Thirty-one pro-Israel student organizations sent a letter to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and the UC Board of Regents on Nov. 8 calling on UCLA to cancel the upcoming National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) conference on Nov. 16-18.
The letter states that SJP is in violation of UCLA’s “Principles of Community” standards that prohibit “acts of discrimination, harassment, profiling or other conduct causing harm to individuals on the basis of expression of race, color, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, religious beliefs, political preference, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship or national origin, among other personal characteristics.”
“Just last May, UCLA was the scene of SJP violence: Jewish, Kurdish and Armenian students were physically and verbally abused for sharing their perspectives on campus,” the letter states. “In July, an SJP activist at Stanford made national headlines for calling for violence against pro-Israel students, while last year SJP was suspended for two years from the University of California, Irvine for the group’s attacks on students.”
The letter went on to state that the majority of hate crimes target Jews and that college campuses tend to have more anti-Semitic incidents when they have a stronger anti-Zionist presence on campus.
“The anti-Semitism of one man, Robert Bowers, led him to murder 11 Americans in a Pittsburgh synagogue simply because they were Jewish,” the letter states. “It is absolutely critical that UCLA take the anti-Semitic rhetoric of SJP members seriously.”
Here are some examples of such rhetoric:
https://twitter.com/AdamMilstein/status/1057769149600956417
Among the groups that signed the letter included Students Supporting Israel chapters in UCLA, Columbia and Santa Monica College, UC Berkeley’s Tikvah organization and Swarthmore Students for Israel.
The Los Angeles City Council has also called on UCLA to cancel the SJP conference.
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