Posted on 05/01/2017 7:51:37 AM PDT by SJackson
Editor’s note: Tufts University and Brandeis University are the latest two schools named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States. Over the weekend, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas terrorists on both campuses. These posters pose a challenge to the Tufts and Brandeis administrations to defend speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism, rather than ordering it silenced as they have in the past.
Brandeis University: Campus Administration
Brandeis University, located in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, is notable for being one of America’s few elite universities to be founded by Jews and is named for Louis B. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. In recent years, Brandeis has been conspicuous for a more disturbing reason—as an academic center that is uniquely welcoming to pro-terrorist speech and ideology directed against Israel while showing extreme hostility towards those who oppose Israel’s terrorist adversaries.
Members of Brandeis’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine have hosted numerous events featuring speakers that defend anti-Israel terrorism and the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Among these are radical professor Noam Chomsky who gave a speech describing Israel’s actions towards Palestine as “vicious, brutal and criminal” and claimed that Israel “is alone in denying” its “illegal occupation of territories.”
In April 2015, the Brandeis administration selected former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering to be honored as the university’s commencement speaker. Known for his extreme anti-Israel views, Pickering has written that Israel has conducted a “half-century-long occupation” of Palestine that is tantamount to “the permanent subjugation and disenfranchisement of a people to which Israel refuses to grant citizenship in the Jewish state.”
In 2014, a Jewish student at Brandeis, Daniel Mael, exposed a secret faculty listserve where more than 90 left-wing Brandeis faculty exchanged radical views. Some of the listserve’s participants promoted Hamas propaganda while espousing anti-Semitic comments and expressing hatred of Israel. Professor Donald Hindley, for instance, referred to the Jewish state as “The Vile, Terrorist Israeli Government,” in a post about the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists.
Hindley also sarcastically wrote: “Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses…” and compared an event challenging the anti-Semitic BDS movement to “Germany in the later 1930s with everyone at least a Nazi sympathizer.”
Brandeis sociology professor Gordon Fellman, meanwhile, wrote on the listserve seeking signatures for an open letter to “end the illegal occupation in Palestine.” According to the letter, “the government of Israel, having provoked the firing of rockets by its rampage through the West Bank, is now using that response as the pretext for an aerial assault on Gaza which has already cost scores of lives.”
When Brandeis University president Fredrick Lawrence condemned these statements as “abhorrent”( but took no official action against the professors who made them), some faculty who participated in the listserve, along with the Brandeis English Department, condemned his comments and sought a faculty forum on freedom of speech on campus.
While welcoming anti-Israel and pro-Hamas speech on campus, Brandeis has also exhibited hostility towards those who are critical of Islamic terrorism. In April 2014, under pressure from students and faculty, the Brandeis administration acted to withdraw an honorary degree that had been offered to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born women’s rights activist and critic of radical Islam who has condemned the mistreatment of women in Muslim countries, and especially the practice of female genital mutilation. Eighty-seven Brandeis faculty members signed a petition citing Ali’s “extreme Islamophobic beliefs” as a reason why the honorary degree should be rescinded. Showcasing the university’s blatant hypocrisy, Brandeis had previously awarded an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, who has a long history of anti-Semitic statements, among them the claim that “The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community.”
Brandeis also failed to take action when SJP members disrupted a university panel featuring six members of the Israeli Knesset. The SJP activists repeatedly yelled the epithet “war criminals” at the panel participants and attempted to distribute fake warrants calling for their arrest.
For its history of repeatedly welcoming anti-Israel and pro-terror speakers and protests on campus while allowing those who would present opposing views to be silenced, the Brandeis administration makes our list of Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.
Tufts University: James M. Glaser, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Jianmin Qu, Dean of the School of Engineering
The campus of Tufts University has repeatedly rolled out the red carpet for supporters of the BDS movement against Israel. In 2014, it hosted the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) National Conference, a secretive event which to which media access was strictly controlled and monitored but according to the conference agenda, instructed attendees on how and when to take “direct action” against supporters of Israel.
Tufts SJP has repeatedly condoned anti-Israel terrorism in its published works and statements and holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid” hate week during which the BDS movement against Israel is promoted. It has also violated campus regulations by distributing mock “eviction notices” to Jewish students in the dorms, which it falsely claims are similar to notices “routinely given to Palestinian families living under oppressive Israeli occupation.” Tufts SJP also attacked and delegitimized the campus pro-Israel group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) by labeling it “literally a hate group.”
No action was taken against SJP, yet when the David Horowitz Freedom Center attempted to hang posters describing SJP’s links to Hamas and its genocidal agenda, three Tufts administrators— Dean of Arts and Sciences James Glaser, Dean of the School of Engineering Jianmin Qu and Dean of Student Affairs Mary Pat McMahon—emailed a statement to the entire Tufts student body, condemning the posters and claiming that they violated the University’s community standards.
“The university will be sending a statement to the poster’s sponsors in order to make clear that such materials are not welcome on our campus,” the email read.
Two of these administrators—Glaser and Qu—followed up this missive with a letter sent directly to the Freedom Center. It read:
We are writing to express our serious concerns regarding the posters placed on the Tufts University campus on October 19, 2016… The posters in question violate our community standards and are not welcome on our campus. We ask that you cease any further actions that violate our community standards and, in the future, that your organization comply with applicable university policies in any interactions with members of the Tufts community or our campus facilities.
