Across the country, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are today commemorating the massacres of October 7, 2023. More precisely, they will gather to commemorate the lives lost among the perpetrators of the massacre—the Hamas terrorists and other Gazans who invaded Israel to rape, torture, and murder men, women, and children. They will mourn the fact that Hamas failed to achieve its goal of destroying Israel while celebrating the effort to do so.
If SJP—an umbrella group for hundreds of anti-Israel student organizations across “Turtle Island (so-called North America)”—ever intended to hide its conviction that murdering Israelis is an affirmative good, it has stopped pretending. For all the posturing about Palestinian victimhood and indignant accusations over Israel’s conduct of the war, these self-styled champions of the Palestinians aren’t mourning the atrocities that invited Israel’s retaliation. They are celebrating them.
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Advertisements for SJP gatherings make this abundantly clear. At NYU Law, SJP promised to use the day to “challeng[e] myths around Al-Aqsa Flood,” the Hamas name for the attack, which SJP helpfully clarified “is the military campaign launched by resistance fighters against Israel.” At SUNY-Oswego, SJP explicitly celebrated “the palestinian resistance . . . eliminating over 1,100 settlers” as “anti-imperialism . . . in its highest form.” The post concluded by saluting “our great leader—Yah Yah [sic] Sinwar,” a reference to the mastermind of the massacres. The CUNY SJP chapter advertised its rally with the distinctive Hamas triangle, “victory to the resistance” in English, and, in Arabic, “What is coming will be even worse.” And these are just examples from New York.
By now, it should be evident that these groups are not antiwar or antiviolence. Nor are they even meaningfully pro-Palestinian. When they reflect on the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died because of Hamas’s cowardice, they do so in celebration. Theirs is a pro-war, anti-Israel stance: murder is good if the victim is, say, an Israeli baby.
These are, in short, extremist organizations. Yet, scandalously, Western media provided public relations for SJP and its ilk during the encampment fiascos of recent years, recasting these groups as protesters for peace.
For example, the Associated Press headlined an April 2024 encampment story, “Anti-war protesters dig in.” Reuters wrote that Columbia faced a federal complaint “after arresting anti-war protesters.” NPR called the phenomenon “an encampment of anti-war protesters.” CNN’s John Vause told viewers that riot police had arrested “anti-war protesters occupying a main building at Columbia.” PBS’s Frontline said that Harvard students were “ramping up their anti-war efforts.” The Washington Post called them “anti-war protests on campuses.”
These are self-deceiving lies. Viewing these groups as heirs to the campus protests of the 1960s and 1970s allows elites to dismiss them as foolish young ideologues at worst, or romanticize them as noble voices for peace and justice at best.
They are neither. They are an organized, widespread apparatus advancing the interests of terrorists. They engage in masked intimidation for the same reason the KKK burned crosses and neo-Nazis marched through neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors: to frighten decent people in the service of a repulsive anti-morality.
Calling SJP what it is—a vicious hate group—does not resolve the question of whether universities can sanction its members. It does, however, make it especially embarrassing that universities let such obscenity off the hook when they had the chance to expel students who violated campus rules during the encampments and occupations.
Universities have no excuse not to know that SJP stands for an ideology on par with that of neo-Nazis or the KKK. What would they do if they discovered a neo-Nazi or KKK affinity group on campus? Would they, in their newfound appreciation for maximal free speech and the context-dependent nature of discriminatory harassment, allow such groups to operate? Somehow, it seems doubtful. And they almost certainly would never admit the kinds of students who would form such groups in the first place.
Yet year after year, universities manage to populate their SJP chapters. The American people should demand that university leaders explain why. How is it that NYU reliably manages to keep neo-Nazis out, yet students who relish the murder of Jewish Israelis somehow make it through the admissions process?
Chalking this scandal up to idealism, or covering it up with euphemism and dissembling, cannot continue forever. Students for Justice in Palestine’s anti-morality, its celebration of barbarism, is incompatible with civilization. The institutions providing the barbarians safe harbor need to kick them back outside the gates, where they belong.