Freedom Center Pressures Universities on Support for Pro-Terror Groups

Learn more about the Freedom Center's Stop the Jihad on Campus campaign.

Recent news reports of racial extortion and attacks on free speech on some of our elite college campuses have raised questions about the value of higher education in America today.  Less discussed but more prevalent is an even more disturbing issue—the dominating presence in our universities of activist groups acting as mouthpieces for Islamist terrorism.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center recently concluded an intensively researched, carefully documented report on The Top Ten U.S. Colleges Most Friendly to Terrorists. They are (in alphabetical order) Brandeis University; Columbia University; Harvard University; Rutgers University (New Brunswick); San Francisco State University; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, San Diego, University of Michigan, and University of New Mexico.

The ten case histories in this report present a disturbing picture of campus communities—among them some of the most prestigious colleges in the country—where groups parroting the violent propaganda of Hamas and other terror organizations promote a hate filled agenda aimed at the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people. This  nationally coordinated effort, which is spearheaded by Students for Justice  in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA), both of which were planted in the U.S. by members of a terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, is not only tolerated but supported and funded by administrators at these schools who rigorously restrain  other hate groups through codes of conduct that in this case are ignored.

Because the funding, housing and political free reign given to these front groups for terror threatens the physical security of Jewish students and the national security of our country, the Freedom Center has sent copies of this report to the Presidents and Chairs of the Boards of Trustees of these ten colleges, along with a letter calling on them to withdraw the funding, housing  and other symbols of legitimacy given to these groups whose objectives are so deeply inimical to the intellectual purposes of the university and so hostile to U.S. national security.

These letters direct the university presidents’ attention to the following facts:

• That both Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association  promote a terror agenda by sponsoring annual campus events called “Israeli Apartheid Weeks,” whose sole purpose is to demonize Israel in terms dictated by Hamas and to promote the destruction of the Jewish State.  In fact, far from being a contemporary racist analogue of the post war South African regime, Israel has more than a million Palestinian citizens who enjoy more civil rights and civil liberties than they would if they lived in Gaza or the West Bank or  indeed any Arab country.
• That both SJP and MSA are chief sponsors of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose goal is to kill the Jewish State by economic strangulation. This death threat is aimed at the one country in the Middle East that fundamentally opposes the oppression of women and violence against homosexuals—fundamental commitments of the modern American university as well-- that is otherwise a basic and enduring feature of governments throughout the region.
• That in serving as a mouthpiece for Hamas and defaming Jews as racists, colonizers and baby killers, the SJP and MSA are bringing to the campus public square the hate-filled propaganda of a group whose declared goal is the extermination of the Jews “from the river to the sea.”  These groups are, quite simply, acting as mouthpieces for an ideology of genocide.
• And finally that in giving the SJP and MSA and other groups with different names but similar agendas the status of legitimate members of the multicultural campus community, with offices, student funds, and the right to hold what can only be regarded as festivals of hate on university property, the administrators of these ten schools are spitting in the face of their own rules and regulations which would stringently deny such support, say, to the Ku Klux Klan or other such organizations whose only objective was stigmatizing a group and fomenting violence against it.

The Freedom Center has requested that the Presidents of the schools named in the Top Ten Colleges Most Friendly to Terrorists withdraw their administrations’ active support for the Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association, and other front groups for terror, thereby ensuring a civil discourse on their campuses, as well as a respect for the basic truths about a deeply and dangerously troubled region of the world. We have also forwarded copies of this report to key alumni and the  local media in the communities where these schools are located.