Universities with Faculty for Justice in Gaza chapters are under fire from a coalition of 120 civil rights and religious organizations led by the AMCHA Initiative.
They claim FJP members are “abusing” their faculty positions to “escalate antisemitism.”
As part of the campaign, the organizations sent a letter to the presidents of 170 universities with a Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter. AMCHA also released two educational videos: One on “the dangers of FJP” and another on “the harms of academic BDS.”
“What I think should be center stage right now is this faculty organization, which is part of a national network linked to an international movement with a purely antisemitic mission and has dreadful consequences for Jewish students on college campuses,” AMCHA Initiative co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told the Washington Examiner.
According to an AMCHA report, physical attacks on Jewish students are more than seven times more likely at college campuses with FJP chapters present, while threats of violence and death against Jewish students are more than three times more likely, and student demands for academic boycotts of Israeli faculty are nearly 11 times more likely.
Rossman-Benjamin said that tenured faculty is the “prime mover of so many of the acts of violent antisemitism that our report found increased” dramatically after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. Physical assaults increased by 2500% and violent threats increased by 900%.
The next phase of the campaign will include a new ranking system that will rate schools based on “faculty abuse.”
The AMCHA co-founder argued that the rise of ethnic studies departments has played a major role in shielding faculty from the consequences of violent or hateful speech under the guise of academic freedom. She said that while these departments may “call themselves disciplines, they are really political agendas” whose members consist of activists as opposed to educators.
Rossman-Benjamin, a University of California, Santa Cruz faculty member, shared pictures of the school’s ethnic studies department — specifically the doors of several faculty members’ offices, which are littered with what she called “unprofessional [anti-Israel] propaganda.” She said such displays are commonplace in ethnic studies departments but not exclusive to them.
She called on schools with existing rules on faculty political neutrality to enforce those rules and schools without those rules to create them. She said, “If university administrators are unwilling to do it because they’re being bullied by faculty, then legislators need to come in and do it, because it’s federal and state monies that are being used to fund this stuff.”
Under President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration, he promised to remove federal funding and accreditation from schools fostering antisemitic activity. “We will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers,” he said.
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In the letter to the 170 university presidents, the organizations highlighted concerns that many FJP chapters were created following a call to action from an American affiliate of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. They warn PACBI has “foundational ties” with five U.S.-designated terrorist groups: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP General Command, and the Palestinian Liberation Front.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Faculty for Justice in Palestine for comment.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
