CUNY's systemic Jew-hatred

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When a provocative Tiktok video uploaded by Nerdeen Kiswani, a second-year student at CUNY law school, went public recently, the anti-Israel sentiment of the clip came as no surprise to those who were aware of Kiswani’s long record of toxic activism. In the video, Kiswani is seen attempting to light on fire an IDF-emblazoned sweatshirt worn by an individual sitting with her, expressing her hatred for the IDF and the nation it defends — a loathing that apparently animates Kiswani’s life, since she is fully engaged as the former vice president and president of the virulent student group Students for Justice in Palestine at Hunter College and at the College of Staten Island, City of New York University.

And, as evidenced by the video clip, Kiswani is perfectly willing to use and celebrate violence against Israeli Jews. In fact, when in 2017 Palestinian terrorists killed four people and injured 17 others by ramming them with a vehicle on a Jerusalem promenade, Kiswani lauded and encouraged celebration of the murders, ghoulishly noting that “Palestinians in Palestine are giving out sweets in celebration. I will not hide from this. I will not be ashamed or embarrassed by this. These celebratory actions are what keep the resistance moving forward, they are what keep it alive.”

Needless to say, this type of murderous activism can poison the climate of a university campus, exactly what took place at CUNY for another law student there, Rafaella Gunz. Gunz, a Jewish journalist who studies LGBT and feminist issues, herself became a target of pro-Palestinian students, including Kiswani, and eventually dropped out of the law school this year after she was relentlessly targeted by anti-Israel activists. “It came to my attention that there was this petition,” Gunz wrote. “It was inspired by me, it doesn’t say anything by name, that it’s me, but it says ‘a certain subset of Zionist activists.’ And that’s just me. I’m clearly outnumbered on this campus, right?”

CUNY’s anti-Israel campus activists, and particularly the virulent SJP, use the victim mantle to shield their actions from self-examination, feeling that, as representatives of the dispossessed and perennially-oppressed Palestinians, they can adopt any tactic to campaign against Israel, Zionism, occupation, and purported Israeli apartheid. That has meant that at several campuses in the CUNY system, for example, SJP used the 2015 Million Student March, a nationwide student demonstration for free public college tuition, to also slander Israel, Zionism, and Jews. The protest, advertised on Facebook by “NYC Students for Justice in Palestine” and other affiliate groups, ascribed, using the tropes of classic anti-Semitism, the financial situation at CUNY to its “Zionist administration [that] invests in Israeli companies, companies that support the Israeli occupation, hosts birthright programs and study abroad programs in occupied Palestine, and reproduces settler-colonial ideology … through Zionist content of education… [aiming] to produce the next generation of professional Zionists.”

Troubling videos of the event revealed such endearing chants from the protestors as, “Zionists go home!”, “Zionists out of CUNY!”, “When we take control of CUNY, we are gonna kick you out and make sure you don’t graduate!”, “Get out of the Middle East!”, “Get out of America!”, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (i.e., Israel will be destroyed and replaced by a Palestinian Arab state). And if there was any doubt that this demonstration was only about the politics of Israel and not about Jew-hatred, the chants such as “Jews out of CUNY!” and “Jews are racist sons of bitches!” should dispel that fantasy once and for all.

SJP has a dismal record on campuses nationwide, with its pattern of radicalism, misbehavior, toxic speech, and regular instances of overtly anti-Semitic behavior. That radicalism has been problematic, particularly since research findings by the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism at universities, “indicate a significant increase in actions which directly harm or threaten Jewish students, including physical and verbal assaults, destruction of property, harassment discrimination and suppression of speech, at schools with an SJP or similar anti-Zionist chapter,” clearly evident at CUNY and how this activism affected Gunz.

No university would tolerate a white supremacist student group which purported to exist only to promote pride in being white but whose activities wholly involved agitating against minorities, staging Black Racism Week events, inviting white racist speakers to campus to trumpet the moral defects of minorities in America, and regularly yelling out at rallies and elsewhere such charming chants as, “send them back to Africa” or “string them up, string them up,” a call to lynch and murder blacks. Would any university anywhere ever even charter a white supremacist group like this and tolerate this type of behavior — even once — without immediate and forceful condemnation, sanctions, and punishment? Of course not.

But those are precisely the behavior and tactics of SJP, except that its target is Israel, Zionism, and Jewish students.

A university should, and must, have the right and responsibility to its respective community to decide which student groups have a legitimate and valid mission and which are animated by extremist ideology and penchant for spreading bigotry, ethnic hatred, and misreading of history and facts.. That CUNY or any other university cannot with good conscience refuse to allow a chapter to find a bulwark on its own campus speaks to the moral vacuity of many administrators, as well as their fear of offending what they perceive to be a campus victim group.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” Aldous Huxley once observed, and if universities like CUNY continue to ignore the poisonous radicalism in their midst, if they do not rid their campuses of toxic extremism and bigotry, they do so at their own peril.

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Boca Raton resident and president emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of “Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.”