Students for Justice in Palestine Flunks Out

By Eric Rozenman and Julie Strauss Levin

This past Oct. 7, George Mason University’s Hillel and Chabad student organizations held a commemoration for the victims of Hamas’ rampage of rape, mutilation, kidnapping, immolation, and murder in Israel. Undergraduates in yellow T-shirts called for the release of those still held hostage in Gaza, distributed literature, and listened to GMU President Gregory Washington’s supportive remarks.

Less than two weeks earlier, on Sept. 25, on the same plaza at the heart of GMU’s campus, the school’s chapter of the false-flag group Students for Justice in Palestine held its own demonstration supporting Hamas’ mission. That mission, proclaimed in the terrorist group’s 1988 Charter, includes destruction of Israel; establishment of an Islamic theocracy over it, Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria); and genocide of the Jews. Hamas’ 2017 Charter reaffirms the Palestinian Arab claim to all the land “from the River Jordan in the East to the Mediterranean Sea in the West.”

The United States designated Hamas a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997. Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, funds, arms and trains Hamas.

Among other things, GMU’s SJP participants displayed a large banner reading “Globalize the Student Intifada.” Calls to “globalize the intifada” have been a common slogan invoked by anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrators and propagandists since the Oct. 7, 2023, slaughter of 1,200 people, the worst single-day bloodshed of Jews since the Holocaust.

Use of “Intifada,” an Arabic word translated as uprising or overthrow, was self-applied to Palestinian terror wars against Israel in 1987–1992 and 2000–2005, in which thousands of Israelis and Arabs died. Its invocation by SJP is intentional, provocative and dangerous.

In this light, it should be noted that Hamas is an acronym for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. It is also an Arabic word meaning “zeal.” Revealingly, the Hebrew word chamas means “violence,” “cruelty” or “injustice.”

GMU’s SJP chapter is on record endorsing the Oct. 7 murders, justifying the same as “resistance.” Despite SJP’s attempt to confiscate the language of free people and free speech, inverting criticism of its rhetoric and actions as “racist,” it is, in fact, the war against the Jewish state and people — which the organization supports — that epitomizes Jew-hating racism.

SJP deserves no place at GMU. President Washington and his administration should expel it, not because its free speech is hateful, but because it deploys such speech to endorse and at least implicitly incite — contrary to university policy — antisemitic bigotry, violence and, potentially, murder. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that First Amendment speech protections do not cover incitement to unlawful acts.

Testifying at a U.S. House Ways and Means Committee hearing last November, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said, “I don’t think there should be a place on any campus for organizations like SJP that threaten people based on their ethnicity or faith or nationality.” He noted that Brandeis University had expelled SJP and George Washington and Columbia universities had suspended it. Florida has barred the group from all public university campuses. The University of Illinois dropped recognition of SJP as a student organization.

An ADL Backgrounder reports that local SJP chapters take their cues from the national SJP. Many SJP chapters have called for “Zionists” — the majority of Jewish students who identify or have any association with Israel — to be removed from campus spaces or from universities altogether.

Last October, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares launched an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine. Coverage of the investigation noted that SJP is a “signature project” of AMP. AMP itself appears to be a Hamas-related support group.

Anti-Israel, antisemitic demonstrators on university campuses the past year have taken to obscuring their faces with medical masks or keffiyehs. The latter are traditional Arab headscarves, popularized by Yasser Arafat, the late leader of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization.

In response, George Mason University recently adopted a “Concealment of Identity” policy. It authorizes campus police to demand identification from anyone hiding his or her face while on campus. This begs two questions. One, why should any such concealment be tolerated? Medical masks and keffiyehs worn to obscure faces recall nothing more plainly than Ku Klux Klan hoods, employed for the same intimidating, racist and often violent purposes.

Two, why should SJP’s presence as a university-recognized organization be tolerated at GMU, or any other educational institution? This de facto Hamas overseas youth group advances no academic or First Amendment purpose. Neither a neo-Nazi fraternity nor KKK affinity group would be tolerated on any campus, and they should not be. SJP is in the same league. It, too, flunks liberal education and it must go.

Eric Rozenman and Julie Strauss Levin served on the 2022 Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism. Rozenman is a former editor of Washington Jewish Week. Levin is an attorney who also serves on nonprofit boards.

First published in Washington Jewish Week