This post was updated on April 19 at 7:46 p.m.
UCLA officials accused conservative writer David Horowitz Tuesday of using intimidation tactics after he posted flyers around campus Friday that named students and faculty members as supporters of terrorism against Israel.
Jerry Kang, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, sent an email to students Tuesday denouncing Horowitz’s action. Horowitz, who is based in Los Angeles but unaffiliated with UCLA, alleged student members of the Muslim Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine supported violence that targeted Jewish individuals.
In his email, Kang said Horowitz implicated the listed students and faculty members as terrorists and murderers. He added he thinks Horowitz caused severe psychological harm by listing names and releasing personal information that makes students and faculty members more vulnerable to threats.
“This serious escalation amounts to a focused, personalized intimidation that threatens specific members of our Bruin community,” Kang said in the email.
Horowitz said he did not call the students and faculty members terrorists, but instead described them as supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which encourages sanctions against Israeli companies and institutions. Horowitz added he thinks people who support the BDS movement have a terrorist agenda.
“I want to embarrass members of MSA and SJP,” he said.
Kang said MSA and SJP are recognized student organizations in good standing, and condemned Horowitz’s attempts to malign them. He added the campus can take legal action against those responsible for the posters because they violated university policies on unauthorized graffiti and postings.
Chancellor Gene Block sent messages to those targeted by the posters Friday, and Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Janina Montero met with the students Friday afternoon. Rahim Kurwa, a member of SJP and doctoral candidate in sociology whom Horowitz named, said Montero told students to contact campus officials if they felt unsafe.
Horowitz put up posters accusing SJP of supporting the murder of Israelis in November 2015 but did not name individual students or faculty. He told the Daily Bruin in November he did not post the flyers, but later claimed responsibility.
Horowitz said he would continue putting up flyers at UCLA until the campus formally apologizes to him and invites him to speak to students or engage him in a debate with Kang.
In a letter submitted to Kang, Horowitz’s attorneys demanded Kang retract his statement, issue an apology and refrain from further circulating what Horowitz called defamatory statements to the campus community.
Kurwa said he thinks UCLA administrators should develop a more comprehensive plan to prevent and address future incidents because they pose a threat to personal safety.
“I don’t get the sense there’s any particular training (administrators) get about how Islamophobia, anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian sentiments manifest or how to respond appropriately,” Kurwa said.
Kang said UCLA will enforce university policies on harassment and intimidation by pursuing legal action against Horowitz.
Funny if Jerry Kang, a law professor, hasn’t learned to read things carefully before reacting to them! What a bozo!
I guess that’s why he is at UCLA instead of a courtroom making REALLY big bucks. SJP can dish out intimidation, but they can’t take it.
I totally agree. They go crying to mommy Kang when confronted with some truth.
Ku Klux Kang
Sounds like UCLA officials want a safe space.
UCLA has been coddling Arab terrorist sympathizers for many years now, an effect of the anti-Semitic far-left intimidating professors with threats of campus terror.
These terrorists are patriots defending their homes and property from Jewish interlopers and thieves starting in 1948 and continuing today. They are resistance in the same sense as we recall the “French resistance” to the German occupation.
Nonsense, DW. Germans never had any historical claim to France (other than Alsace-Lorraine) and were truly occupiers.
A better comparison would be the Muslim “migrants” and “asylum seekers” running rampage in Europe.
Like the recent bus bombing that happened in Israel? You defend that?
2400 Palestinians were slaughtered in August 2014 of which 531 were children. You defend this?
Palestinians fired rockets and encouraged their people to murder Israeli Jews that must be A OKAY with you.
The Jews were ethnically cleansed from the land THEY built. They got their land back from the European colonizers and Arab squatters who turned Israel into a cesspool. Now it is a paradise. Why? Because Allah gave Israel to the Jews, and any Moslem opposing this is an apostate.
Muslim fascists like you have 57 countries for yourselves.
Really?! The land belonging to my supposedly “Jewish thieving” grandparents was stolen when they were chased out of Syria and Turkey (maternal grandparents) and Hungary and then Czechoslovakia (paternal grandparents who survived the Holocaust). All 4 grandparents came to Israel with nothing pre-1948 and built themselves and Israel up to be the high tech leader it is now. “Zionist thieves”?? Get your head out of the sand and take a history lesson you moron.
