At the University of Michigan, Getting Tough with Hamas Supporters

In the academic year 2023-2024, campuses across the country, beginning on October 8, 2023, were engulfed by pro-Hamas demonstrators. Their faces contorted by hate, members of these mobs waved their signs, screamed their slogans about Israeli “genocide,” and insisted that “there is only one solution/Intifada revolution,” which is an unambiguous call for violence. They demanded a “free Palestine” “from the river to the sea,” which, properly understood, means the eradication of Israel and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state. They invaded and vandalized campus offices. They surrounded Jewish students and would not let them escape while yelling at them. Some Jewish students were physically attacked. They burst into classrooms of Israeli and Jewish faculty, interrupting their lectures.

College administrators in the last year have been maddeningly slow to react. Many administrators did nothing, showing themselves to be unwilling to lay down the law to such violent troublemakers. Three university presidents, from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, were asked at a congressional hearing if calling for the “genocide of Jews” in their view “violated their campus codes of conduct.” All three answered that “it depends.” Some universities offered slap-on-the-wrist suspensions for a handful of demonstrators who physically harassed Jewish students; some administrators, as at Brown University, even offered to meet with demonstrators to discuss their demands on cutting all ties to Israel. Nothing appeared to calm down the pro-Hamas anti-Israel demonstrators. After a long investigation into antisemitism and anti-Israel activities on campuses, conducted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, a long report was issued on antisemitism on American campuses, a report that was damning in its evidence both of antisemitic acts by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and of the failure of university demonstrators to take a firm stand against those demonstrators.

Now a few universities have begun to lay down the law by starting to punish Hamas supporters in a way that will have an impact. At the University of Michigan, the leading pro-Hamas group now faces a four-year suspension from the campus that should weaken its ability to conduct its anti-Israel propaganda campaign to win over impressionable students.

More on this welcome development at the University of Michigan can be found here: “University of Michigan Reportedly Moving to Suspend Pro-Hamas Group for Up to Four Years,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, November 8, 2024:

The University of Michigan has reportedly initiated disciplinary proceedings against one of its most outspoken and controversial anti-Israel groups, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the result of which may be a suspension of up to four years.

“The complaint was initiated through the Office of Student Organization Advancement and Recognition (SOAR), which is under the Center for Campus Involvement,” SAFE said on Thursday in a statement, which did not disclose what merited the punishment, published on Instagram. “Similarly to the academic disciplinary charges initiated through [the Office of Student Conflict Resolution] against protesters from the November 17th sit-in, the university acts as the judge, jury, and executioner in these disciplinary proceedings.”

It added, “This unprecedented, racist move against a legacy org contradicts any claim that the university values its history of student activism.”

The University of Michigan has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment for this story.

SAFE has long been a source of anti-Israel activity on campus. In January, its members led an anti-government protest against the outgoing presidential administration, represented by US Vice President Kamala Harris, who appeared at the school to discuss climate change. They chanted “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, you’re committing genocide” and called for mass casualty events inspired by Islamist terrorism, screaming “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution” while waving Palestinian flags. The student who appeared to be leading the demonstration condemned the Biden administration for approving aid to Israel, which she referred to as “the Zionist entity.”

In 2022, during observance of the Jewish New Year, SAFE erected an “apartheid wall” on campus and led an anti-Israel protest in front of it. Some University of Michigan students approached the protesters and urged them to become fully apprised of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Michigan Daily, a campus newspaper, reported at the time. Standing atop a nearby structure, they made a “thumbs-down” gesture when they perceived the protesters’ remarks as offensive or lacking nuance….

Those protesting the pro-Hamas protesters did nothing more than quietly suggest that the protesters just might benefit from learning more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And when they heard the protesters make remarks that they considered offensive — such as “Say No To Genocide” — their counter-protest consisted not in screaming their objections, but in quietly engaging in pollice verso.

The University of Michigan’s likely suspension for four years of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) is a good sign that the university has had enough of pro-Hamas hysterics. SAFE is the most controversial of all the pro-Hamas groups. It calls for “mass casualty events” inspired by Islamic terrorism, its targets presumably pro-Israel students and faculty. Its members yell out, in the same bloodcurdling vein, that “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution,” while waving Palestinian flags. The student who appeared to be leading the latest SAFE demonstration condemned the Biden administration for approving aid to Israel, which she referred to as “the Zionist entity.”

In 2022, during observance of the Jewish New Year, SAFE erected an “apartheid wall” on campus.

If SAFE is banned from the University of Michigan campus for four years, that should discourage other pro-Hamas groups from emulating its calls for violence. But if they instead take up the slack left by SAFE’s banishment, and start calling for “intifadas” and accuse Israel of “genocide,” which can only increase antisemitism, then those groups, too, deserve to be banned.

Remember: the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has finally published its detailed report on antisemitism — and its link to anti-Israel activism — on American campuses. It makes hair-raising reading. That committee, under its formidable chairman, Representative Virginia Foxx, conducted that famous grilling of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, and it is prepared to grill many more American universities on what they are doing, or failing to do, about antisemitism and anti-Israel campaigns on their campuses. American universities have lost whatever aura or numinous presence they may have once possessed, and have deservedly sunk in public esteem. There has been a grotesque emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion, affecting which students are admitted, which faculty are hired, which courses are offered. Now Congress, which has a lot to do with the conditions attached to federal grants to universities, is determined to clean up, among much else, the antisemitic swamps of academe.

And who knows? Perhaps with the administrators at the University of Michigan showing that they are now prepared to confront pro-Hamas demonstrators, and ban them for their murderous incitements, administrators elsewhere will emulate the Ann Arbor example. Courage can be catching.