How tolerating Students for Justice in Palestine ignores the lessons of the Holocaust.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

“‘I would have killed all the jews in the world,But I kept some to show the world why I killed them’ -Hitler- #PrayForGaza #PrayForPalestina.”

--SJP UWM Activist

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is that time of the year when politicians, pundits and university presidents pretend to care about the mass murder of six million Jews.

And then they spend the other 364 days palling around with their modern counterparts.

In South Carolina, Senator Brad Hutto, a state senator, had managed to singlehandedly stall an anti-Semitism bill to protect Students for Justice in Palestine, an anti-Semitic hate group. Hutto had been the Democrat choice to run against Senator Lindsay Graham. And here was the Democrat’s choice to represent South Carolina in the United States Senate doing everything he could to prevent his state from passing a bill to reject anti-Semitism in time for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

The SJP chapter at the University of South Carolina sent Senator Hutto a message that began, “Thank you for your opposition to the Anti-Semitism bill.”

Senator Hutto has been fighting the anti-Semitism bill for at least a year.

Why would Students for Justice in Palestine and its political allies on the left oppose an anti-Semitism bill? The obvious answer is that the campus hate group has a long history of anti-Semitism.

Canary Mission, a civil rights group which has been compiling examples of anti-Semitism on social media by members of campus hate groups, has released its latest report focusing on SJP anti-Semitism.

“Hitler should have killed the Jews when he had the chance.”

-–University of Houston SJP activist

Canary Mission’s previous report had focused on anti-Semitism among SJP, Muslim Students Association and other BDS activists at the University of Houston. Its latest report is a broader overview of SJP chapters on campuses at the University of Maryland, Northeastern University, Ryerson University and the University of South Florida.

The racist tactics by anti-Semitic SJP activists included a walkout at Holocaust Remembrance Day at Northeastern University, another walkout by BDS student activists to stop a Holocaust Education Week vote at Ryerson University and an SJP speaker at the University of Maryland who blasted the Jews for commemorating the Holocaust. These SJP attacks on Holocaust commemorations are not aberrations.

NU SJP had previously disrupted a Holocaust Awareness Week event in 2011. What accounts for such a consistent pattern of anti-Semitism that seems to endure long after the students responsible for it have already graduated? The institutional culture around Students for Justice in Palestine perpetuates its bigotry even once a class of activists have graduated and moved on to hating somewhere else.

SJP at Northeastern University is an excellent example of how that works.

Shahid Alam, SJP’s faculty adviser at Northeastern, was caught on tape telling members of the hate group, “If you are a political figure, they think it is fatal if someone calls them anti-Semitic. But if you are an academic, if you are an activist, if they call you [an anti-Semite] wear that as a sign of distinction. This proves that I am working for the right side, for the just cause.”

A faculty member celebrating any other form of racism would have been committing career suicide, but there is a great deal of tolerance and even academic support for campus anti-Semitism.

Steven Salaita lost out on a job offer at the University of Illinois after tweeting support for the murder of Jews. He would also declare that Zionism was “transforming anti-Semitism from something horrible into something honorable”. Academic organizations that defended Salaita’s bigotry included the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association and the Middle East Studies Association. To these groups and Salaita’s other backers, anti-Semitism is indeed honorable.

Unsurprisingly, Salaita is a frequent speaker at SJP events. SJP Loyola described the honorable bigot as “our friend”. SJP at Brooklyn College, one of the hate group’s more notoriously bigoted chapters, has hosted Salaita. As did the Georgetown SJP and a number of other campus BDS hate group chapters.

The Canary Mission report peels back the layers of anti-Semitic campus infrastructure to Hatem Bazian.

Bazian is the Typhoid Mary of campus anti-Semitism. As a student body president at San Francisco State University back in the 90s, he had led a campaign against Hillel. He was accused of participating in an attack on the offices of the Golden Gater student newspaper because of its Jewish associations.

After members of the SJP hate group disrupted a Holocaust Remembrance Day event, Bazian spewed bigotry at a rally to protest their arrests, saying, “take a look at the type of names on the building around campus – Haas, Zellerbach – and decide who controls this university.”

Hatem Bazian was even reported to have quoted the genocidal Islamic Hadith: “The Day of Judgment will not happen until the trees and stones will say, Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.” More recently, he was caught retweeting anti-Semitic cartoons, one of which depicted North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Jewish garb declaring, “I just converted all of North Korea to Judaism.”

SJP chapters at Vassar and UCLA have recently been caught up in their own anti-Semitic cartoon controversies.

“We need to put zionists in concentration camps.” “Hitler also had respect for Islam.”

-–Former SJP Events Coordinator, SDSU

Where does hate like that come from? It comes from Students for Justice in Palestine.

The campus hate group is a machine for indoctrinating students into anti-Semitism. It transmits the bigotry of Hatem Bazian, Shahid Alam, Steven Salaita and other bigots linked to the hate group to a new generation of students.

Canary Mission doesn’t just list bigotry on social media by SJP and MSA members, it also features messages from former members of these hate groups coming to terms with their indoctrination.

“As a former member of SJP, I now understand how my actions were anti-Semitic and wrong,” one former SJP member wrote, describing an atmosphere of “blatant hatred” that “seems to extend to anyone who was Jewish.”

“As a member of SJP, I was shown a lot of anti-Israel material,” another wrote. “In retrospect, I recognize that these anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages are lacking in their substance and depth.”

Stories such as these are not unusual when coming from former Neo-Nazis. But these young men and women were indoctrinated into hating Jews on some of the nation’s leading college campuses. And the bigots teaching them to hate were funded by student fees and protected by academic associations. When BDS bigots attack the Holocaust, major academic associations stand behind them.

Remembering history isn’t about the past, it’s about bringing meaningful change to the present.

Politicians, pundits and college presidents pay lip service to International Holocaust Remembrance Day even as SJP and its political allies wage war on Jewish students, disrupt Holocaust commemorations and celebrate Hitler. And they go on functioning as an integral part of the intersectional alliances of the left.

Students for Justice in Palestine is the nation’s leading campus hate group. And it continues to grow and hate. This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we should hold its political allies accountable.

“I can now relate to why Hitler chose to burn the people he hated. It must have felt great.”

-–SJP Purdue Secretary