...The ball is now in Hillel International’s court. Brown Hillel defrauded Hillel International. It lied to Hillel CEO Eric Fingerhut. It used Hillel’s facility to host a group that wishes to destroy Hillel as part of its institutional war against Jewish freedom in the US. This institutional war goes hand in hand with the substantive war against the Jews.
Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
16 May '16..
Two wars are being waged against Jewish students on American university campuses. One is substantive, the other is institutional. The plight of the Jews at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is emblematic of both.
The purpose of the substantive war is to deny Jews their freedom as Jews. As the guarantor of Jewish freedom, Israel is the subject of a systematic, multidimensional assault, carried out everywhere on campuses.
On a growing number of campuses in the United States, the only Jews who can safely express their views on Israel are those who champion Israel’s destruction.
Those who support Israel are subjected to continuous harassment by their fellow students.
The substantive battle is being led by Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP is a phantom organization with no national organization. As Jonathan Schanzer from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies testified before the US Congress last month, it is directed by former officials from non-profits including the Holy Foundation, KindHearts and the Islamic Association for Palestine that were forced to shut down after they were implicated in financing terrorist groups including Hamas and al-Qaida.
At Brown, SJP seeks to make it impossible for Jewish students to organize as Jews.
For instance, in late January, Brown Hillel hosted a discussion of Jewish identity featuring actor Michael Douglas and Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky.
SJP protested the event arguing that since both men supported Israel, the event stood in opposition to “social justice.”
As Ira Stoll reported in the New York Sun, during the event, protesters outside the hall calling for Israel’s destruction made it hard for the audience of several hundred people to hear what Sharansky and Douglas were saying.
Stoll added that rather than protect the audience’s freedom of assembly and the speakers’ freedom of speech, an assistant dean stood with the protesters and “offered to provide further support for students who had missed class to be involved in activism or who were upset by the evening’s events.”
In March, a consortium of student groups at Brown, including a Jewish group affiliated with Hillel, cosponsored a talk by Janet Mock, an African American transsexual activist.
In light of the Jewish group’s co-sponsorship, SJP launched a petition to boycott the speech. Not wanting the protest to eclipse the substance of her remarks, which, of course had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, Mock canceled her lecture.
These events make clear that for SJP and its allies, it isn’t just Jewish life on campus that must be destroyed.
Jews as Jews must not be permitted to participate with non-Jews in organizing or hosting campus events related to issues of common concern.
In both of its substantive anti-Jewish actions, SJP tipped its hat to the institutional battle against Jewish freedom that its Jewish allies are leading.