The campus climate of hate and divisiveness is not limited to MIT, Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; it’s now metastasized to the University of Chicago. It’s largely promoted by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP), who are constantly demonstrating on campus and have had its members arrested for trespassing in the admissions office. They also confront groups of prospective students and their parents touring the campus, telling them that the University they’re considering is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians (the administration has deemed these confrontations to be okay so long as they do not interfere with “university activities”) . In contrast, demonstrations of Jewish students are few, legal, not raucous, and don’t violate campus regulations.
While a lot of the demonstrations constitute legal free speech, something I defend, some are not, like demonstrating without a permit, blocking university entrances, sitting-in in university buildings, and disturbing classes with loud chants through a megaphone.
Regardless of the legality issue, the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, is being dominated by letters from the SJP, news reports on the SJP written by a member of that organization, and other reportage about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activities. Since the Jewish students at Chicago are largely fearful and intimidated, I thought I’d give some brief pushback here about the SJP’s self-promotion in the student newspaper. Curiously, the paper, the Chicago Maroon, publishes very long SJP op-eds, and “news articles” by SJP members, running to thousands of words—lengths that regular news article don’t get. One might almost think that the newspaper itself is promoting the kind of hatred and divisiveness purveyed by SJP.
The most odious instance of this is the 2453-word op-ed below, a new reprint of a piece written by UChicago’s SJP on October 11 (there’s an update at the end which is just as biased and hateful as the article iteself). Click to read:
The article begins with the usual accusations of Israel for defending itself, but also includes a justificaiton of Hamas’s butchery of October 7. Here are the first two paragraphs, with my emphasis in bold (there’s a postscript of more recent events that doesn’t correct any of the article’s lies and misstatements):
The events of the past week have been historic and unprecedented by all measures. Last Saturday, for the first time in history, Palestinian resistance groups broke out of Gaza, reclaimed land from the Israeli occupation, and seized control of numerous Israeli military posts. Scrambling to recover from this humiliation and collectively punish Palestine’s population for the accompanying violence inflicted on Israeli soldiers, settlers, and civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has—predictably—resorted to openly genocidal tactics. In addition to bombing Gaza’s population centers with white phosphorus and systematically targeting its hospitals and shelters, Israel has announced a “total blockade” on the besieged enclave, endeavoring to starve the 2.3 million Palestinians held captive within it into submission—or worse. Israel’s war minister made the occupation’s exterminationist aims explicit yesterday, declaring that “there will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
In the face of these alarming developments—not to mention the escalating involvement of the U.S. military and the wholly inadequate and unacceptable statement issued this week by the University—it is necessary to underscore a number of crucial facts that have been consistently and deliberately obscured by mainstream media coverage and Zionist propaganda. These forces continually attempt to frame the conversation around condemnation of individual atrocities while ignoring the structural causes of violence. It will not be possible to address the root causes of this situation or bring a just peace to the land until these basic realities are acknowledged, confronted, and addressed directly.
This is simply shameful justification of barbarism as a simple “breaking out of Gaza and “reclaiming land from the Israeli occupation”. There is no mention that the land wasn’t reclaimed, but hundreds of innocent Israelis were killed, raped, and tortured. The SJP doesn’t mention this. There were also about 240 hostages taken, a huge war crime that also isn’t mentioned in the SJP’s letter. The white phosphorus claims have been rejected by the IDF (there’s no good evidence for them) and of course hospitals and shelters are targeted by the IDF because Hamas uses them as command and weapons centers. Note that the only allusion to the horrific attack of Hamas on October 7 is a mention of “individual atrocities” that are outshined by “structural causes of violence.”
The tenor is that the Israelis brought this attack on themselves, an inversion of morality that completely discredits the SJP—as if it needed discrediting.
The rest of the article is full of the usual lies and exaggerations, and I’ll give one example. Readers should be savvy enough to see through this, as I’ve discussed these claims before:
First, Gaza is a concentration camp. This is not hyperbole. The Israeli occupation has herded millions of Palestinians into a strip of land just 25 miles long and six miles wide. More than two-thirds of these Palestinian hostages are refugees, more than half of them children. Since 2007, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless blockade by air, sea, and land, deliberately denying its inhabitants access to food, water, electricity, and life-saving medical treatment. On top of these structural violences, Israel has subjected Gaza to a series of massacres and military assaults over the last two decades in an effort to “punish, humiliate, and terrorize” its captive civilian population into submission.
