The David Horowitz Freedom Center Led the Way Against Hamas on Campus
The David Horowitz Freedom Center Led the Way Against Hamas on Campus
We were fighting the MSA and SJP at the beginning. And we will finish them.
Daniel Greenfield - NOV 16, 2023
In 2010, a few months after Hamas terrorists had tried to penetrate the Gaza border fence, David Horowitz arrived to speak at a Young Americans for Freedom event at UC San Diego.
In what became a viral video seen by millions, Jumanah Imad Albahri, a member of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), confronted him. David Horowitz asked her whether she would condemn Hamas. She refused.
Then he asked her an even more pointed question:
“I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or Against it?”
Jumanah Imad Albahri leaned in close to the microphone and spoke clearly. “For it.”
It was not David Horowitz’s first confrontation with the MSA and its allied Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) campus hate groups. Long before university administrators, donors and mainstream pro-Israel groups were willing to acknowledge Hamas on campus, Horowitz and the David Horowitz Freedom Center were fighting and exposing Hamas on campus.
The Muslim Students Association was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas, and has worked closely with Students for Justice in Palestine. Both cheered the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7. Their open Jew-Hatred led to SJP being suspended at the University of Florida and the University of South Florida, to Brandeis University ending SJP’s status and Columbia University suspending SJP. President Frank H. W of Queens College condemned the QCMSA chapter for excusing “the kidnapping of civilians, including children, the elderly, women, and men” and promised a review by the Office of Compliance and Diversity.
That’s a start.
Long before academia was willing to address the problem, David Horowitz and the Freedom Center were there exposing SJP and the MSA. And being denounced for telling the truth.
At UC Santa Barbara, Horowitz warned back in 2008 that there “is a movement for a second Holocaust of the Jews that is being supported on this campus by the Muslim Student Association.” Members of the MSA who had turned out in force tried to shout him down. The Santa Barbara Hillel and UCSB American Students for Israel later shamefully joined with the MSA and SJP to condemn Horowitz and defend the MSA as “an incredibly valuable member of our campus.” In the years to come, USCB’s student government conspired to illegally keep Horowitz from speaking on campus because they feared him so much.
This was one of many such incidents.
David Horowitz’s speeches had usually required a lot of security. At Butler University and Ball State University, masked students attacked Horowitz. But matters worsened after he began to speak out against the MSA and SJP. At Emory University, his speech was shut down by constant disruptions and jeers. When he spoke at the University of Massachusetts, there were “numerous law enforcement officials inside”.
In 2015, at UCLA, the university administration denounced posters condemning the violence and hatred of MSA and SJP. Jerry Kang, UCLA’s vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, threatened legal action over posters “accusing two student organizations — the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — of being murderers and terrorists” which he claimed were legitimate student groups in “good standing”.
After Horowitz spoke out against the MSA and SJP at the University of North Carolina, members of the groups played the victim by spreading a “Not Safe UNC” hashtag.
Next year at George Mason University, the talented blogger and artist, Oleg Atbashian of The People’s Cube, was arrested and thrown in jail for putting up posters linking SJP to Hamas.
When the David Horowitz Freedom Center bought student newspaper ads listing the MSA chapter presidents who had gone on to join Al Qaeda, pressure campaigns were launched to keep what they falsely labeled “hate speech” off campus. Student papers, like The Daily Tar Heel at UNC, refused to print Horowitz’s response to smears that he was an ‘Islamophobe’.
And throughout all that, David Horowitz and the David Horowitz Freedom Center persisted.
Year after year, we delivered exposes of SJP and MSA chapters, compiled lists of campus hate groups, pressured administrators, confronted campuses and spoke out when most were silent.
On my first big assignment from David Horowitz back in 2011, he asked me to write pamphlets profiling SJP and MSA. The result was “Students for Justice in Palestine: A Hate Group” and “Muslim Hate Groups on Campus“. The pamphlets have since shown up in counterterrorism training and college courses. I was proud to be part of the effort to expose them then and I am proud that we are continuing to lead the fight at a time when people are finally waking up.
Leftists and the media are still using the same spin but we have documented the expressions of support for Hamas and its crimes by SJP and MSA chapters. We have exposed the lies that this is about “speech” or “pro-Palestinian activism” and about anything except the murder of Jews.
We never stopped fighting Hamas on campus and we’ll never stop fighting it now.
In 2020, Students for Justice in Palestine at Wayne State University complained that “we were specifically targeted” by the 1,000 fliers from the David Horowitz Freedom Center exposing their hate and that of Rep. Rashida Tlaib. And for once SJP was right about something. We were.
And we were right to do it too.
Next year, an SJP rally at Wayne State University defended Islamic terror attacks against Israel. “You say that these people are terrorists and we don’t claim them. By Allah, we do claim them, they are our people. These are our resistance [fighters], they are doing something we can’t do.”
After the Hamas atrocities on October 7, SJP at Wayne State joyfully celebrated how “the resistance in Gaza stormed the illegitimate border fence”, assaulted “the settlements near the border” and predicted a war to destroy all of Israel. “We continue to stand alongside our people in Gaza and across Occupied Palestine in their legitimate resistance against the occupiers. In our Martyrs’ names, the struggle for liberation and return continues,” it declared.
That’s why we’re not done targeting it or any of the SJP and MSA chapters that promote terrorism and the murder of Jews. These campus hate groups are taking off their masks and we are there for every minute of it. There is no place for their hate on campuses or in America.
We were there fighting them at the beginning and we intend to be there at the end.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-david-horowitz-freedom-center-led-the-way-against-hamas-on-campus/