On October 7, 2023, over 1,200 men, women, and children going about their lives in southern Israel were brutally slaughtered when Hamas terrorists violated the border. 80% of all bodies showed signs of abuse or rape. Hamas targeted a music festival and killed at least 360 young dancers. Over 240 innocents were taken captive by the terrorists and 160+ remain hostage in Gaza. It was the most Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust.
In the wake of this violence, a second horror for the world Jewish community has been the nightmarish rise of antisemitism on American university campuses and throughout the West, expressing a ghoulish support for the Hamas rapists and kidnappers and chanting genocidal slogans that call for the complete destruction of Israel and the Israeli people, like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
On November 28, the University of Michigan campus community is set to be presented with a vicious referendum that takes the position of Hamas and absurdly accuses Israel, which is attempting to rescue the hostages and liberate the Gazan people, of a “genocide.” This is a vile affront to the victims and survivors of the actual massacre.
Hamas and its supporters have waged a long-term, well-funded campaign to delude Americans into accepting their attempt to portray Israel as somehow uniquely “illegitimate” as a state. Combined with the broadest wave of antisemitism in the West since the 1940s, the Jewish community is being made to feel deeply unsafe, marginalized, and othered, particularly in the university context.
There is still time. Call on President Santa Ono and the University of Michigan Board of Regents to act now to ensure that this hateful, slanderously antisemitic referendum never goes in front of the student population. Additionally, join us in demanding the campus group SAFE, which is connected to the notorious pro-Hamas campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), be denied funding, resources, and university recognition. Like SJP and other pro-terror organizations, SAFE, despite its misleading name, creates an unsafe environment for students, especially Jews. The University of Michigan must take a moral stand against violent rhetoric, discrimination, and antisemitism.
With the level of rhetoric against Jewish people and Israelis that has already been permitted in this environment, popularizing such malicious and clearly false claims will only serve to inflame an already traumatic situation.
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