Students for Justice in Palestine Cheers Hamas Crimes at Colleges Across U.S.

Daniel Greenfield October 16, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the Hamas rape of girls, murder of babies and kidnapping of children as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance”.

The national organization which has 200 chapters on campuses across North America put out a ‘toolkit’ which explained that the Jewish victims were “not civilians” and could be freely targeted.

Its poster for a ‘Day of Resistance’ featured an image of the paraglider that Hamas terrorists had used to massacre and rape young Israelis at a music festival.

SJP chapters on college campuses quickly took up its call for a ‘Day of Resistance’ and put out their statements endorsing and defending Hamas and celebrating its atrocities. Many of them adopted the language of the toolkit and used the phrase “by any means necessary” to defend Islamic terrorism, not to mention rape and kidnapping, as a legitimate tactic of “resistance”.

Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine’s statement declared that it “enshrines the right of the Palestinian people to resist the Zionist regime by any means necessary and honors the martyrs who have sacrificed their lives for liberation.” The “martyrs” are the Hamas terrorists.

It added that “every settler is an aggressive occupier even as they sit comfortably in their stolen homes” and that “there exists only a colonizer and a colonized, an oppressed and an oppressor” meaning that all Jews and non-Muslims in Israel were legitimate targets for mass murder.

The national SJP organization as well as 22 chapters, including those at UCLA, USC, Berkeley, and 6 University of California schools, signed a statement declaring “our unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza” and taking pride in “Towfan Al-Aqsa” (the Hamas name for the operation) “as a revolutionary moment in contemporary Palestinian resistance.”

“We honor Palestinians who are working on the ground on several axes of the so-called ‘Gaza envelope’ alongside our comrades in blood and arms, and what is coming is greater. Victory or martyrdom,” the genocidal statement signed by dozens of campus groups proclaimed.

Other signatories to the enthusiastic anticipation of the Hamas massacres of Jews yet to come included four Muslim Students Association chapters, a Muslim Brotherhood operation that usually closely coordinates with SJP, as well as the Young Democratic Socialists at Berkeley, Students for Socialism, and the UC Santa Barbara Student Commission on Racial Equity.

Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on many other campuses also took pride in the horrors inflicted by Hamas.

“Since Friday, Palestinians have been launching a historic attack on the colonizers,” the SJP chapter at Tufts University crowed. “Footage of liberation fighters from Gaza paragliding into occupied territory has especially shown the creativity necessary to take back stolen land. It has not been without cost as hundreds of Palestinians have been martyred.”

While some avoided using the name ‘Hamas’, preferring euphemisms like the ‘resistance, others unabashedly stated their support for the Islamic terrorist group by name.

The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Hunter College praised the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attacks “led by Mohammed Dief, the commander in chief of the izz el-din al-Qassam Brigadges, the military wing of Hamas” as a “significant moment.”

Hunter’s SJP’s statement concluded with, “Dief has declared, “Enough is enough.” That’s the slogan that also decorated its message along with “resistance is the only answer.”

In the UK’s University College London Students for Justice for Palestine similarly dispensed with the pretense of ambiguity and posted a quote from Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

George Washington’s Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” who are “dispelling the illusion of the Zionist entity’s invincibility”. It described the Hamas attacks on Israeli communities and the massacres of men, women and children as “seizing settlements”. Like other SJP chapters, it added the phrase “by any means necessary” as a euphemism for describing terrorism as a form of “resistance”..

The SJP chapter predicted that “the settler colony will fall”, by which it meant the destruction of Israel and boasted that “even the backing of the world’s most powerful imperial states”, meaning the United States of America, could not stop Hamas.

It also announced a vigil for the “martyrs” or Hamas terrorists who “made the ultimate sacrifice”.

Students for Justice in Palestine at George Mason University similarly described the invasions and massacres as the work of “Palestinian resistance fighters” who were “reclaiming land and seizing settlements considered illegal”. It emphasized that “we must not fall into the trap of distinguishing between armed resistance fighters and non-combatants”, contending that “every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms” while all Jews are settlers and an “aggressor, a soldier and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches”.

All Muslim terrorists are civilians and Jewish civilians aren’t really civilians, according to the George Mason SJP chapter. And therefore all Jews, regardless of age, could be treated as soldiers and killed. Like the infants who were shot by Hamas at point blank range.

SJP chapters across the country were unanimous in their pride in Hamas and its atrocities.

Students for Justice in Palestine at Ohio State University praised Hamas as “our heroic resistance in Gaza” and announced a rally to “uplift and honor our resistance and martyrs.”

SJP’s chapter at Rutgers University described the Hamas “Al-Aqsa Flood Offensive Strategy” of attacking civilian communities and massacring those inside as “justified retaliation” against “settler colonization” and the “desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated the “unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza” and asserted their “full solidarity with the Palestinian resistance”. It was also a signatory to the “victory or martyrdom” statement signed by the national organization.

The SJP chapter at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice defended the Hamas massacres as the means by which the “Palestinian people have fought back against colonization.”

Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia posted that, “in an unprecedented feat for the 21st century, resistance fighters in Gaza broke through the illegitimate border fence” and “seized control of several Israeli settlements.”

“The events that took place yesterday are a step toward a free Palestine”, SJP UVA asserted. “We stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters.” Students for Justice in Palestine’s chapter at the University of North Carolina stated that “it is our moral obligation to be in solidarity” with “violence”. Northwestern University’s Students for Justice in Palestine claimed that terrorists have the right to carry out attacks “without stigmatization as instigators and terrorists”.

Dozens of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters across America expressed their support for an illegal terrorist organization and for its crimes. Several explicitly argued for killing civilians.

Many of these chapters are located at public universities and benefit from taxpayer funding. The national organization of Students for Justice in Palestine is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and donations to it are treated as tax-exempt. Its support for terrorism violates that status.

While pro-Israel activists and conservatives have spent decades warning that Students for Justice in Palestine is a violent antisemitic campus hate group that advocates for Islamic terrorists, those warnings were ignored, dismissed and shut down by university administrators, student papers and the national media as bigoted and ‘Islamophobic’.

Now SJP’s national organization and some of its most prominent chapters from New York to California have gone on record as endorsing not only Islamic terrorists, but the most horrific crimes against Jews that are possible. They have done this on campuses where students have been sanctioned for wearing sombreros on Halloween, using pronouns incorrectly or some other minor offense against wokeness, and expect to face no consequences for it.

If a normal student expressed support for murdering members of a minority group, there would be action. Certainly if an entire official campus student organization, like SJP, that is officially registered and funded, expressed its enthusiasm for murdering a minority group, there ought to be clear and decisive action to decertify and remove them from any university campus.

Many SJP chapters have stopped beating around the bush. They’re so convinced of their political invulnerability that they openly quote Hamas and celebrate rape, kidnapping and murder. College administrators can no longer pretend that they don’t see what SJP is. If they fail to take action, then they are no longer just collaborating with SJP, but with Hamas.

The atrocities of the High Holy Days War leave a simple choice: either you’re with kidnapped children, raped women and murdered babies or you’re with Hamas. Students for Justice in Palestine has made the choice that everyone always knew that it would make. It’s up to some of the most prestigious colleges in the country, from Columbia University to UCLA, to make theirs.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading. 

 Tags: campus, Hamas, recent, SJP