They don’t mention terrorist attacks by Hamas and other Palestinians on Israel over the years, the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians from Gaza (another war crime) or the fact that Gaza was given to the Palestinians by Israel in 2005, that Hamas takes huge amounts of money meant as aid for Palestinian civilians, and that tghe “merciless blockade” is used only to prevent weapons and other aid to terrorism from entering Israel.
One of the biggest deceptions in the article is the display of the top half of the map below, with a caption saying, ” The apt historical analogy here would not be the war between Russia and Ukraine, in other words, but the project of Westward Expansion and Native Genocide perpetrated by Western powers on Turtle Island.”
Anybody who knows anything about the history of Israel and the claims about “Palestinian land” can see right through this map, but rather than go through it, I’ve put a video below showing why every panel in the upper map is a lie (I can’t speak to the lower map, but it’s certainly true that Native Americans were displaced by white settlers from Europe and other places. )
Here’s an explanation of why the top part of the map is bogus; the narrator is Kiki Hausdorff, Assistant Parliamentary Counsel at City of London Corporation.
If you want to see another explanation of why the top row of maps are misleading, go here. The fact is that this representation of the shrinking of “Palestine” is grossly wrong, but has been embraced by many people ignorant of what the green and white areas really represent. The Maroon op-ed of course ignores the repeated Palestinian rejections of Israeli offers of peace. This confected map is in fact an up-to-date version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“, a forgery written by Tsarists to show a fictional plan for Jews to take over the world. The “Protocols” are mentioned prominently Hamas’s founding document, its Covenant of 1988. Hamas, it seems, will swallow and perpetuate every lie that furthers its aims, which is the erasure of Israel followed by further Islamism meant to swallow the world.
The update at the end of the op-ed concentrates on the IDF’s attack on Gaza and civilian deaths, deeming these, falsely, to be a “genocide”. And the University of Chicago is said to be complicit in this genocide:
What is still more disheartening is the fact that neither the U.S. government nor the University of Chicago has been willing to take the most basic of moral stances in the face of this unfolding genocide: divesting from Israel’s military and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Instead, the Biden administration has deployed U.S. troops and shipped U.S. weaponry to the genocide’s perpetrators, while the University has spent weeks refusing even to meet publicly and transparently with its students about its investments in Israeli arms suppliers. We encourage students to follow UChicago United for Palestine’s ongoing campaigns against the University’s complicity in this atrocity and to follow news outlets that report on Palestine with the factual credibility and moral consistency so often lacking in corporatized U.S. media. We particularly recommend Middle East Eye, The Intercept, Electronic Intifada, Jewish Currents, Mondoweiss, Peoples Dispatch, Al-Jazeera, +972 Magazine, and Al-Mayadeen.
The article below, published in the Grey City section, “The Maroon’s features and investigative journalism section”, is largely pro-Hamas propaganda. Click the headling to read. It’s 4126 words long, and the “investigation” is only the regurgitation of SJP’s lies by a reporter who is in fact part of SJP. So much for objectivity!
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The “objective” reporter:
I’m not going through it in detail (it’s a day-to-day report on the activities of SJP), except to recount a few of many lies (this was written on November 28):
As chants continue during the next passing time, around 12:30 p.m., a somber moment falls over the crowd. An SJP organizer’s voice chokes up as he announces the bombing of Al-Ahli hospital, where many displaced Gazans were seeking refuge and medical treatment from Israeli bombardment. According to Palestinian officials, the strike killed close to 500. Organizers call for a moment of silence. Grief-stricken, several protesters begin crying. Many embrace each other for comfort. Others don’t seem to know what to do with their hands. Some begin to channel their grief and outrage into chalking. One message on the sidewalk reads: “Never forget Oct. 17: Israel killed 500 in a Gaza hospital.”
The source of the strike is still contested. The Gaza Health Ministry blames an Israeli strike. US intelligence forces and the Israeli military blame a misfired rocket from militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has denied these claims. Israeli airstrikes have targeted several Gazan hospitals since October 17. The Israeli military says it is targeting Hamas in tunnels under these hospitals.
No, the strike’s source is not contested by those who have investigated it: it was, as the evidence shows, caused by a rocket launched towards Israel by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, a rocket that landed in the hospital’s parking lot and killed far fewer than 500 people (see here, here, here, and here). And of course the IDF has now issued proof of the existence of both Hamas tunnels under hospitals and weapons in them. That’s not mentioned, either.