Julia — you need to do some thinking: What do your grandparents trials and miseries have to do with the theft of Palestine? The Zionists remain thieves whether your family suffered or not, can you understand this? There is a basic asymmetry at the root of all of this stuff. No Palestinian ever packed up and moved to Eastern Europe with the intent of driving Jews off their farms, out of their villages or shops and taking possession of everything left behind, including their bank accounts. This never happened.
And then you conjure up “holocaust” (yet again!!), an emotive word constantly used to alert the other that some Jews suffered 70 years ago in Europe. What are you trying to say? Look — my kid brother was killed by a drunk driver at seven years old. So? Do I conclude from that It is alright for me to steal cars all the time?
Try thinking before you call anyone a “moron”.
You Muslim fascists ARE the morons.
Actually many professors are anti-Israel activists in their own right. It is the administrators who are terrorized.
David Hororwitz’s rather crude posters are more humorous than they are threatening, more crass than they are effective. Modern day Meyer Lansky, Sheldon Adelson, is definitely not getting “his” money’s worth in Hororwitz.
Good thing for us, the forces of anti-racism and inclusion, that the forces of hate and exclusion are voiced by such a third rate cheap propagandist as Hororwitz.
He takes racist Zionism and ritual Torah desecration to a new low
Zionism is not racist. It is in accord with the Torah and Koran. It is Arab Islam that is racist and apostasy in opposing the Jews in their homeland.
Zionism is exclusivity and therefore racist. “Homeland”? Where were they for …um….twenty centuries?? That’s a lot of absenteeism. And then they assert the “right of return” after twenty centuries (using the bible as history!) but deny Palestinians the “right of return” after 70 years, a drop in the absentee bucket! The only authority that Israel is a Jewish homeland is the bible which was written by Jews! Wake upl.
Your Muslim friends are the racists.
Nope. Jews are racists, that’s the dirty little secret, that’s what Israel is about. Jews fight against racism everywhere and for everyone except Israel and for themselves. Get it? They are constantly building a wall between themselves and the rest of the world. First thing when they get a state together is build a wall! They have stolen property and killed the owners rather than leave the Palestinians in peace and in place. Even now, everybody is out to get them. Make a big deal of anti-semitism in the US where there is virtually none worth the title. Let’s hear more about Jewish racism, how the Arabs are “animals” and let’s build a higher wall…etc. etc.
Muslims are the racists who kill over cartoons. Muslims are the racists who demand that everyone else cave to their demands. Muslims are the racists who occupy 57 countries for themselves.
The only racist idiot here is you!
Oh, Julia — again, try thinking… Horowitz is an obvious racist, drawing the distinction (crudely at that) between “us” and “them”, a kind of distinction that would warm your little racist heart, wouldn’t it? All you seem to do is call others names. All these years of schooling and all you have if “moron” and “idiot” (at least you spell these right — not a total loss.)
Muslim fascists like you are the racists.
Liberal fascists like you are the racists.
So much for the ‘free speech’ movement of the sixties. It should more aptly be called ‘suppression of free speech’. What a bunch of hypocrites.
I can’t believe I went to this leftist sh$tty school. Bye bye ucla. Can I have my money back? Ku Klux Kang should be fired and sued.
You should get your money back as you clearly got nothing out of it.
Horowitz is a propagandist who wants the US to support Israel. He, and many others like him, want to dehumanize the vastly larger population of the Middle East by branding them terrorists. He preys on susceptible people who already have racist and misogynist leanings and uses lies, dog whistles, and chicanery to convince them that the government favors minorities and women. This is so far from the truth, it is laughable. But truth has no place in his crusade. No one in Horowitz’s circle of Israeli apologists criticized Trump for attacking Hispanics, Blacks and women but when the neo-Nazi’s attacked Jews in Charlottesville, suddenly the business community and the big charities started to back away from Trump. All the so-called “councils” featuring corporate elites on their boards were dissolved. Fund raisers planned at Mar-a-Lago were canceled. It does make you wonder. We give billions annually to Israel which has many atomic weapons and the means to deliver them but fail to give any aid to North Korea, a much poorer, weaker country because out of a sense of self-preservation, they decided to build nukes. Why is it taken for granted that the Jews should get preferential treatment over others in the US? Horowitz is one big reason.