Editor’s note: Below is Sara Dogan’s review of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s new pamphlet, Muslim Hate Groups On Campus by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Center. To read the pamphlet, click here. To order the pamphlet, click here or buy it for $0.99 on Kindle.

Muslim Hate Groups On Campus by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, exposes the radical origins and violent objectives of the purportedly mainstream Muslim student organizations that have set up shop on our nation’s campuses.

For those who have not set foot on a college campus in recent years, the casual anti-Semitism and atmosphere of intimidation may seem eerily reminiscent of 1930s Germany. Radical Muslim students and their leftist allies string barbed wire around “check­points” where pro-Palestinian activists brandish mock weapons and shout to passing students “Are you Jewish?” and erect “Apartheid Walls” plas­tered with Hamas posters describing Jews as baby-killers, along with  maps showing the Jewish State erased and replaced with “Palestine.” These actions are justified as episodes of agitprop “theater,” but they have a more serious and deadly intent.

The lead sponsors of these events (dubbed “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” or “Palestine Awareness Weeks”) and the chief instigators of the campus attacks on Jews, Greenfield shows, are members of two student organizations linked to the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood network, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). A civil rights lawsuit against the University of Cali­fornia, Berkeley for failing to protect a Jewish stu­dent from a violent attack by an SJP activist notes that “the two groups [MSA and SJP] not only co-sponsor events and cooperate on strategic projects, but they even share the same office and campus fa­cilities.” It further charges that “The more publicly activist SJP may be understood as the militant arm of the outwardly benevolent MSA.”

What do the administrators at the University of Pennsylvania know about the 2012 National Conference of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement about to take place at Penn and when did they know it?

“BDS,” as this virulent anti-Israeli hatefest is commonly called, is coming to the Penn campus on February 3-5, but university officials have hid from the implications of hosting such an event.  They say that the university is on record as not supporting this movement, yet they let the event go forward, providing space and possibly funding, despite the fact that the sponsors may not meet school requirements as a recognized group and that their anti-Semitic message is deeply hostile to academic freedom and basic human decency. The university appears to be bending rules that would be rigidly enforced for sponsors of another cause.

U Penn’s willingness to enable the BDS conference is particularly inexplicable given the fact that this growing movement to boycott Israel and Israeli-produced goods, force divestment from any companies that do business with Israel, and establish sanctions against Israel due to its supposed violations of human rights, was created by nations and groups seeking to delegitimize and destabilize Israel such as the terrorist-sponsoring nation of Iran and the terrorist groups Hezbollah, and Hamas.

As Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz has noted, the BDS movement abets terrorism: “People who advocate boycotts and divestiture will literally have blood on their hands,” he said. “They encourage terrorism and discourage the laying down of arms.”  Even Noam Chomsky stated recently that BDS was “hypocritical” in its pretense to be concerned about Israeli human rights violations and that the movement could be called anti-Semitic “with justice.”

Among the scheduled speakers at the upcoming conference is Anna Baltzer, a “Jewish American Palestinian human rights activist,” who summarizes the line of attack on Israel when she bluntly states that its polices of  “ethnic cleansing and apartheid must be stopped.”   These terms are not arguments; they are knowing lies designed to weaken the Jewish State and soften it up for the kill. The insidious segregation of “apartheid” does not exist in Israel. Arabs are granted full civil rights under Israeli law, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or sex. Israeli Arab citizens vote in national elections, have representatives in the Israeli Parliament, serve as tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities, and sit on the benches of Israeli courts (including the Israeli Supreme Court). They have more rights, and enjoy more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than the Arabs of any Arab state.

The BDS conference at Penn will feature, in addition to BALTZER, a cavalcade of anti-Israel speakers, including founder of the Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, whose views are summed up when he says, ”Israel is a society where virulent anti-Arab racism and Nakba denial are the norm although none of the European and American leaders who constantly lecture about Holocaust denial will dare to admonish Netanyahu for his bald lies and omissions about Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.”

The BDS National Conference at U Penn is by no means a stand-alone event.  In fact the BDS movement shares radical political DNA (and personnel) with the international “Israel Apartheid Weeks” and “Palestine Awareness Weeks” scheduled to take place on campuses around the country this spring.  The goal of these events, designed by Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), is to garner support for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas who seek to “push the Jews into the sea” and annihilate the Jewish state.  These “weeks” have regularly sought to intimidate Jewish students, occasionally through acts of physical violence, and have become frequent occurrences at campuses like the University of California, Irvine.

