Friday, April 29, 2016

Hundreds Swarm SDSU President to Protest David Horowitz Freedom Center Anti-BDS Posters (VIDEO)

At FrontPage Magazine:

A series of posters created by the David Horowitz Freedom Center targeting proponents of the Hamas-inspired and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Jewish state have incited a storm of controversy on the San Diego State University campus where hundreds of students swarmed University President Elliot Hirshman to claim that he did not condemn the posters forcefully enough and demanding an apology.

The Freedom Center’s posters identified by name a number of prominent student and faculty BDS activists on the campus and described them as having “allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus.” The posters also contained the hashtag #StopTheJewHatredonCampus, the slogan of the Freedom Center campaign which seeks to confront the agents of campus anti-Semitism and refute the genocidal lies spread by Palestinian terrorists and their campus allies. These lies include the claims that Israel occupies Palestinian land and that Israel is an apartheid state.

Protestors were also incensed by a print ad taken out by the Freedom Center in the Daily Aztec.

The ad states:
There is an epidemic of Jew hatred on American campuses and at San Diego State University. This Jew hatred is incited by Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association and assorted leftist groups, all of whom support the terrorist organizations Hamas and Fatah.
The ad goes on to explain that both SJP and MSA were created by operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and that both groups “disseminate genocidal lies about Israel whose purpose is to weaken and destroy the world’s only Jewish state.”

Posters for the campaign appeared on five California campuses, including at UCLA and UC-Berkeley, where they also sparked protests from anti-Israel activists, as well as university administrators who falsely characterized them as “hate speech.” Images of all the posters may be viewed here. Accounts of the protests and administrator responses can be read here.

In an email sent to San Diego State’s entire student body on Tuesday, Hirshman criticized the posters but also defended the importance of free speech: “First, we recognize and fully support the rights of all parties to voice their positions on political issues, whether supportive or critical. We also understand that when parties adopt a specific political position they become responsible for their actions and these actions may produce criticism.”

Hirshman’s failure to outright condemn the posters did not sit well with SDSU’s anti-Israel activists and the campus left...
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