CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2024, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“THE STRONG FACULTY LINK TO
PRO-HAMAS DEMONSTRATIONS”
More than 80 percent of
Americans favor Israel over the Palestinian Hamas terror group in their ongoing
conflict. Among college-age Americans, more than 57 percent favor Israel.
That’s according to a recent
Harvard CAPS-Harris poll reported by the Center for American Political Studies.
Which raises the question of
why pro-Palestinian protestors have dominated the campus scene in California
and nationwide, staging far more rallies, setting up all encampments, occupying
buildings and threatening and committing far more violent acts than their
pro-Israel counterparts.
Now the AMCHA Initiative, a
Santa Cruz-based group that has tracked campus antisemitism since the earliest
years of this century, has found at least a partial explanation: It’s the
faculty.
More specifically, it’s an
on-campus group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), whose collegiate
chapters and membership ballooned just after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas incursion
into Israel that massacred more than 1,200 persons and took 251 hostages, many
of whom Hamas killed in captivity.
FJP exists to further
activities of the Hamas-linked college group Students for Justice in Palestine,
whose anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations mushroomed on Oct. 8, 2023, just
one day after the massacre and more than one week before any Israeli troops
entered Gaza in their current war with Hamas.
In a detailed study of
protests at 100 universities, AMCHA found the number of demonstrations, the
time encampments lasted and the number of incidents involving death threats and
threats of violence against Jewish students was vastly higher on campuses with
FJP chapters than those without.
This was true nationally and
in California, where FJP and its affiliates have UC chapters at the Berkeley,
Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz
campuses, as well as at Stanford and USC, most of which saw lengthy encampments
and building takeovers.
The study found incidents
involving violet physical assaults of Jews on campuses were 7.3 times more
likely at schools with an FJP chapter than those with none, like Santa Clara
University and many Cal State campuses.
Death threats against Jews
labelled “Zionists” were 3.4 times as common at colleges with FJP chapters,
whose membership at California schools ranges from seven to 40 professors per
campus.
FJP formally has two main
purposes: to promote the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement designed to
isolate Israeli universities and their faculty, and to purge all Zionist
expression from their campuses.
Here’s some of how that
played out at UC Santa Barbara, in a student’s description of one of many
campus meetings about the Israel-Hamas war:
“For the Jewish students in
that room, the betrayal in what a Black speaker said was palpable. (Jews) were
framed as oppressors, even though it was their people who had been slaughtered
just weeks before, over 1,200 lives, most of them Jewish, lost in the worst
massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” they said.
“The reality of that horror
was ignored. Instead, the speaker, president of (an) organization
that…celebrated the Oct. 7 invasion, portrayed Palestinians as the only
victims, as though the grief of the Jewish students…was offensive. (His)
narrative left Jewish students stunned. They were grieving, heartbroken, and
terrified, and now they were being painted as aggressors in a story where they
had just buried their dead. This was soul-crushing.”
That experience, multiplied
many times over, is one reason many Jewish students have transferred away from
campuses they attended last year.
In a way, their leaving is a
victory for FJP, one of whose stated goals is to squelch all disagreement with
its views. Another stated goal is to dismantle many schools’ foreign study
programs linked to Israeli universities.
Administrators at UC,
Stanford and other campuses this fall adopted some of AMCHA’s suggested
safeguard and enforcement mechanisms aimed at keeping politics out of
classrooms, while leaving campuses open to peaceful expression of all views.
It's too early to know how
this will play out, but an official FJP statement said “the work to educate and
organize (students) will grow in new ways.”
One big question: How many
students will be willing or able to risk their grades and futures by defying
the views of some of their professors and how many will go along to get along?
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net”
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