Students found posters on Bruin Walk and in the North Village Thursday morning accusing the organization Students for Justice in Palestine of involvement in terrorist and anti-Semitic acts.
One of the posters found Thursday read, “Regardless of how they picture themselves, this is who they really are,” above a photo of a child standing next to a rifle. The posters also listed two hashtags, “SJP Jew Haters” and “Stop The Jihad On Campus,” which targeted the Muslim Student Association, a religious student group unaffiliated with SJP.
Students found similar posters on the American University campus in Washington, D.C., Sunday evening. One poster featured a hand stabbing the Star of David with a knife, and another read “MSA Terrorist Anwar Al-Awlaki: President MSA Colorado State.” Al-Awlaki was killed by United States drones in 2011 after linked to al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. An exact replica of the poster targeting MSA was found at UCLA Monday morning.
SJP President Yacoub Kureh, a graduate student in mathematics, said the posters’ attempt to connect SJP to MSA is inaccurate because not all Palestinians practice the same religion.
“The fact that they didn’t just target us really confuses me,” Kureh said. “People assume all Palestinians are Muslims and that’s certainly not the case.”
He added the assumption that SJP is anti-Semitic is very offensive to the group’s Jewish members.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center placed similar posters near De Neve Plaza in April. David Horowitz is a conservative writer who currently manages the Freedom Center website. Similar posters were also found on campus in February.
Horowitz did not respond Thursday to multiple calls for comment.
Ani Der-Grigorian, SJP outreach director and fourth-year anthropology and international development studies student, said she thinks the connection between the two groups stems from Islamophobia. She added SJP is a secular organization whose goal is to promote Palestinian activism, while the Muslim Student Association is a religious group.
Der-Grigorian said UCLA officials have done little in response to the posters, although she said they did meet with a few members of the organization last year.
“The administration has done the bare minimum,” Der-Grigorian said. “They haven’t sat down with us about how unsafe this makes our members feel.”
She added the “SJP Jew Haters” hashtag on the posters was also used in connection to a Bruin Republicans event with Ben Shapiro this week.
Felipe Bris Abejon, SJP education and resources director and first-year political science student, said he was the first to notice the posters on Bruin Walk around 10 a.m., when he found one stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
Kureh said he does not think Bruins for Israel is responsible for the posters because the student group has been helpful when the posters were put up in the past.
“Last year, BFI was supportive in taking these down and was very clear this is not the way they want to engage with us,” Kureh said. “They’ve never used the SJP name this way.”
SJP leaders said they understand the First Amendment limits how much officials can respond to these incidents, but would still like administrators to provide a thorough response to condemn the spread of hurtful information.
Let’s see Janet Napolitano and Diane Feinstein raise a ruckus about these racist and bigoted anti-semitic acts against Palestinians which obviously makes for an intimidated and hated on student body.
I guess Napolitano and Feinstein think it’s right for california students to be mislabeled foreign extremists of ISIS since it fits with their Horowitz hasbara .
America first
Not Israel
Free Palestine
Muslims like you are the racists and bigots who defend ISIS.
Did your mommy stop feeding you the milk of you basement rats or were you just malnutritioned from being too busy building apartheid walls and stealing your neighbors’ land and goats.
Btw I’m not muslim which just goes to show how moronic and trump-like
you are.
And who do you support ? The christian mass murderers like hitler and Stalin, or maybe the Asian mass mirders like chairman Mao? Or maybe the atomic bomb dropping leaders ?
I don’t think any of them were muslims?
Timothy mc righ, aurora, columbine, charleston…all not muslims.
In fact toddlers have shot more people in the US last year than did Muslims.
Your islamophobic rant is great in showing how meager your claims and critical thinking ,or lack thereof, are typical israel-Firster hasbara propaganda.
BDS
You are the moron who defends the Bataclan attacks.
LOL, Trying to benefit from such tragedy as the Paris attacks make you as evil as the terrorists.
You liberals are the evil ones who make excuses for the terrorists. You liberals are the ones who try to benefit by crying “Islamophobia” and blaming the Jews.
You are the kindergarten reject that is Nuttyahoo’s illegitimate love child he had with sheldon Adelson during a rough night of goat stealing and apartheid wall building.
Go worship Israeli terror atrocities like those committed by the criminals ariel Sharon menachem begin and Yitzhak shamir as they brag about inventing modern terrorism.
Got your life sized poster of baruch Goldstein posted over your flea infested bed yet?
BDS
Go worship another terrorist, hajiboy. BDS was happy that Paris was attacked.
