Vice chancellor criticizes student’s anti-Semitic Facebook comments

A UCLA official criticized anti-Semitic comments made by a UCLA student on Facebook in an email statement sent to the student body Wednesday.

Janina Montero, vice chancellor for student affairs, sent the email after a pro-Israel group on campus condemned an undergraduate student for a series of comments posted on the Facebook status of Jewish actress and UCLA alumna Mayim Bialik.

UCLA spokesman Ricardo Vazquez said the vice chancellor’s decision to send out emails is made on a case-by-case basis, and Montero felt this incident rose to a level that warranted the email.

In the comments, the student called Jewish people “troglodyte albino monsters of cultural destruction” and “capitalist colonizers.”

The student did not respond to several requests for comment for this article.

Vazquez said the university will not pursue disciplinary action because the First Amendment protects individual’s private speech.

In the email statement, Montero urged students to treat others with compassion and to not stereotype other identities.

“The hurtful and offensive comments displayed ignorance of the history and racial diversity of the Jewish people,” she said. “Bigotry against the Jewish people or other groups is abhorrent and does not represent the values of UCLA or the beliefs of our community.”

Liat Menna, president of Students Supporting Israel at UCLA, the group that criticized the student’s comments, said she thinks Montero’s statement was inadequate because it did not address the issue of anti-Zionism. Zionism is the belief that Jewish people should have an independent state, such as Israel.

“The demonization of Jewish students on campus is directly linked to the demonization of the Zionist identity,” she said.

Vazquez said the university is working to prevent similar incidents through community collaboration initiatives, the Diversity Requirement and more accessible ways of reporting bias.

Published by Rupan Bharanidaran

Bharanidaran is the News editor. He was previously a news reporter for the campus politics beat, covering student government and the UCLA administration.

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13 Comments

  1. She must be a member of SJP. After all, SJP fundamentally believes in the comments she made. They try to mask their radical beliefs under the cloak of BDS. Now that the UAW overturned SJP’s bigoted pro-BDS platform, they can hopefully get lost.

  2. Let her begin by suspending Lisa Marie Mendez. Her virulent anti semitic posts on facebook are now legendary and she continues at the UCLA medical center as a student/ assistant with no reprimand. They don’t follow their words with action. Meaningless

  3. The Vice Chancellor sends out a public email condemning these despicable comments, giving it far more public attention than it was initially receiving. Then, once it receives higher public scrutiny, the administration backs away from reprimanding the student. The administration has decided to adopt a strategy that in order to calm public concerns regarding these comments, they will engage in a campaign of publicly shaming the student, rather than putting themselves at risk of being sued for First Amendment violations by suspending/expelling the student. This is disgusting.

  4. There should be no expulsion, unless we want universities policing all sorts of speech based on varying standards. Should a school be allowed to expel someone for a off color joke? What about disagreeing with school policy?

    I’m Jewish, and would rather have jerks like her allowed to speak, than administrators choosing which speech gets protection.

    1. Um, the universities already do that but not consistently nor in a content-neutral fashion. How can such a person be licensed to medically work on the public? Would you put yourself or your mother in her care? I wouldn’t. If she threw a Jewish baby out a window, do you think the university would be culpable? Yes. If she were denouncing, say, homosexuals in this manner, would this be a non-event? No.

  5. I’m guessing that if a student with conservative values spoke the truth about Islam, gun-rights, pro-life, or BLM, that student’s status at UCLA would change dramatically and instantly. That is, of course, after all the leftwing lemmings scurried to their safe spaces and whined about microaggression.

  6. The 1st Amendment only protects speech against the government. In any case, eleven forms of speech are NOT protected: Obscenity, fighting words, defamation, child pornography, perjury, blackmail, plagiarism of copyrighted works, incitements to imminent lawless actions, true threats, solicitations to commit crimes and verbal treason. Anti-Semitism, when cast as verbal or written defamation is not protected speech. On the other hand, it, and conversely “Islamophobia” can not be prosecuted as crimes, as the Attorney General has been threatening.

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