Eleven student groups signed a statement by the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at New York University School of Law that voiced support for Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis and touted anti-Israel conspiracy theories, reported The Washington Free Beacon.
“The Zionist grip on the media is omnipresent,” said the statement, dated Monday.
SJP claimed in the statement that “embedded in the Zionist supremacy narrative is the orientalist, Islamophobic idea that Azkenazi [sic] Jewish whiteness is fundamentally superior to Palestinian lives, culture and identity.” The statement additionally compares Palestinian terrorists to Ukrainian soldiers.
“The root of the violence we see today is the violent founding of the Israeli state,” the statement noted. “Any Palestinian resistance should be understood with reference to this foundational violence—a concept American media seems to have no trouble applying to the Ukranian [sic] response to Russia.”
The groups that have expressed support for the statement are NYU’s Black Allied Law Students Association, the Middle Eastern Law Students Association, the Muslim Law Students Association, the South Asian Law Students Association, the Disability Allied Law Students Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the Women of Color Collective, the Coalition on Law & Representation, the NYU Review of Law and Social Change, and Ending the Prison Industrial Complex.
Jewish students have filed harassment complaints against the statement. The law school said on Tuesday that it was investigating the complaints “as required by our policies.”
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) has called on NYU’s School of Law to take necessary disciplinary measures against the students.
“The student signatories to this statement are peddling some of the worst and most historically deadly anti-Semitic screeds against Jews, similar to those used by Hitler to justify the Holocaust, and utilized today by far-right and neo-Nazi conspiracists like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke,” said Sacha Roytman Dratwa, CEO of CAM. “The defaming of the national liberation movement of the Jewish people in its indigenous and ancestral homeland is not a mere legal matter, it provides a tailwind for terror and attacks on Jews. We have seen far too many murderous attacks on Jews in the U.S. in recent years parroting these same conspiracy theories against Jews and Jewish collectivity that have ended in bloodshed.”
He continued, saying “this is sadly no mere academic matter, but a matter of the safety and security of all Jews whose fellow students read this hate and incitement.”
In 2020, NYU agreed to revise its non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy to include anti-Semitism after the school’s response to such incidents was investigated by the U.S. Department of Education’s civil-rights office.