The growing BDS movement pursues these same ends by other means—delegitimating Israel by cutting its financial and cultural ties to America. Along with others in his group, Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement, is a regular speaker on college campuses during Israel Apartheid Week.  Barghouti expresses the genocidal logic at the heart of the anti-Israel movement when he says of its attempt to defend itself: “Israel is never retaliating, because it’s the occupying power, and occupation by definition is aggression and violence.”

Despite the intention of the BDS conference to preach three days of systematic ethnic hatred against Jews that the university would not countenance if it were directed, say, at Muslims, U Penn officials have turned a blind eye (and deaf ear) to the growing public outcry about the conference, claiming that it is solely a student matter and that, to stretch credulity, the university literally has no information regarding the conference, its funding, its sponsors, or its arrangements to use university facilities.

In the wake of the federal investigation recently opened to investigate charges of anti-Semitism and a hostile environment for Jewish students at the University of California Santa Cruz, other students who have experienced anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist harassment are coming forward with their stories. Among these are former Hampshire College students Lihi Benisty and Samantha Mandeles whose testimony paints a truly disturbing picture of the atmosphere of hatred and intimidation faced by pro-Israel campus activists.

Hampshire College is a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts.   As well-known Israel activists on a campus dominated by the extremist organization Students for Justice in Palestine, which is linked to the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood network, both Benisty and Mandeles have faced harassment and intimidation as the price for voicing their views on Israel.

Lihi Benisty transferred to Hampshire last year as a junior and quickly became active in pro-Israel activism on campus but was shocked by the hostile and violent reception her activities garnered from pro-Palestinian students on campus.

“Being ‘pro Palestine’ right now on college campuses I think is kind of a new fad, especially on liberal campuses,” Benisty explains. “[Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)] is probably the largest group on campus and the most active group and they sound good and they present these facts that how can you not support them if they’re throwing around genocide and apartheid and all those words.”

Benisty attended what was supposed to be a small, intimate event at the neighboring University of Massachusetts featuring Israeli soldier Sgt. Kenny Sachs and was astonished that anti-Israel demonstrators outnumbered the pro-Israel students attending. “There were about 15 of us pro-Israel students and about 30-50 Hampshire students and community members that came to protest,” Benisty recounts. As the only pro-Israel Hampshire student at the event, she became known  as a supporter of Israel and began experiencing increasing episodes of harassment from members of the Students for Justice in Palestine. “The week following the event, I was harassed every night coming home,” Benisty states. “I was called ‘apartheid lover,’ ‘genocide supporter,’ ‘Zionist racist bitch.’”

She adds, “One time I was even called ‘racist bitch’ and someone nudged me, and I didn’t fall, but still, and it didn’t hurt, but it was physical aggression.”

Lihi scheduled a meeting with one of Hampshire’s deans, but the day before she was supposed to meet with him she received a death threat in her email.  “I received an email to my Hampshire email which only Hampshire students and faculty have access to,” Lihi recounts. “It was from Katie Smith who is probably a made-up name, from a gmail account, and it said, in all capitals, ‘Make the world a better place and die slow.’ And that was following all that week of harassment.”

“I didn’t want to be at Hampshire anymore because I couldn’t deal with it,” Benisty summarizes. “It was basically a very, very hostile environment. I felt not only physically unsafe but emotionally unsafe.”

Nor was Lihi alone in experiencing harassment for her pro-Israel beliefs. Samantha Mandeles, a student and pro-Israel organizer at Hampshire from 2006-2010, can recall numerous incidents where both she herself and other students were harassed for their support of Israel, creating a hostile climate for Jewish and pro-Israel students on the campus.

“In my time at Hampshire, I have experienced a lot of anti-Semitism, I have seen a lot of anti-Semitism,” Mandeles recounts. “The example of the harassment of Lihi is egregious, but it is not uncommon in my experience.”

Mandeles recounts one incident from her junior year when she was speaking with a group of friends gathered outside who were discussing Jewish stereotypes.  A Palestinian student she’d never spoken with before was hanging out with the group and upon learning that Mandeles is Jewish he told her, “So you’re Jewish?  So you and your people are responsible for the death of Jesus and all the important prophets.”  Mandeles notes that this student was involved with SJP during his entire tenure at Hampshire.

