Pro-Hamas Student Group Launches Legal Offensive Against Universities

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has launched a major lawfare offensive apparently aimed at securing a right to break school rules on college campuses and promote anti-Israel hatred, which has contributed to a surge of antisemitic incidents at universities across the US.

On Monday, SJP at the University of Vermont (UVM) filed a federal lawsuit alleging that school officials violated the constitution and perpetrated anti-Palestinian bias by suspending the group for breaking multiple rules, local media reported. Meanwhile, SJP filed a separate civil rights complaint against the University of Georgia (UGA), where some nine students were arrested in April for illegally occupying school property, claiming that its members were victims of “extreme differential treatment.”

The lawsuit against UVM followed SJP’s latest suspension for violating what the university called “the code of student conduct,” a “solicitation and posting policy,” and other offenses. In excerpts of court documents shared by Valley News on Tuesday, the lawyer representing the group, John Franco, said the accusations were false and intended to squelch speech which is critical of Israel.

“In a word, as a state instrumentality, the defendants have invoked state power to muzzle UVMSJP, to delegitimize it, and to give anyone else second thoughts about associating with it,” Franco wrote in the complaint, which is seeking an injunctive reversal of the suspension. Elsewhere he said UVM has “chosen to weaponize procedural permitting issues and the student misconduct process to bully and intimidate UVMSJP and other students, chilling the exercise of their protected First Amendment rights.”

First reported by Athens Politics Nerd, SJP’s civil rights complaint against UGA lodges accusations of racism.

“UGA’s targeted discriminatory investigation of students and student organizations that are made up of mostly Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslim members, perceived to be Palestinian, affiliated with, or advocating in support of Palestinians amounts to a McCarthyist campaign to punish students for their identity and/or expressive activity,” a copy of the complaint shared by Athens says. “There is simply no justification for UGA’s differential treatment of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.”

The legal actions come amid National Students for Justice Palestine’s, as well as its affiliate groups’, sustained and unrelenting campaigns to intimidate university officials into boycotting Israel and banning expressions of Zionism from higher education. As The Algemeiner has previously reported, SJP also regularly traffics in hate speech, destroys property, and trumpets its support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and overthrowing the government of the United States.

Last week, the SJP chapter of Pomona College promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories falsely accusing Israel and the US of spreading the Covid-19 virus to commit genocide and maintain “colonial” rule over people of color.

“Pandemics are a tool of the colonizer,” said an SJP pamphlet distributed during a club fair at the school, according to a Jewish students club, Haverim, that acquired a copy the document. “By bomb or by pathogen, these attacks on Palestinian life are man-made, intentional policy choices … The american [sic] state and israeli [sic] settler colony have found a dress rehearsal for more targeted genocides in their construction of today’s eugenicist normalcy wherein everyone is expected to sustain repeated covid infections indefinitely until death.”

Earlier this month, National Students for Justice Palestine (NSJP), which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, publicly discussed its grand strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US in a now-deleted tweet that was posted to X/Twitter.

“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said last week. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”

In August, on the first day of school, SJP affiliated anti-Zionist students at Cornell University vandalized an administrative building, shattering the glazings of its front doors and graffitiing “Blood is on your hands” and “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” on it. Eleven days earlier, the SJP chapter of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced the beginning of what it described as an “armed rebellion,” claiming a right to use political violence as a tactic for achieving its objective of destroying Zionism, Israel, and capitalism.

“We emphasize our support for the right to resistance, not only in Palestine, but also here in the imperial core,” the group said in a manifesto — which was reportedly crafted with the help of anti-Zionist UNC professors — posted on social media. “We condone all forms of principled action, including armed rebellion, necessary to stop Israel’s genocide and apartheid, and to dismantle imperialism and capitalism more broadly. The oppressors will never grant full liberty to the oppressed; the oppressed must seize liberty with their own hands.”

Columbia University in New York City is still dealing with the legal repercussions of refusing to rein in SJP’s behavior. According to a lawsuit filed February, students linked to SJP beat up five Jewish students in Columbia’s Butler Library. Another attacked a Jewish students with a stick, lacerating his head and breaking his finger, after being asked to return missing persons posters she had stolen. In June, the school settled a lawsuit in which it was accused by a student of neglecting its obligation to foster a safe learning environment amid riotous pro-Hamas protests that were held at the school throughout the final weeks of the academic year.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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