As the academic year ends, there continues to be a notable rise in anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda, worsened by harmful protests by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at CU Boulder.
Despite being derecognized as a student group last semester, SJP’s negative impact persists, and they have ongoing influence across the campus. These student activists are not acting alone; they have support from a group with considerably more power: Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP).
The FSJP website spreads overtly anti-Zionist propaganda and statements that harm Jews, which has observably provoked unrest on campus.
Meanwhile, SJP’s “activism” has consisted mainly of taking over public spaces, hosting known antisemites, and bullying and harassing Jewish students. Throughout that whole time, FSJP participants have used their position as faculty members to enable this behavior.
This is why FSJP poses a greater danger than the student groups. According to their Instagram, the CU chapter of FSJP started in May 2024; however, FSJP nationwide was founded after October 7, with a problematic mission statement. Their official website states, “FSJP supports campus groups of faculty and staff organizing for Palestinian liberation. It was established in solidarity with our students during the 2023-25 war on Palestinian communities – a U.S.-backed assault against a colonized, dispossessed, and oppressed population.”
This statement entirely dismisses the identity of the Jewish people and the State of Israel by using the outdated stereotype that Israel functions as a colonizer state, and ignores the true reason for the current war — the mass rape and murder of Jews by a popular Palestinian terrorist group and their supporters.
When the Ethnic Studies department decided to publish a statement in support of Palestinian liberation this past semester, continuing the trend of pro-Palestinian groups ignoring the atrocities on October 7, it became clear that the entire department had been taken over by these activists masquerading as professors.
While the statement was retracted following the university’s request, a revised version was issued that weakly expressed an opposition to antisemitism “in any form,” and continued to display justification toward the biggest source of antisemitism on the planet — the Palestinian anti-Israel movement.
And this neutered statement still failed to acknowledge the violence experienced by Israelis and Jewish people worldwide, or the mass protests that began just days after Hamas’ mass murder.
FSJP expresses no reservations regarding their past behavior, and has attempted to pressure the university to allow student groups free rein to break school policies with outrageous requests. Their only agenda seems to be aiding students intent on excluding the majority of Jewish voices.
Two of the most egregious demands are that the institution solely accommodate the Palestinian community’s support and safety, and divest entirely from Israel.
For readers unaware, “divesting from Israel” is a euphemism that has become particularly favored by anti-Israel groups like these; it is essentially a call for the university to discriminate against Israelis based on their nationality, and to take away resources and programs from students interested in learning from Israeli institutions.
The social media post that FSJP created with the list of six demands all have a similar underlying theme: the dismantlement of Jewish life on campus, and imposing a Palestinian lens on all education and discourse related to the conflict in the Middle East.
They also explicitly demand divestment not only from Israeli institutions, but also the two major Jewish institutions on campus, Hillel and Chabad, which they view as Israeli because of their ties to Israel and pro-Israel culture.
It is one thing for a student group to exercise their freedom of speech, even if it is hate speech. CU Boulder is a state school, and college is supposed to be a place where people learn about “activism.”
However, they crossed the line when faculty openly shared their political beliefs and forced them on students, and then supported groups that violate school policy. This is not activism — it is forced indoctrination and hate speech.
Compare FSJP and their “partners” in the Ethnic Studies department to the Jewish Studies department. When the campus situation started heating up, faculty from the Jewish Studies department issued an official statement articulating their position on the ongoing conflict, and explicitly refrained from endorsing any expressions of hatred towards either Israel or the Palestinians.
No student in higher education should ever be pressured to conform to, or feel threatened by, a professor’s political views — especially when those views implicitly endorse acts of terrorism against the student’s minority group.
The actions of FSJP not only threaten academic freedom and integrity, but they also actively insert and enable a toxic culture on campus that targets Jews.
Allowing this group to continue without any scrutiny is a disservice to our campus community, and a betrayal of the Jewish community.
This article was originally published in The Algemeiner.