Another SJP member sent Mandeles a note on Facebook telling her she should “stop advertising your fascist Zionist bullshit.”

One of Mandeles’ friends taped an Israeli flag and a list of facts about Israel to his dorm room door. The flag was subsequently stolen and the sheet of facts was shredded into tiny pieces and left in a pile outside his room. Mandeles describes how another “Jewish, Zionist friend of mine was approached in [the dining hall]…by a pair of SJPers, who, without any sort of provocation, began to loudly sing a Palestinian national song in her face.  She told me that they followed her out of the dining hall, singing at her as loud as they could.”

And Mandeles relates how a Hampshire professor, in a one-on-one academic meeting with a student she knows, told that student that “Jews will always cry anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized because it’s in their nature.”

Even the Jewish community at Hampshire was often remiss in defending Israel. Mandeles recalls a Passover seder she attended where the campus rabbi, at the point in the evening where the assembled traditionally declare “next year in Jerusalem,” refused to say the words, stating “I am not going to say ‘next year in Jerusalem’ because I know Israel is a very contentious issue and I don’t want to offend anyone.”  The rabbi, she notes, is no longer at Hampshire.

“I got to Hampshire and wasn’t really expecting such an elevated and poisonous level of contempt,” Mandeles says, summarizing her experiences. “I just didn’t know that it was going to be so nasty.”

Over the past 20 years, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has fought to defend free societies from their enemies on the Left. Borrowing a strategy from political luminaries of the past who disseminated their thoughts in easily portable tracts, the Freedom Center since its inception has produced small, concise, and easily comprehensible primers on the most important issues of our day. One of these booklets, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution, has sold more than 300,000 copies and been distributed to more than 1.2 million people. Another, Big Lies: The Arab Propaganda War Against Israel, has reached another 600,000.

Now, the Center is taking another step into the digital age by re-releasing its pocket best-sellers on Kindle. Among the booklets now available for download are the aforementioned Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution and Big Lies and the recent publication From Shadow Party to Shadow Government by David Horowitz and John Perazzo

Each of these concise volumes will arm the reader with crucial facts and knowledge about America and its adversaries.

You can download these pamphlets to your Kindle here.

The full list of pamphlets now available for download on Kindle includes:

From Shadow Party to Shadow Government: George Soros and the Effort to Radically Change America

From Shadow Party to Shadow Government dissects George Soros’ network of leftwing political organizations, through which he has been able to exercise unparalleled influence over the past twenty years.

What Americans Need to Know about Jihad

A primer on the totalitarian ideology that seeks to establish a global Islamic state ruled by Islamic law.

Why Israel is the Victim and Why There is No Peace in the Middle East

Israel is the only democracy in a Middle Eastern desert of tyranny and oppression. Why Israel is the Victim and Why There is No Peace in the Middle East sets the record straight about the Middle East conflict.

Obama and Islam

Obama and Islam answers the question that our president’s recent actions raise:  what exactly is Barak Obama’s relationship to Islam?  How does he see the Muslim extremism that has targeted America for destruction?

Obama’s Professor and America’s Cultural Crisis

There’s an old joke that goes like this: Two Jews are facing a firing squad. The officer in charge of their execution asks if they have a last request. One Jew says to the other “I think I’d like a blindfold.” The other Jew says “Let’s not make trouble.”

That Jew turns out to be Rachelle Rubin, president of the Boston University chapter of Students for Israel. Rachelle read a Frontpage Magazine article which recounts the rejection of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s ad refuting the genocidal lies spread by the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian leaders who want to “push the Jews into the sea” (these are their precise words). After reading the article Rachelle felt concerned enough to write a letter to the Freedom Center — urging us not to “push the issue” lest we “offend” BU’s Arab population (which has not said a word in defense of the Jews or in opposition to the lies).

The ad which the David Horowitz Freedom Center attempted to place in the Boston University campus paper, the Daily Free Press, was based on the Center’s campaign to put up a “Palestinian Wall of Lies” on university campuses to combat the “Israel Apartheid Walls” which Muslim Brotherhood front groups are erecting on college campuses this week to delegitimize the state of Israel, and soften it up for jihadist armies of Hamas and Hizbollah massed on its borders.

