DePaul University is not widely recognized for its promotion of Jew hatred, but the Catholic university located in Chicago has a big anti-Semitism problem. When a tenured DePaul professor dared to defend Israel in a non-campus publication last spring, it sparked a hew-and-cry from numerous student groups and university departments who held rallies calling for him to be censured. The DePaul Faculty Council then passed a resolution in defiance of the principle of academic freedom which condemned the professor’s statements as “factually inaccurate” and characterized them as advocating “war crimes and ethnic cleansing.”
DePaul is home to a chapter of the Hamas-linked student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which hosts an annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus to promote Hamas propaganda and delegitimize and demonize Israel. The chapter has also hosted numerous events featuring anti-Semitic speakers who promote the Hamas-funded, anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and have promoted the so-called “Great Return March” which was actually a Hamas-led attack on Israel’s borders. DePaul SJP also held a fundraiser on behalf of convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh and led the effort to pass a campuswide referendum urging the University to divest from “companies that profit from Israel’s discriminatory practices and human rights violations.”
Instances of Jew Hatred:
In August 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine at DePaul promoted a Chicago-area event with Janna Jihad, a 13-year-old who is billed as “Palestine’s Youngest Journalist ‘Reporting from the Front Lines.’” Jihad is a relative of the terrorist Ahlam Tamimi who planned and helped carry out a Sbarro pizzeria suicide bombing 18 years ago. The news site Legal Insurrection describes the teenager as having “been groomed for years by the Tamimis to succeed her cousin Ahed Tamimi as the youthful, innocent face tasked with hiding the clan’s murderous hatred of Israel.”
In May 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine at DePaul University held its annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus. The apartheid week is part of a national campaign to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. During the week, SJP displayed an “apartheid wall” plastered in Hamas propaganda including a map of Israel with a Palestinian flag covering it, suggesting that the entirety of Israel belongs to Palestine, again delegitimizing Israel.
In April 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine organized a rally to attack a gay, Jamaican immigrant professor who voiced contrary views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in an off-campus publication. That professor, Dr. Jason Hill, wrote in The Federalist that Israel has the “moral right to annex all of the West Bank” and argued that “There can be no such thing as legitimate ‘Palestinian Territory’ in a geographic region legally seized in a defensive war instigated by a foreign aggressor.” SJP’s response was to call for the Dr. Hill’s censure by the university and demand that he undergo mandatory “racial sensitivity training.” At the anti-Hill rally, SJP members threw flyers over stair bannisters and shouted chants including “Jason Hill, you can’t hide, we know you want genocide!” DePaul SJP issued a joint statement with other campus groups including United Muslims Moving Ahead, DePaul Socialists, Students Against Incarceration, CAPA, Lambdas and the College Democrats in which they objected to a pattern of “racist, anti-Palestinian, xenophobic, sexist and Islamophobic” statements made by Hill.
While the DePaul Administration tepidly defended Prof. Hill’s right to free speech, the Faculty Council passed a highly irregular resolution which “condemns in the strongest possible terms both the tone and content of Professor Hill’s article, and affirms the claims that it expresses positions that are factually inaccurate, advocate war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and give voice to racism with respect to the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Arabs generally.” One DePaul faculty member who opposed the faculty vote censuring Hill wrote that the Faculty Council violated its own bylaws in several different ways including by failing to provide proper notice of the vote and by allowing the author of the proposal to censure Hill to direct debate over his own resolution. SJP at DePaul held a Celebratory Dinner/Iftar to celebrate the fact that “#HillWasCensured.” “We celebrated the power and impact of the student’s collective action against hate,” read SJP’s announcement. SJP also thanked its cosponsors for the dinner which included several university departments and other student organizations including, “International Studies, Islamic World Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Art Media and Design, and Political Science.”
In February 2019, SJP at DePaul held a “Palestinian Legislation Teach-in” to protest anti-BDS legislation in the U.S. Congress. Protest signs displayed at the event demonized and delegitimized Israel. These signs included ones condemning “Israeli apartheid” and promoting the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel. One sign claimed that the Israeli company Sabra (which makes humus) “is made from Palestinian blood,” a form of anti-Semitic blood libel.
In January 2019, SJP at DePaul hosted an event titled “Chicago to Palestine Delegation: Report from the Frontlines.” Multiple speakers at this event demonized and delegitimized Israel. One speaker said, “I can’t even tell you the number of reports of beatings, psychological torture or physical torture, as well as sexual abuse of children [by the Israeli military]…When we defend the people who have given their lives to the liberation of their homeland we’re defending the very right for the people to resist the continued ethnic cleansing and genocide of [the Palestinian people].” Another speaker claimed, “the construction of Jewish settlements, illegal Jewish settlements, in Jerusalem in particular, but in Palestine as a whole is very strategic…Some people…ask what excuses do the Israelis use to steal land in the first place….And the answer is that Israel has specific policies and specific laws designed to legalize the confiscation of land…All of these policies of land theft, settler expansion and overall oppression in Jerusalem [are] within the context of what’s called the greater Jerusalem plan…”
In November 2018, SJP at DePaul held a “Palestine 101 Teach-In.” The event description promoted the Hamas-funded BDS movement against Israel and lauded the “Great Return March” which was actually a Hamas-led attack on Israel’s borders.
During its May 2018 “Israeli Apartheid Week,” DePaul SJP distributed flyers on the campus quad which demonized the Jewish state and falsely claimed that the founding of Israel resulted in “~5,000,000 Palestinians Killed.” Advertisements for the rally featured a drawing of Israel contained within a Palestinian flag, implying that all of Israel belongs to Palestine and denying the Jewish right to self-determination. The ads also falsely claimed that “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.”
In January 2018, SJP at DePaul held a rally and march through campus to protest President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Signs held by the protestors demonized and delegitimized Israel. One sign featured an outline of the borders of Israel with the word “Palestine” scrawled repeatedly throughout, implying that all of Israel is Palestine. A speaker at the protest claimed that “The U.S. is the primary political and financial sponsor of Israeli settler terror, land theft, and military occupation of Arab land and all of historic Palestine.”
In May 2016, SJP at DePaul issued a press release objecting to an art exhibit on campus sponsored by the Midwest Consulate of Israel. The press release demonized Israel, claiming that the exhibit “disguises the active apartheid settler colonial state of Israel as one of concordance and peace in our student library.” It added, “there is nothing Vincentian, humane or productive about showing the figure of Catholicism engaging with zionists, war criminals and human right abusers” and “The exhibit ignores the many discriminatory laws, illegal settlements and human rights violations against Palestinians and ultimately normalizes the brutal military occupation and colonization of Palestine by the Israeli state.”
In February 2015, DePaul SJP held a fundraiser to benefit convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted by an Israeli military court in 1970 for her involvement in two fatal terrorist bombings.
In May 2014, the student body at DePaul passed a campuswide referendum urging the University to divest from companies “that profit from Israel’s discriminatory practices and human rights violations.” The referendum was part of the Hamas-funded BDS campaign against Israel which aims to weaken and isolate the world’s only Jewish state.
DePaul University is the academic home of Professor Taurean Webb, an adjunct professor of Black History at the University and a featured speaker at the 2018 American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference. AMP has been unmasked in congressional testimony as a front group for Hamas which funnels Hamas funds into promoting the BDS movement on American campuses. Webb is the author of the infamous “Journey Toward Justice” training program which has been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups as theological anti-Semitism. The training program teaches that the creation of Israel was “evil” and a “structural sin” and claims that American Jews have exaggerated the evils of the Holocaust in order to harm African-Americans.
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