Activists who advocate for the destruction of Israel will gather at George Mason University this weekend to strategize about expanding their presence on campuses across America.
The national meeting, organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), will include training workshops for student activists, who have routinely engaged in tactics such as shouting down speakers, “intimidating students,” chanting “we support the intifada!”, and advocating for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has reported ties to terrorism.
Alongside campus workshops such as “(50) Shades of Zionism” and “BDS 101,” the conference will feature a number of speakers who have shown open hostility toward Israel through the BDS movement or have advocated for violence against the Jewish state.
Ramah Kudaimi, who will be speaking during an off-campus portion of the conference, has called for “violent resistance” on Twitter, and has expressed expletive-laden condemnation of Israel using the social media platform. “f— israel every day until the fall of the zionist regime,” she tweeted. Kudami also used the platform to confront an Al Jazeera television show for not giving air time to Holocaust deniers.
Kudaimi is the director of grassroots organizing for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a group that was forced to cancel a pro-BDS Capitol Hill event earlier this year when the sole member of Congress sponsoring the event withdrew support.
Other publicly listed, off-campus speakers include Swarthmore assistant professor Sa’ed Atshan, a proponent of the BDS movement and former faculty adviser to SJP Tufts, who has said that Israel is located in the Middle East “only because Uganda wasn’t available,” according to one student.
Another activist slated to speak, Randa Wahbe, is a BDS supporter who has been an activist with Adalah-NY, a BDS-linked boycott campaign that has charged Israel with “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid,” according to the watchdog group NGO Monitor.
A spokesman for GMU told the WEEKLY STANDARD that “there will be no speakers” on campus during the Saturday conference, per SJP’s posted schedule, but added that it is not the university’s “practice to say who could or could not speak on our campus.”
“The conference is being hosted by one of our student organizations. Mason is the venue, not the sponsor of the event,” university spokesman Michael Sandler continued. “All of these organizations have the right to host meetings and rent space on our campus for events – regardless of whether we agree or disagree with the positions of said groups.”
Sandler said that GMU, which has been praised for its commitment to free speech, encourages “free and open dialogue,” which at times can involve “the exchange of controversial points of view that some may even find offensive.”
“We believe the best way to counter offensive speech is through more speech, not less,” he said.
The Anti-Defamation League describes SJP as a student organization whose chapters “frequently organize events, many of which accuse Israel of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,” advocate for BDS campaigns, and have compared Israelis to Nazis.
The presence of SJP is “one of the strongest predictors” of whether students perceive a “hostile climate toward Jews and Israel” on campus, according to a recent report by Brandeis University.
