State University Threatens Arrest for Group That Exposed Terror Front Connection on Campus
A conservative group that put up fliers at the University of Texas at San Antonio that exposed anti-Semitic hatred on campus — including from a terror front organization — has been threatened with arrest by the university, Front Page Magazine reports.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center, which is associated with Front Page Magazine, had been posting fliers on the UTSA campus regarding two groups that have been linked to antisemitism and harassment of Jewish students on campus.
One of them, Students for Justice in Palestine, has been linked to Hamas.
“SJP was created in 2000 by Hamas supporter Hatem Bazian and pro-Hamas activist Snehal Shingavi, a member of the International Socialist Organization, to wage a campus war against Israel on behalf of Hamas,” a 2016 report on SJP from the Freedom Center read. “Bazian has quoted approvingly from a famous Islamic hadith which calls for the violent slaughter of Jews and which appears in Hamas’s founding charter.”
The report notes that American Muslims for Palestine — an alleged front group for Hamas in the United States — has been SJP’s biggest funder, with $100,000 given to the group for campus activities in 2014. Baizan was also a notable speaker for Hamas-linked group KindHearts, which has been shut down by the U.S. government.
As part of their #StopUniversitySupportforNeoNazis, the Freedom Center put up fliers on campus featuring quotes from some of the activists for SJP and the Muslim Students Association — which was named in a Muslim Brotherhood document as an affiliated group — at UTSA.
The quotes included “How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough,” “Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die” and “Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”
So, what did the university do? Threaten them with arrest, of course. Not the students, the organization that brought them to everyone’s attention.
In a letter from UTSA’s interim chief legal officer, John Danner, legal action was threatened against the Freedom Center, saying that “(i)f any member of your organization returns, they are subject to arrest, pursuant to Section 30.05 of the Texas Penal Code.”
This, by the way, is a public university; non-student groups do have free speech rights at universities. As do students, like SJP and MSA activist Nour Rafiti, a UTSA student who once tweeted to a friend “have a safe trip habibtii! slap a jew for me ;)”
In this case, the Freedom Center was publicizing the fact that hate groups with terror ties are operating on the campus with little to no interference from the university. If the university won’t act on hate speech (at least when it’s directed against Jewish individuals by Muslim students), the Freedom Center figured that it would take the initiative.
That wasn’t even the worst part, though. In a message from UTSA President Taylor Eighmy, he lumped the Freedom Center together with a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization in a statement about a new UTSA website for bias incident reporting.
“We have had a couple of recent examples of incidents addressed by the team,” Eighmy wrote. “Last week, the group identified and removed unauthorized flyers placed on campus by representatives of the Horowitz Freedom Center. A review of camera footage identified a non-UTSA affiliated individual responsible for posting the flyers. A criminal trespass warning was subsequently issued and violation of the warning could lead to arrest.”
This is where we are in America. God help us all.
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