‘Blood Thirsty Baby Killers’: Extremist Anti-Israel Activism Surging on US College Campuses, New Report Finds

Anti-Israel activists on US college campuses embraced a strategy of vilifying Zionists and supporting terrorism against the Jewish state during the 2022-2023 academic school year, according to a new report.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish civil rights group, on Wednesday released the latest version of its annual report tracking anti-Israel activism on US campuses. The report tallied 665 campus anti-Israel incidents during the 2022-2023 academic year — nearly double the number of incidents from the prior school year.

While not all the incidents were necessarily antisemitic, many were antisemitic “in intent or in effect,” according to the report, which added that they collectively “contribute to a more hostile campus environment” for Jewish students.

“Every year, young Jewish people go to college with the hope that their Jewish identities, including their connection to the Jewish state, will be welcome on campus,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “This sense of community is increasingly at risk as concerning anti-Israel incidents increase. University leaders must respond effectively to this hatred so that Jewish students feel safe.”

The report cited several examples of anti-Israel activism harming Jews on campus. In one such instance, Georgetown University co-sponsored a conference featuring British academic David Miller, who Bristol University fired as a professor for harassing Jewish students. He has accused the “Zionist movement” of “grooming Jewish kids.”

In another case cited by the ADL report, Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee erected a so-called “apartheid wall.” Separately, during a City University of New York (CUNY) Law School commencement speech, a graduate demonized Israel and charged that Jewish money determines the positions taken by administrators on Israel.

Support for terrorism was also common on college campuses. According to the report, the anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) expressed on at least 10 occasions admiration for Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a US-designated terror group. She is known for previously hijacking two planes.

Other SJP chapters at the University of Texas, Dallas, New York University Law School, and the University of Massachusetts posted violent images containing PLFP’s logo and guns. In January, the University of Chicago’s SJP chapter honored Khairy Alqam — who murdered seven Israeli civilians exiting a synagogue in Jerusalem — in a collage titled “Honoring the Martyrs.”

“Many expressions of support for violence/terror were accompanied by the slogan that ‘[armed] resistance is justified when the people are occupied,’ which is often used by activists to promote all violence against Israel, even against civilians, which they argue is a noble cause in the anti-colonial struggled, despite Jews (like Palestinians) being native and indigenous to the land,” the report states, noting that classical antisemitic tropes are also used to attack the Jewish state.

In April, for example, an unknown person wrote “You blood thirsty baby killers” on a flyer promoting an Israel Independence Day party at Pomona College.

Philanthropic support for the pro-Palestinian campus movement can be substantial, the ADL noted, citing a $20,000 donation that the Sparkplug Foundation, a left-wing nonprofit organization, granted SJP in 2022. Other organizations have also provided money and even logistical resources such as American Muslims for Palestine and Palestine Legal, which is generously funded by Tides Foundation, a pioneer in activist investment.

As The Algemeiner has previously reported, a growing alignment of large, left-leaning philanthropic organizations with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is fueling the latter’s growth on American college campuses.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a left-wing anti-Israel organization that promotes the BDS movement, has received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion, since 2017, according to a report by the higher education nonprofit National Association of Scholars in April. Meanwhile, the Tides Foundations has given the group $75,000 since 2019. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants.

ADL’s report comes amid a nationwide surge in antisemitic incidents on college campuses across the US, a problem that it and other organizations have closely tracked, flagging a significant increase in displays of both traditional antisemitism — discrimination against Jews based on religion or race — and anti-Zionism targeting Jewish students over their support for Israel.

Just last week, a student and anti-Israel activist at Harvard University interrupted a convocation ceremony held by the school, shouting at Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana, “Here’s the real truth — Harvard supports, upholds, and invests in Israeli apartheid, and the oppression of Palestinians!”

Another Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania, is scheduled to host an event this month featuring a gamut of anti-Zionist activists who have promoted antisemitic tropes and called for violence against Israel.

Speakers listed on the event’s itinerary include Islamic University of Gaza professor Refaat Alareer, who said in 2018, “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are.” Another listed speaker, Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, previously said during an interview that “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them.”

Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, is also a scheduled speaker. In recent years he has made comments about “Jewish power” and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. In May, during a concert held in Berlin, he performed in what looked like a Nazi SS officer uniform. A projection that played during the concert also compared Holocaust victim Anne Frank to Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — who was accidentally shot and killed last year while covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank — and the show was deemed as “deeply offensive to Jewish people.”

The surge in anti-Israel activism on campus has seemingly contributed to the growing alarm that Jewish students are feeling about antisemitism. A striking 57 percent of Jewish students reported witnessing or experiencing an act of antisemitism either on campus or in the general public, according to a recent survey conducted by market research firm Ipsos and released by the World Jewish Congress and Jewish on Campus, a nonprofit organization. Meanwhile, 84 percent of the students said they fear that antisemitism in the US poses a threat to the country.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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