A group accused of providing support for terrorists is holding its national conference at George Mason University — a state-funded Virginia institution.
Students for Justice in Palestine will hold a two-day conference on the Fairfax campus of George Mason University. The conference press release states:
The conversations we have will be important and pertinent to the student movement, so we want to see as many faces as possible! Let’s keep growing and building together as we strive for a free Palestine.
The organization is also seeking donations to pay for students from around the country to travel to Virginia for the conference, which is scheduled for November 4-6, 2016.
Students for Justice for Palestine has been branded a “hate group.” The Anti-Defamation League describes them as follows:
“SJP has consistently demonized Israel, describing Israeli policies toward the Palestinians as racist and apartheid-like, and comparing Israelis to Nazis or Israel to the Jim Crow-era U.S.”
I asked David Horowitz, prolific author and head of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, to describe SJP:
“SJP is a front for the Hamas terrorists, carrying out their propaganda and spearheading their BDS [boycott, divest, sanction] agendas on campus. It’s an outrage that universities recognize SJP as a student group and fund their pro-terrorist activities.”
SJP was founded by Hatem Bazian. As Daniel Mael has written of Bazian:
Bazian’s extremist rhetoric can be traced at least as far back as 1999, when, in a presentation at an academic conference, he favorably recited a famous anti-Semitic passage from the Quran: “The Day of Judgment will not happen until the trees and stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’” (He later denied having done so.)
In 2011, he helped organize the “Never Again For Anyone” speaking tour, during which the Holocaust was invoked and the Palestinians likened to the Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany.
Further, SJP has been tied to incidents of mock eviction notices being slipped under dorm room doors, possibly having targeted dorms containing Sabbath-compliant elevators:
One George Mason staff member tells me that some of the organizers of SJP at George Mason are the same people who led the fight to oppose renaming George Mason’s law school in Justice Antonin Scalia’s honor.
SJP members from all over the nation are slated to come to Virginia to attend the conference. SJP has at least 215 active chapters on American college campuses. Most college chapters are funded by student activity funds: money that all members of the student body must pay.
New York legislators have threatened to cut off public university funding at one college if support for SJP continued.
It remains to be seen if Virginia legislators will take action before this scheduled November conference.
At least some groups — such as Christians United for Israel — have opposed the anti-Israel rhetoric of SJP and the growing threats of violence against Jewish students on campus.
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