But the fact that the Maroon‘s investigative unit used a “reporter” who was part of the SJP’s protests discredits the narrative completely. The paper promises an upcoming piece written by a Jewish student, and we’ll see if it appears.
Finally, the third piece of SJP news in this week’s Maroon describes members of the organization putting up “art installation” on the quad that were removed every night by the university. That’s because those installations violate university regulations for where protests can take place, not because they violate our free expression laws. Click to read:
At least the paper notes that the “installations,” one of which is pictured below, were violations of University regulations. This is civil disobedience, but not of the type that is going to change people’s minds—in contrast to the marches of Martin Luther King and his followers. Those who created the installations should be subject to university discipline, but of course they won’t be. At least the University of Chicago administration didn’t buy burritos for the protestors! (That happened at Harvard.)
Nevertheless, instead of admitting that their installation violated university regulations, the SJP complains bitterly that its removal is inhumane:
Art installed by students from UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) during an “emergency art build” on the main quad on Wednesday were removed overnight. The previous installation was removed over Thanksgiving break.
“UCUP condemns this removal of art as both a deeply disturbing act of disrespect against the martyrs in Palestine and a sinister message to Palestinian students everywhere who are increasingly targeted in hate crimes,” read a statement from UCUP to The Maroon.
According to the Student Manual, the installation of any structure on campus must be approved by the Director of the Student Centers or a someone designated by the director. UCUP confirmed that their recent installation was not registered.
Note the use of the word “martyrs”, which can refer to terrorists killed in the act of killing Jews. And of course hate crimes against Jews are far more numerous than those against Palestinians and Muslims, but the article don’t mention that. Doesn’t the paper do fact-checking?
Here is the group beavering away with their installation. Caption from the Maroon:
I want to emphasize that the hatred and divisiveness on American campuses is fomented not by Jewish students, who by and large engage in peaceful demonstrations, but by terrorist-supporting organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine. Their modus operandi include disrupting of campus events, intimidating Jewish students, yelling at prospective students and their parents, and having sit-ins in University offices and buildings. Some of this is illegal both under the law and under university regulations, so one can see it as civil disobedience. But the difference between this and the disobedience of, say, civil rights activists in the 1960s, is that the latter won over hearts and minds because their cause was just, and those arrested voluntarily took their punishment, including being attacked by police dogs and squirted with hoses. They did not beef about being arrested. In contrast, Students for Justice in Palestine is not changing hearts and minds because it abandoned the moral high ground. As you saw above, the group is morally bereft, having justified the deliberate killing of Israeli civilians on October 7. The group is reprehensible. And although some of its activities are both legal and consonant with campus regulations, SJP and UCUP have created an atmosphere here in which Jewish students have become fearful and intimidated. It is an atmosphere inimical to learning.
Solving this problem while adhering to our Principles of Free Expression is a very hard task for the administration. I have no solutions save that SJP stop purveying lies and disrupting campus. But this won’t happen. And the problem is all over America, as we saw from last week’s House hearings (I object to how they were conducted, but they did highlight the hypocrisy of universities when dealing with free-speech issues). Since up to now Jewish students here have been largely in the background (but see here), I’ve written this to give them support and to show that their opponents are morally bankrupt.
SJP proudly supports the Hamas butchery of October 7. That’s all you need to know about the organization.
I agree with almost all of this, but I don’t believe that a newspaper is promoting hatred by running op-eds that promote hatred, and I worry about any suggestion that newspapers should censor unpopular views. I also strongly disagree with the view that “demonstrating without a permit” is not protected by free speech. It definitely is. You do not need a permit to have a demonstration in public spaces. Certain types of demonstrations (reserving a space, parading on streets, utilizing amplification) can require a permit for those activities, but we should reject the general idea that permission from the government or the university is needed to exercise free speech.
Excellent article. The woke left is ruining our educational institutions because instead of actual, proper critical thinking, these people and the educators that condone them prefer to act like the immature highschool tik tok generation brats and clout chasers that they are – ignorant, driven by unadmitted bigotry and hypocrisy, driven to seek and create drama, driven to compromise every sense of ethics and morality in order to “not offend” the base that they’ve pandered to for so long, driven to say the most vile things in an effort to out virtue signal one another, and the list goes on. We need to bring back actual critical thinking to our universities and not just “critical” thinking which is to criticize at the expense of morality. Personally, however, I have never known the woke left to be big on ethics or morality – only on what is self serving. By enabling this kind of thinking and willingness to overlook the truth, we endanger our liberal democracy.
