Brandeis University informed Students for Justice in Palestine on Monday about its decision to no longer give the group university funding or allow it to hold activities on campus. The "Vigil for Palestine" that had been scheduled for Monday night was canceled as a result.
Brian Camenker, executive director of MassResistance, tells AFN Brandeis University has not banned the student group, but it has decertified it as an official group of the university, which, as he points out, "is stronger than anybody else has done so far."
"The arguments that the Students for Justice in Palestine use are all false arguments," he notes. "It's all a bunch of propaganda that's, as far as we can tell, funded by Arab governments."
Camenker describes Brandeis as a Jewish university that was founded around the middle of the 20th century to help victims of antisemitism.
"It's basically a left-wing Jewish university," he adds. "It's not religious. So, it has all this sort of social justice stuff seeping through it."
Over time, the university has attracted "a bunch of Muslim students who hate Israel" and support "stuff that's so hateful and disgusting, it's just off the charts."
Following last month's terrorist attacks on Israel, the university's president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, gave a statement declaring the school's support Israel and for students' freedom of speech.
The protests continued.
"Muslim anti-Israel, and also Jewish anti-Israel students, continued their horrible rants. So, [the university] finally said, 'Ok, we're decertifying that group. You can still speak, but you're not going to be an official part of this university,'" Camenker relays.
While he commends that, he thinks the university should have done more over the years to diffuse this ahead of time.
'Never again'? Well …
Jan Markell, founder and director of Olive Tree Ministries, finds it "shocking" how many young people in the U.S. today are openly pro-Hamas. "How are you 'pro' that kind of evil?" she wonders. "I think it backs up the passage in [the Old Testament Book of] Jeremiah that the heart is deceitful and deceptively wicked."
Markell says protesters who are chanting such slogans as "Free Palestine!" are misguided completely. "First of all, there is no such thing as Palestine – there never was a Palestine," she explains. "Ancient Israel lived in an area that was designated as 'Palestine,' and that was meant to insult the Jewish people back in 135 A.D."
Likewise, she continues, there are no Palestinian people. "[The late PLO leader] Yasser Arafat came along in the 1960s and invented them," she states.
As for the level of anti-Semitism spiking on American campuses?
"… This is a new level of hatred that, again, I think caught America [and its Jewish population] off guard …. I think most Jewish people are stunned out of their mind that this is happening," she tells AFN. "In 1945 when the [Nazi concentration] camps were liberated, everybody said 'never again.' Well, lo and behold, we're there again."
Markell is host of the radio program "Understanding the Times."
Jan Markell's comments added after story was originally posted.