Hahahaha you know that Nuttyahoo gets boned up whenever there anything like a 9/11 happening….what did Nuttyahoo say about 9/11?
He said this is a good thing for Israel!
Disgusting
Fascist Democrats like you are the nutcases who defend ISIS, Hamas, Boko Haram, and Al Shabaab. YOu defend those who cheered the 9/11 attacks: Your jihadist buddies.
And you got that from what I said?
Amazing.
Fascist democrats indeed preening themselves on separation of church and state but in reality they are slaves of the Church of the State they have been led by the nose to help create.
You liberal fascists are disgusting. You support the Bataclan attacks. You defended the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Of course, you also defend the terror mosques who defend the attackers, hajiboy.
Liberal fascist?
Are you eating the oxymoronic kool-aid again.
Free Palestine
Liberals ARE the fascists for their hatred of Jews, especially the BDS movement that cheered the attacks on the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo.
Jew-hating dirt bag.
I don’t really care if you’er uninformed, misinformed or just a Jew hater.
You’re all from the same bag of factual spiritual manure.
Is English your first language? Honest question.
Look forward to see if the chancellor Block and other college officials would raise an eyebrow on these hateful acts. Just imagine what would happen if such posters labeled other minorities and groups across the campus. Such hateful actions, must be condemned by the administrators and officials, before turning the UCLA into an unfriendly campus for certain group of students.
SJP supports Hamas and Hamas TV brainwashes Palestinian CHILDREN to hate and KILL JEWS with their hateful kiddie porn cartoons and TV shows. Here’s just one example of what these BARBARIANS teach little kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IueZydnciHM
Islam is a barbaric religion because Muhammad was a violent Jew-hating warlord who slaughtered thousands and beheaded hundreds of “infidels”. His most devout followers today imitate his bloody example by reading the WAR MANUAL he wrote, called the Quran: http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Mein_Kampf
“The amount of anti-Jewish text in Mein Kampf adds up to 7% in total,
whilst the largely non-abrograted Medinan verses of the Qur’an contain
more than double that amount, standing at almost 17%”
First off, this is the news section, not opinion, where only facts should be reported. As far as I know, the word “offensive” is an opinionated term. Finding something offensive is not a fact, it’s an opinion. It seems as if the editors of the Daily Bruin need to take a journalism class or two.
Second, how is this offensive? SJP supports Hamas, who shares ideologies with ISIS and would love to do to Tel Aviv what ISIS did to Paris.
Sometimes, the truth is offensive.
“Sometimes the truth is offensive” especially when it is exposing Zionist war crimes and crimes against humanity, hypocrites like you will be crying anti-semitism.
You Muslim fascists are the hypocrites who defended the Charlie Hebdo attacks. You Muslims are the criminals who support ISIS and Omar al-Bashir.
SJP should change their brown shirt tactics and stop clamoring for an intifada. Then maybe such posters won’t appear. To me, the posters tell it like it is.
And SJP feels unsafe????
Please cite where SJP is “clamoring for an intifada.”
Helen of Peel,
In 2004, Hatem Bazian, co-founder of SJP and now a UC Berkeley professor, called for an intifada-in the US-in a speech in San Francisco. It is on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfv5yaKxNgo
Last October, SJP at UC Irvine (where I teach part-time) held a demonstration on campus. They had a poster that expressed support for the intifada. I personally saw it and wrote about it on the below blog posting.
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2015/10/day-of-rage-at-uc-irvine.html
Helen,
Here is another recent example from UC Berkeley:
https://twitter.com/canarymission/status/656216143594717184
If you ever get the opportunity, attend a meeting or some other get-together where there are only SJP members in attendance. Anti-semitic conversation is commonplace. Most will agree with it, some will not, but nobody will condemn it. Anti-semitism in UCLA SJP is not a myth. It is real and pervasive.
lol what??? lmao.
Typical Ziofascist habit for slandering their victims and churning out false propaganda.
You Muslims are the fascists who support the Bataclan attacks.
SJP is offensive.
To who?
To Jews, to Christians, to those who criticize radical Islam.
It gets old watching Jew hatred try passing itself off as political activism.
Time to tell the Jew haters to either go crawl back under their rocks or get out.
People who hate Jews are bad eggs.
Expect the terrorist support organization CAIR to chime in hear any minute. They are always around helping support terrorists. CAIR sure got busted in some whoppers in connection with Farook. What scumbags. However, when an organization is founded by islamic terrorists, what can you expect but a bunch of lies?