I have disagreed with you before. Which is why I am going out of my way to say I think you are completely correct here.
In my undergrad days our student newspaper was as predictably Marxist as you might expect for the time. We didn’t have the freedom not to subscribe to it because the cost was buried in the mandatory non-academic surcharges on our tuition. But I don’t think it would have been wise to have tried to close it down by getting the university to cut off its finding. Just one of the costs of freedom to speak.
I appreciate your comment about needing a permit to demonstrate. This seems like a perfect way to prevent some voices from.being heard: the authorities just never approve a permit for some positions. I am not accusing U of C of doing this. It is a power that can be easily abused.
As far as the student newspaper “censoring unpopular views” it sounds as if the unpopular views being censored here are anyone speaking on the behalf of Jews or of Israel. Sending a member of a special interest group to report on that group’s activities is Terrible Journalism 101. It is not serving the entire student body for the student paper to express one side of an important issue continuously. It is not a broadsheet for the SJP.
There is no evidence of the Maroon censoring anyone or refusing to print any views. They may have a bias, but that is not the same as censorship. And having someone with a bias do reporting is not “Terrible Journalism 101.” There is plenty of excellent journalism with a viewpoint, from the Nation to In These Times to the Atlantic to Reason. The Maroon used to have independent liberal and conservative weekly sections within the paper. An editor devoted to objectivity decided to ban them in 1995, and so the conservative and liberal staffers who were purged (including me) jointly started up an alternative, opinionated newspaper, the University of Chicago Free Press, which did excellent work while it survived.
I wonder if the student newspaper blurs the faces of protestors routinely, or only in this case. E.g., if a pro-life student organization held an anti-abortion protest on campus, would this same student newspaper blur the faces of the participants, out of concern that they might face social blowback for their position? Somehow, I doubt it.
I would like to see opt-in (at least) disclosure of funding by protesters.
Funding acknowledgement is on everything from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NASCAR, concerts, and so on – why not protesting and congress/house of representatives, like in Idiocracy – or is a student organization literally presumed to be funded 100% by students, or laundered as such?
“Viewers Like You” (a common line on public tv or radio).
What is worrisome (and also sad) is that many students will fall for the propaganda about the older history, and the recent history, hook line and sinker. People can more readily believe in “news” that is put right before them, and it takes effort to venture outside of ones’ usual media channels to find the truth. Young people may be more vulnerable to these sorts of disinformation campaigns, especially since they are seen as coming from their peeps (fellow young people). Finally, op eds are commonly mistaken for investigative journalism
So it would be better if these things are countered by other op eds, and I wonder if a group can get together and start insisting on putting those out in the paper.
Oh, I just spotted The Dialectic (PCC(E), I am agreeing here)!
“I’ve put a video below showing why every panel in the upper map is a lie (I can’t speak to the lower map, but it’s certainly true that Native Americans were displaced by white settlers from Europe and other places. )”
The Dialectic marries truth to a lie. Started with Rousseau, Kant, and perhaps most famously Hegel – it’s how The Left has worked for centuries.
Very clear example.
Also shows how The Dialectic relies on low-information – e.g. most are not historians of the peoples of North America, nor aware of any meaningful connections of that to a relatively remote part of the world – the part we are meant to be understanding in the first place.
Bonus : same in kind, different in degree – as above, so below – Hermetic alchemy.
Can the University decertify the SJP and UCUP and have them removed from campus? The University of Chicago is a private institution and is under no obligation to support these groups—either with space, a platform, or funding. Getting rid of them does not prevent their exercise of free speech; they would just have to do it somewhere else. This activity is not acceptable. And, the University speaking out about these two groups would not violate the Kalven Principles, as the behavior of these groups very definitely impinges on the mission and functioning of the University.
At my public university SJP is a sort of collective that has a public presence but no named leaders and no formal association with the university itself or with the undergraduate student union or the graduate student association. So there’s nothing to decertify. Campus security know who the SJP activists are and can watch them when they’re known to be on campus but otherwise not much can be done absent a crime etc. Many of us complained when SJP entered university buildings to leave propaganda in offices. But otherwise I think it’s good that SJP can say what they want to say in public spaces. They have that right. Also makes their bigotry obvious.
I do agree that they are easier to watch when they are out in the open.
The U of C has, to my understanding, committed itself to upholding First Amendment standards of Free Speech. This obligates the university to afford any group a platform for protesting in public spaces (assuming the protests conducted there do not crossover into illegal conduct — harassment, stalking, assault, and the like).
