shooting in Austin, Texas involving a suspect with alleged support for the Islamist regime and a separate gun attack on the gym of an Iranian dissident in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Both incidents stoked fears of politically motivated violence linked to the broader regional crisis in the Middle East.
On Sunday, a gunman opened fire at a bar in Austin’s West Sixth Street district, killing two people and injuring 14 others before being shot and killed by police.
Authorities later reported finding a flag of the Islamic Republic and photographs of Iranian leaders inside the suspect’s apartment, deepening concerns about potential links between the attack and broader political or ideological influences.
According to the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, there were indicators that could suggest a possible terrorism link.
In Canada, hours after the announced death of Khamenei, a boxing gym run by Iranian-Canadian dissident activist Salar Gholami was struck by gunfire overnight.
Tehran’s ability to coordinate or inspire attacks on American soil has long been a concern for US law enforcement and intelligence officials — a fear that only deepened after Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
Amid the 12-day war in June, NBC News reported that Iran had privately warned the United States that it could activate sleeper cells on American soil in response to military action. While no specific plots were publicly disclosed, US authorities increased domestic security measures and intelligence monitoring in anticipation of possible attacks. Vice President JD Vance said the Trump administration was examining the possibility of an Iran-backed homeland attack “very closely.”
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‘Death to America’: Campus Student Groups Express Solidarity With Iran, Call for Uprising Against US
A pro-Hamas activist wears a keffiyeh while marching from the City University of New York to Columbia University. Photo: Eduardo Munoz via Reuters Connect
Anti-Zionist student groups across the US proclaimed solidarity with the aims of Islamism and jihad following a joint military operation between the US and Israel which killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of other high-level regime officials on Saturday.
“Death to America,” posted a group which calls itself Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff which serves as an umbrella group for a consortium of revolutionary organizations, some of which are formally recognized by the university. “We yearn for the end of the US settler colonial project. This should not be a controversial position.”
In other posts, the group shared an April 24 tweet in which Khamenei told pro-Hamas college students, who were in the middle of convulsing higher education institutions with illegal building occupations and antisemitic hate crimes, that they are “on the right side of history” and another which said “Iran has every right to defend itself against zionist [sic] warfare.”
A torrent of criticism followed the comments, leading Columbia University to denounce CUAD for falsely claiming to be a university entity.
“The group that calls itself ‘CUAD’ is not a recognized student group, or affiliated in any way with the university,” the institution said on the X social media platform, pointing to a July 2025 statement by former interim president Claire Shipman which formally proscribed any official correspondence or communication with CUAD. “There is no evidence that anyone currently in control of their account is a current Columbia student, staff, or faculty member. They are illegally using the Columbia name.”
Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, said American officials should take CUAD’s rhetoric seriously.
“Cheering on Hamas and supporting Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism that has scores of American blood on their hands, surely warrants consequences,” he said. “We already have a great and sensible law on the books which says that while we welcome anyone who wishes to come here, attend university, and get an education, we do not permit people who openly support and advocate for terrorism. Actively supporting terrorism while calling for death to America and chanting ditties that advocate the annihilation of the world’s sole Jewish state should be a red line that warrants expulsion and deportation for those on student visas.”
CUAD is not the only group which denounced what the US dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.” On Sunday, New York University’s SJP chapter announced an anti-US demonstration to “demand an end to this criminal war that benefits no one other than US corporate interests.”
Meanwhile, DMVSJP, a network of SJP groups operating in Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia, implored socialists and other revolutionary groups to attend a demonstration outside the White House on Monday, charging that “another US-backed war would mean death and displacement abroad and repression at home.”
The University of Chicago’s SJP chapter cheered Iran’s retaliatory strikes against US assets in Bahrain.
Some protests have kicked off already, according to social media reports, and have seen members of Yale’s SJP chapter brandishing “Death to America” signs. Prior to the demonstration, the group parroted propaganda confected by what remained of Iran’s political leadership following this weekend’s strikes, accusing the US of “killing children, including civilians.”
In the United Kingdom, the Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society of University College London said, “This is not the end to resistance. The Shia in the west [sic] must remain aware and ready.”
Writing to The Algemeiner on Sunday, Sabrina Soffer, research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, said SJP’s statements are indicative of an ideology which contradicts itself.
“Even after the death of one of the Middle East’s most brutal butchers, they cannot offer even a scintilla of credit to Israel or the United States for confronting a regime that has terrorized its own people for decades,” Soffer said. “They brand themselves ‘anti-war’ yet refuse to recognize that the only genuinely anti-war force in this equation is the one dismantling the infrastructure of terror and repression. Israeli and American actions aimed at weakening a violent theocracy are not acts of aggression against the Iranian people — they are part of a rescue operation on behalf of a population held hostage by its rulers.”
She added, “What is truly un-progressive is the arrogance of presuming to speak for Iranians while ignoring those who have risked imprisonment and death resisting the regime from within. It is entitlement masquerading as solidarity.”
Students for Justice in Palestine’s national office has previously discussed its 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 in September 2024.
“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. “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.”
The tweet was at the time the latest in a series of progressive revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, CUAD distributed literature calling on students to enlist in a holy war against Israel and the US.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” it said. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the literature were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place in December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.