Photo: Monika M. Wahi/Wikimedia Commons
The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Northeastern University in Boston has promoted via social media the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
In a since-deleted Instagram post featuring a graphic titled “Reading is for radicals” is the text: “SJP will be reading through different strategies and theory of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This is a welcoming and accountable space where we can learn and grow with one another.”
Pro-Israel groups working on campus reacted to the post, saying it is “highly concerning” and glorifies violence.
“The PFLP is a designated terrorist organization responsible for the mass murder of civilians from Israel, America and beyond,” StandWithUs co-founder and CEO Roz Rothstein told JNS. “It is telling that SJP would promote an event to ‘read through’ the PFLP’s ‘strategies and theory,’ using imagery that glorifies gun violence. Northeastern University should unequivocally condemn SJP and this event.”
Hali Spiegel, CAMERA’s director of campus programming and strategic relationships, told JNS, “PFLP terrorists have killed and injured hundreds of civilians in terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings. To cite just one example, the group sent a Palestinian teenager to blow up himself and others in Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market in 2004. SJP’s glorification of such an organization and its propaganda is nothing less than an affront to Israeli students on campus.”
AMCHA Initiative co-founder and director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told JNS that the Northeastern SJP post “openly endorses armed violence and invites students to ‘learn and grow’ by reading about the ‘strategies and theories’ of a designated terrorist organization that has murdered hundreds of Jews.” It is a call, she said, that “is unusual; in fact, it may be unprecedented, and it is highly concerning.”
Originally published in jns.org.
Contributed by JNS Washington correspondent Jackson Richman.