After noting SJP’s financial ties to Hamas and the rampant anti-Semitism behind its call for BDS, Freedom Center founder David Horowitz quoted from Tufts’ community standards—which explicitly state “Freedom of expression and inquiry are fundamental to the academic enterprise” to point out that nothing in the Freedom Center’s posters violate those standards.
For its stunning hypocrisy in tearing down posters critical of SJP and Hamas, while allowing SJP to disregard campus regulations, attack Jewish students and violate the University’s rules of civility, Tufts’ administrators deserve to be named among those who are “most friendly to terrorists and hostile to the First Amendment.”
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Editor’s note: The David Horowitz Freedom Center has prepared a report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States. Frontpage will be highlighting one campus from this report each day. Vassar College is the latest campus to be added to the list. The Freedom Center also placed posters on Vassar’s campus linking SJP to Hamas terrorists. These posters serve as a challenge to the Vassar College administration to defend speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism.
Vassar College: John Chenette, Interim President, and Ed Pittman, Associate Dean of Campus Life and Diversity
A small liberal arts college located in the quiet town of Poughkeepsie, New York, Vassar College has for several years been home to a radical, anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas student movement against the Jews and Israel.
In March, 2016, the Vassar Student Association passed a resolution supporting the BDS movement against Israel by a vote of 15-7. The Amcha Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitism on campus, gives insight into the atmosphere as the BDS resolution was debated: “A Jewish student who attended the BDS vote outlined antisemitic activity by pro-BDS students during the meeting, stating, ‘One Jewish student talked about how the BDS campaign had invoked every anxiety nightmare she had ever had. She was crying as she spoke. Pro-BDS students laughed at her.’…Another Jewish student talked about Israel’s founding in the wake of the Holocaust. He was immediately accused of using the Holocaust as a political tool to justify the ‘genocide’ of another people.”
Other events at Vassar indicate the campus SJP chapter’s support of anti-Israel terrorism. In February 2016, Vassar SJP sold T-shirts picturing convicted terrorist Leila Khaled holding a gun with the words “Resistance is not Terrorism” written below the graphic. SJP Vassar also endorsed the T-shirt’s message by a post on social media: “Check out our friends at Existence is Resistance!!! They will be selling sweet fucking antiZionist gear at our events. 100% of profits goes towards organizing Palestinian resistance #ExistenceisResistance.”
In May of 2014, Vassar SJP managed to briefly shock even the radical campus administration by posting a “racist, anti-Semitic graphic” on its social media Tumbler page, depicting a 1940’s-era Nazi propaganda poster of a many-armed figure wearing a loincloth featuring the Star of David and holding a bag of money. The organization was briefly suspended, but was quickly reinstated.
Mostly silent during these outpourings of hatred, the reaction of Vassar administrators was quite different when the David Horowitz Freedom Center challenged the false and one sided campus narrative on Israel by hanging up posters critical of SJP and the BDS movement, and naming campus activists who supported these genocidal causes. Vassar Interim President Jon Chenette sent an email to the entire campus stating that the posters had been taken down and destroyed and that “Those in our community who were singled out in these postings deserve our unconditional support.”
Associate Dean of Campus Life and Diversity Ed Pittman went even further to heal the supposed wounds caused by the Freedom Center’s posters, organizing two separate sessions of an “all campus dialogue.” He stated: “Our best approach in these situations is to stand ready to support those who are impacted. It’s such a politically fueled issue that words and sometimes images are used to hurt, threaten and intimidate others because of their views.” Pittman concluded that the goal of Campus Life and Diversity was “to offer counter opportunities for discourse,” when he and Chenette had just done the very opposite.
For their immediate destruction of posters critical of SJP and coddling of students who may have been offended by them, while continuing to allow Hamas propaganda targeting Jewish students to appear on campus, Vassar administrators Jon Chenette and Ed Pittman make the case for Vassar’s inclusion on our list of administrations most friendly to terrorists and hostile to the First Amendment.
I bet none of those students have been to the Palestinian territories. I doubt they have even been to Detroit.
The Palestinians dont’ have bad water. Israel makes sure of that. The Israeli water treatment plants are piped into the West Bank .... at no cost to the Palestinian people.
Still these students manage to make it 16 years in school without once asking why the ultra-rich Saudis and Emirates don’t help the Palestinians out a slight bit.
It’s a shame too. Not only did I used to work at Yale University (A job that I loved) but I grew up in Tufts medical (Birth defects kept me pretty much a resident there for 6 years). Both of these colleges are great memories for me, full of righteous people who still occupy my prayers for good will.
My alma mater, Tufts, getting into the news again for all the wrong reasons. Just a a FYI, Brandeis is a Jewish University founded because at a time when the Ivy League schools black balled Jewish students. Tufts has a large Jewish student body.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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I thought Brandeis was an early 20th century racist, liberal, Supreme Court radical who hated Jews. Could be wrong though.
Bookmark
Dean of Engineering pulls this crap? Next time I see a resume from a Tufts grad, into the shredder it goes.
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