OPINION:
Thank you for your article “’Jew-hating campaign’ seen with Israel divestment movement on campuses” (Web, March 18). Sadly, the problem is worse than the article suggests.
At the University of California, Davis — my alma mater — the student senate’s vote approving an Israel-divestment measure (later overturned by UC Davis’ student court) was accompanied by anti-Semitic graffiti attacks on the campus’ Hillel House and a Jewish fraternity house. Following the vote, a student senator boasted on social media: “Israel will fall insha’Allah.”
At UC Berkeley, the leader of Students for Justice in Palestine rammed a shopping cart into Jessica Felber, a Jewish student who was holding a sign saying “Israel wants peace.” University officials belittled the assault as “free speech.” At UCLA, even before judicial board candidate Rachel Beyda was interrogated over whether being Jewish prevented her from being unbiased, Students for Justice in Palestine engineered the defeat of Sunny Singh, a candidate for student body president, because he refused to sign a pledge not to take trips sponsored by three Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, one of America’s most respected civil rights organizations.
Perhaps most frighteningly, in 2013 San Francisco State University’s General Union of Palestine Students provided students with stencils for making signs saying: “My heroes have always killed colonizers,” meaning Israelis. GUPS’ president also posted a picture online of himself holding a knife, captioned: “I love this blade … just holding it makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier.” In another post, he said he wanted to decapitate an Israeli soldier and “all others who support the IDF,” adding, “the destruction and decimation of this Israeli plague … can’t possibly come soon enough.”
Couching anti-Semitism as anti-Israel vituperation does not make it any less hateful.
STEPHEN A. SILVER
San Francisco
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