Posted: 4/29/2017 7:00:00 PM
Author: David Horowitz
Source: This article was fist published on The Freedom Center's website.
Freedom Center Targets "Top Ten College Administrations Most
Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment"by David Horowitz and Freedom Center Staff.
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. We will be releasing the name of one campus named to this list each day while placing posters targeting the anti-Semitic hate group Students for Justice in Palestine on that same campus. These posters serve as a challenge to the college administrations on our list 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.
The first two campuses to be named to this list are Brooklyn College (CUNY) and Vassar College. The sections of our Top Ten report on these two schools may be read below.
Brooklyn College: Michelle J. Anderson, President
At Brooklyn College, President Michelle Anderson responded to posters protesting the links between the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and Hamas by tearing them down and denouncing their sponsor, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Anderson emphasized that Brooklyn College’s status as a public university and its obligation to uphold the First Amendment did not in her view extend to speech she considered, without proof or substantiation, “hateful” or “bullying.”
President Anderson failed to address the posters’ central claim that Students for Justice in Palestine is funded by the terrorist organization Hamas, and exists to spread Hamas’s genocidal propaganda against Israel and the Jews. Instead, she cited the widely-discredited smear site of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as the basis for her criticism of the Freedom Center.
Anderson’s response included lofty passages about the importance of free speech and intellectual diversity on a college campus including this one: “Academic freedom not only prevents the suppression of dissident views; it also forces us to confront those whose beliefs are antithetical to our own. The opportunity to have one’s beliefs challenged, to reflect, and to consider change is the very purpose of a university. Free speech, debate, and the open exchange of ideas are the oxygen of our existence on this campus. We must engage.”
Yet she exempted the Freedom Center from these protections by calling its posters “hate speech” – which in any case is constitutionally protected – and defended her decision to tear them down with the following reasoning: “The images and words were frightening and hostile to both supporters of SJP and advocates of free speech on campus, including many Jews. In particular, they targeted individual SJP leaders with the aim of bullying them and making them vulnerable to additional harassment or worse.”
Anderson’s defense of SJP illustrates the intellectual double-standards accepted by administration officials at Brooklyn College. She claims that SJP’s hate speech – in particular its genocidal claims that Israel is an “apartheid state,” and the historical absurdity that Gaza terrorists are “freedom fighters” - are protected speech under the First Amendment while the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s well documented revelation that SJP is promoting Hamas propaganda lies is not.
Brooklyn College SJP has posted articles and videos online defending terrorism including an advertisement titled “The Third Intifada” on its Facebook page. It has hosted speakers promoting the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and even staged an event to publicize its refusal to enter a dialogue with pro-Israel organizations and students. And a gang of 10 anti-Israel activists stormed a campus faculty meeting in February 2016, calling one faculty member a “Zionist pig” and issuing demands for “Zionists off campus.”
Anderson admits that “in years past, some have felt offended by SJP’s protests and have asked the Brooklyn College administration to ban the student group.” But then adds sanctimoniously, “We cannot.” But when given an opportunity to actually defend “dissident views”—which on the campus of Brooklyn College includes the view that SJP is a pawn of anti-Jewish terrorists—Anderson’s First Amendment concerns suddenly disappear.
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.
