This post was written by Managing Editor of UK Media Watch, Adam Levick and was originally posted here.
For the second time in little over a year, the Guardian has managed to portray the radical, regressive anti-Zionist group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in a sympathetic light. The latest article, which appeared in the Guardian on Aug. 24th and is titled ‘GOP mega-donor funds group calling pro-Palestine US students ‘Jew haters‘, reports on a Sheldon Adelson funded group which targets BDS and accuses some individual pro-Palestinian students of supporting terrorism and promoting antisemitism.
Whilst the article correctly suggests that the group, Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus (SJHC), is quite extreme in some of its rhetoric, the Guardian journalist, Sam Levin, grossly misleads readers by suggesting that SJP in particular is being smeared with the ‘false’ charges of being pro-terror and engaging in Jew hatred.
Here are the relevant passages.
“They [SJHC] are trying to cast us as antisemitic, that we are somehow a discriminatory group,” said the political science student, who is a member of the college’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization. “That is a completely spurious accusation. One of our core principles is anti-oppression and anti-racism.”
Tensions surrounding Israel-Palestine campus activism have escalated in recent years, but SJP leaders said the posters identifying specific students were particularly aggressive and had led some of them to face online harassment and death threats.
…
“This definitely felt like a more direct escalation,” said Omar Zahzah, a 28-year-old graduate student at UCLA who was also named in the recent posters. “It wasn’t just slandering SJP anymore. It was attacking specific individuals.”
Zahzah, a comparative literature student, who is Palestinian, added: “It’s easy to joke about and dismiss. But at the end of the day, it’s still pretty intimidating, which is the point.”
The inversion of reality by Levin is extraordinary – suggesting that SJP members are the ones being targeted, intimidated and harassed by aggressive and threatening tactics.
Here are some facts:
- SJP was founded in 2001 by Hatem Bazian, an extremist who’s engaged in antisemitic rhetoric, has endorsed an intifada in Palestine and in the US, and expressed support for jihadist attacks on American soldiers in Iraq.
- SJP is funded by two organizations dedicated to the destruction of Israel – American Muslims for Palestine and Al-Awda.
- SJP has staged events in which Israel was accused of genocide and even compared to Nazi Germany.
- SJP chapters hosted antisemitic speakers.
- SJP events have included Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters and speakers who endorse violence.
- SJP members have bullied, intimidated and physically assaulted Jewish students on campus.
- SJP has often disrupted pro-Israel events – including Holocaust Remembrance Day events.
- An internal SJP document revealed that disrupting Israel-related events was part of their broader strategy of countering “Zionist normalization efforts”.
- A (failed) SJP initiative at the UCLA Undergraduate Students Association Council demanded that “candidates for student government positions sign a statement pledging that they would not go on any trip to Israel sponsored by three Jewish organizations”.
- SJP tactics include “the mock eviction notices against Jewish students on dormitory doors”.
- Protests by SJP chapters have included hate-speech and pro-terror chants such as “when people are occupied, resistance is justified” and “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free” – calling for the destruction of the Jewish State.
- SJP members have been condemned for using social media site to post antisemitic graphics, including a Nazi propaganda poster, captioned “Liberators”, seen here:
If the Guardian journalist engaged in even a minimal amount of research, he would have easily established that SJP not only is guilty of the very intimidation it’s accusing others of engaging in, but is in fact an extremist group which endorses violence, promotes antisemitism and harasses Jews on college campuses.
