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Name-and-Shame BDS posters stir backlash at SDSU, UCLA

A planned appearance by pro-Israel provocateur David Horowitz ignited a firestorm at San Diego State University in advance of a May 5 lecture there by the right-wing activist.
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May 3, 2016

A planned appearance by pro-Israel provocateur David Horowitz ignited a firestorm at San Diego State University in advance of a May 5 lecture there by the right-wing activist.

Posters distributed on campus late last month by Horowitz’s organization called out by name seven SDSU student activists, alleging they have “allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred.” Similar posters naming individual students have appeared in recent weeks on the UCLA campus.

On April 27, protesters at SDSU demanding a condemnation of the posters blocked the school’s president, Elliot Hirshman, from leaving campus in a police car until he spoke with them.

In a video circulated by the SDSU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Hirshman engages the activists in a heated exchange, at close quarters, flanked by security personnel.

“We’re talking about people saying they support the boycott, divestment and sanction of Israel — that is a view, and others might share that view who might be terrorists,” Hirshman says in the video, laying out how he understood the posters.

“I don’t think that is saying our students are terrorists,” he says. “If there was a statement that said our students were terrorists and they weren’t, I would certainly condemn that.”

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that protesters allowed Hirshman to leave only after he apologized for any hurt he might have caused.

Similar notices have appeared on five California college campuses as part of a campaign by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The posters identify alleged SJP activists and other students aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

At UCLA, posters named 16 students and professors — the most of any of the posters on the five campuses.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block took a different approach from Hirshman: “No student should be compared to a terrorist for holding a political opinion,” he wrote in an April 15 email to individuals named on the list.

“I and my administration will continue to speak out against Islamaphobia and ethnic bias,” he wrote. “I encourage you to do the same.”

Days later, when UCLA Vice Chancellor Jerry Kang sent an email to the campus community calling the posters “a focused, personalized intimidation,” a law firm saying it represented Horowitz sent Kang a letter demanding he retract his “malicious and defamatory claims,” the UCLA Daily Bruin reported.

Rahim Kurwa, a sociology graduate student at UCLA and BDS activist who was named on the posters, praised the administration’s response.

“We’ve been meeting with them, and I think that they’re making progress,” he told the Jewish Journal.

Kurwa said that while he doesn’t feel his safety is threatened, what Horowitz is “doing is not that far from an incitement to violence.”

“It’s not hard to figure out where my office is on campus,” he said. “That is an issue.”

Kurwa added that posters traceable to Horowitz are a frequent occurrence on campus — he estimated they have surfaced at UCLA about four times in the past year.

The most recent poster campaign, which defined BDS as “a Hamas-inspired genocidal campaign to destroy Israel,” also hit three other University of California campuses — Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Berkeley.

The SDSU College Republicans, the group scheduled to host Horowitz on Thursday, said it has no intention of canceling the event in light of potential disruptions.

In a statement, the organization said it was “not aware of the flyers being posted on campus and does not know who is responsible for posting them.”

The group added, “We will not be silenced by the upcoming protests.”

Meanwhile, on May 2, Hirshman and other administrators met with members of SJP and other student leaders to discuss the posters.

A wrap-up of the meeting emailed to the Jewish Journal by an SDSU spokesperson concluded that the administration and SJP, working with the student senate, will “undertake a review of university policies to ensure we are balancing freedom of expression and protection from harassment.”

SDSU’s chapter of Hillel, the Jewish student organization, rebuked the posters.

“We strongly condemn any efforts to demonize any racial or religious group, as the inflammatory language of the flyers does,” SDSU Hillel Director Jackie Tolley wrote in a statement.

Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment before this article went to press. But in a press release on a website affiliated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, he explained his motivation.

“We’ve decided to get up close and personal with merchants of Jew hatred on our campuses,” he said.

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