The Center’s “wall” and its ad refute the ten core lies on which the attacks on Israel mounted by Islamic jihadists and the radical left are based. For example, the lie that Israel is “occupied Palestine.” Israel in fact occupies a tiny sliver of the ruins of the Turkish empire (the Turks are neither Arabs nor Palestinians). Eighty percent of the so-called Palestine Mandate (which refers to a region not a political or ethnic entity) was ceded to Jordan, which is ruled by a Hashemite minority that no one mistakes for Palestinians. Seventy-percent of the population of Jordan are Arabs from the Palestine mandate but no one is calling for the self-determination of these people or the destruction of the Jordanian state, because the agenda of the Islamists is to purge the Jews from the Middle East.

The “Palestinian Wall of Lies” ad was an attempt to confront Boston University’s Israel Apartheid Week, which featured the erection of an “Apartheid Wall,” a speech by Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, and an event with Noam Lekach and Elinor Amit from a group called “Anarchists Against the Wall” which protests Israel’s security fence and what they term “land theft, violence, separation and occupation” – all favored propaganda terms of the left to support the claims of the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas. The removal of Israel’s “apartheid wall” would simply give free reign to Palestinian suicide bombers to kill more Jews.

The Free Press refused to print the ad, claiming that the content “may be offensive to our readers belonging to certain religious or ethnic groups.”  When the Freedom Center asked the Free Press editors to cite which specific passages were offensive, and offered to modify the ad, the paper refused to give specifics.

The Freedom Center documented this refusal in its article “Censorship at the Boston University Daily Free Press,” which appeared in Frontpage Magazine. Rachelle Rubin read the article and wrote to David Horowitz. This is their complete correspondence:

[Editor's note: The typos in Rachelle Rubin's email -- including the misspelling of David's name -- have been left uncorrected.]

Dear Mr. Horrowitz,

I was just made aware of the article in frontmag about The Daily Free Press not publishing your ad. While I do understand your frustration, I ask you please not to push this issue. First and foremost, the majority of SJP memebers are not Muslim, many are Jewish and many are anarchists. BU has a large Arab population, which has NOT been mobalized, and we most definitly do not want to do antyhing to offend them- there is no reason for us to try and incite, the same way that there is no reason for them to get involved. In addition, yesterday was a great day for us. At the moment the pro-Israel students are feeling proud and feel the support of the Boston University campus, we dont not need enemies we do not have. Boston University IS a place of understanding and coextiance and we are doing everything in our power to keep it that way- we WILL NOT stoop to SJP. This is a student issue and we are trying to handle it that way. And finally, to press this issue would deter future Jewish and pro-Israel students from attending our campus. We have been pro-active, and stand positively, strongly, and proudly and would like THAT to be the way the outside Jewish and pro-Israel world see our campus, becuase it is the truth

The battle for free speech is the front line battle in the defense of the West against the totalitarian jihad being waged by political Islam. This was manifest in the rejection by the ironically named Daily Free Press of a pro-Israel ad from the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The Daily Free Press is the “student” newspaper at Boston University and the rejected ad featured the Freedom Center’s “Palestinian Wall of Lies,” a document that refutes the audacious falsehoods that form the jihadists’ case against the Jewish state.

The “Palestinian Wall of Lies” ad was timed to coincide with Boston University’s Israel Apartheid Week, an event organized by Students for Justice in Palestine which is a front group for the Muslim Students Association and the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the planned events are the erection of an “Apartheid Wall” featuring the standard lie that Palestine (there has never been such an entity since Roman times) is “occupied” by the Jewish state. In fact, the Jewish state occupies the ruins of the former Turkish empire (the Turks are neither Arabs nor Palestinians). The Boston University hate week also features a speech by Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, and an event with Noam Lekach and Elinor Amit from a group called “Anarchists Against the Wall” which regularly holds protests against the border fence in the West Bank of Israel which was erected to keep suicide bombers out. It has reduced Palestinian terrorist attacks against Jews by over 90% which leftists at Boston U and other schools evidently want to see resumed. The group also protests what they term “land theft, violence, separation and occupation” – all favored propaganda terms of the left to support the claims of the genocidal terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Freedom Center’s ad was designed to counter this outrage – no better than having the Hitler Youth parade on the university quad – by confronting these lies with facts. It was submitted to the Daily Free Press on February 24 and was quickly returned with a terse email stating, “Due to the controversial nature of the ad, the Daily Free Press has decided not to run your ad next week.”  When pressed for a specific cause for the rejection, the Daily Free Press advertising editor Kathryn Palkovics claimed that “it is not a specific phrase or word that violated our policy, but that the general content may be offensive to our readers belonging to certain religious or ethnic groups.” When the Freedom Center asked whether this rule applied to material offensive to Jews (and therefore to the hate week organized by the left), Palkovics failed to answer.