Thanks Ken. I worry about the skinny geek facing the mob. So Two questions if you please:
1. At what point do we cross from protected speech into conduct such as harassment? For example, consider several demonstrators loudly getting up into a touring prospective student’s face but not touching though spittle may splash. This would occur in a public right of way such as a sidewalk.
2. What responsibility, if any, does the university have to patrol campus to keep order; that is, prevent confrontations of groups yelling at one another from becoming prohibited conduct? Chicago’s dean on call program for scheduled demonstrations exists but seems useless or worse with the one case I know of deploying a low-level assistant director of housing as a dean….with her allegedly dressed in Palestinian colors (please pardon my obvious bias here)
Thanks
As to your first question, Jim, if the demonstrators’ conduct interferes with the prospective student’s ability to move freely, or if the conduct is repeated during the course of the prospective student’s visit to campus, that conduct would cross over from free speech to harassment or criminal stalking.
As to your second question, see the so-called “fighting words” doctrine.
Thanks, Ken!
That is an excellent video on Israel’s borders. I wonder that in the talk of right and wrong there are so few mentions of the wars to destroy Israel and of her defense.
However wrongheaded one may find the assertions of SJP and UCUP to be (and I find them wrongheaded in the extreme), I do not think there is a meaningful distinction between the above-described activity and other activities — such as pamphleteering or soliciting passersby to sign a petition — that have been held to be protected by the First Amendment Free Speech clause so long as they are conducted in traditional or specially designated public fora.
The SJP and UCUP would have no right to corner prospective students and their parents indoors, or at a university-sponsored function, under what’s known as the “captive audience” doctrine.
Thanks for the update, Jerry. This is so depressing, I, believe it or not, am pretty speechless.
I don’t see the problem here.
Free speech also means free speech in favor of positions that one deems wrong or morally abhorrent.
To the extent that the speech of these moral idiots interferes unlawfully with university business as usual, punish them. If the punishment is not dissuasive the first time, ratchet it up. There are many people who would love to be admitted to U of C and would not dream of trying to instigate mob rule. A place of academic excellence as U of C will never lack customers. (And no, the customer is not king. We live in a republic.) If the punishment isn’t dissuasive the first time, ratchet it up some more. And by dissuasive punishment I mean suspension for at least a full semester during which the miscreant is not allowed to set foot on the U of C campus or use any university ressources, and, in case of repeat offending, permanent expulsion from the university. The university has all the means to prevent these people from disrupting its business. This ain’t rocket science.
And if the university does not enforce its own rules, maybe FIRE can help – maybe we can have it investigated by the government for allowing a climate of bullying and harrassement. (Even as a liberal, I fully support Harvard, UPenn and MIT being pilloried and having their knuckles raped by Republicans in Congress. And I fervently hope that donors keep their checkbooks closed. This moral rot needs to be exposed.)
As to Jewish students feeling fearful and intimidated, I say: Man up! This is life. It’s a series of trade-offs. You want free speech, then you have to accept that lunatics (flate earthers, intelligent design proponents, homeopathy afficionados, etc.) and moral idiots will have their say too. The only thing you can do is take their names, publicize them (so that you or like-minded people will not later hire them accidentally), and then ignore them. Reading a good book about stoicism might help too.
I’m a strong supporter of increasing our legal immigration quotas. And of giving allies and their families in Afghanistan refugee status in our country. But the virulence of the protestors supporting Hamas and its murderous ways has given me pause. And given me a picture of the Palestinian people that is far less positive than I had before October 7th. I’m less sure now that increasing immigration from the Middle East is a good idea. If those immigrants believe in and support the genocide of any group, especially Jewish people, I don’t want them here. We have enough home grown antisemitism, we don’t need to import any more.
On YouTube “Nikki Haley rips pro-Hamas UN Gaza resolution” June 14,2018 (UN general assembly special session June 13,2018) There is also a transcript.
All of Haley’s remarks from 5 years ago are still pertinent today. And look what happened.
A good article in today’s New York Times by Ben Hubbard “While Gazans suffer Hamas reaps the benefits”
I will never understand why the anti-Hamas side refuses to do the most obvious thing to turn people off of seeing Hamas as “freedom fighters” and see them as bloodthirsty inhuman animals. It’s very simple.
Go get a big screen projector, set up a movie screen on the quad, turn up the volume, and play this video on a loop.
https://x.com/Iyervval/status/1711092340339933341