We have submitted a letter to the Daily Free Press protesting this censorship of pro-Israel viewpoints in its pages. The text of the letter and the correspondence with the editors are reproduced below:

Open Letter to the Boston University Daily Free Press:

On February 25th, we submitted an ad to your paper based on our “Palestinian Wall of Lies,” a campaign designed to address and refute frequently-told lies about the state of Israel. The same ad has been submitted to and accepted by other campus papers including the UCLA Daily Bruin.

The Daily Free Press rejected our ad on the spurious ground that it offends the religious and ethnic sensibilities of some of its readers. We know it is spurious because the editors refused to specify any particular phrase or claim in our ad which was offensive, even after we offered to modify the ad.

The “lies” addressed in the ad are factual and should be considered offensive to no one. For instance, the lie that “Israel Occupies Arab Palestine” explains, “There never was an Arab country called ‘Palestine’ or inhabited by ‘Palestinians’” and “The land on which Israel was created…was land that had belonged to Turkey for 400 years.”

Advertising editor Kathryn Palkovics stated in an email, “Our board discussed your new ad last night and we cannot accept your ‘Wall of Lies’ ad for print as it still violates our advertising policy.”  This policy is astonishingly vague and gives the editors leave to reject ads that in their view (however distorted)   “promote discrimination against any gender, ethnicity, nationality, religious group or sexual orientation” or “any content deemed patently offensive to the readership.”

David Horowitz, chairman of the Freedom Center, then wrote to Palkovics stating, “As reported by you, the position of your board appears to be a policy to censor any comment critical of policies and/or positions taken by the terrorist organization Hamas, the government of Gaza, or the Palestinian Authority under a general rule that if you have readers who belong to terrorist organizations that happen to be Muslim or Palestinian your paper will not publish anything objectionable to them. Is this the position of your board?”

Palkovic responded that “The Daily Free Press believes the depiction of a Muslim carrying a gun in the background, as well as the text regarding Arabs as rejecting peace, may be offensive not only to Muslim and Arab students, but to our readership as a whole. Jews and Israelis are not excluded from our policy.”

So apparently the editors of the Free Press object to us stating the fact that the Palestinians have rejected peace—not only once but many, many times. The current position of the Palestinian Authority and the government of Gaza is total rejection of the existence of a Jewish state. How can the Israelis make peace with Palestinians who refuse to recognize their right to exist?

To clarify the issues, we removed the graphic of terrorists holding guns in one hand and Korans in the other in a second version of the ad we submitted, which was also rejected. Despite their claims to the contrary, it is clear that the main impetus behind the editors’ rejection of our ad is that they don’t like our point of view and want to suppress it.  Such censorship is in direct conflict with the openness and free discourse which should exist on a university campus and particularly at Boston University, which is located in the city where the American Revolution began. It shows just how aggressively the left is conducting its war against our founding principles in its zeal to support the Islamic jihad.

Sincerely,

Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom
David Horowitz Freedom Center

Record of correspondence:

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Elizabeth Ruiz wrote:

Hi Kathryn,

Here is the PDF. We had to send it as a YouSendIt file because it’s too big to attach.

We can either put it on a American Express Card, a Mastercard or you can send the bill to:

David Horowitz Freedom Center
14148 Magnolia Blvd.
#103
Sherman Oaks, CA 91423

Please let me know which one is the most convenient for you.

Best,
Elizabeth

From: dfpads@gmail.com On Behalf Of Daily Free Press Adv. Dept.
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 3:06 PM
To: Elizabeth Ruiz
Subject: Re: PDF of ad

Hi Elizabeth,

Due to the controversial nature of the ad, the Daily Free Press has decided not to run your ad next week. I have attached our media kit, which includes our advertising policy. Please feel free to contact me should you have any questions about our decision.

Thank you,
Kathryn

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Elizabeth Ruiz wrote: