I am more than disappointed with the University of Washington administration.
I am dismayed and saddened by the efforts of pro-Hamas students and their radical supporters in the community.
Three times during the past month there have been rallies on the University of Washington campus supporting genocide. Rallies that called for the elimination of the State of Israel and the removal of its Jewish inhabitants. Rallies for genocide.
Such gatherings have no place on any campus. The First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, an essential foundation of American freedom, does not protect calls for violence.
Would the UW allow hundreds of KKK members on campus, their faces covered with hoods, calling for the elimination of minorities in the U.S.?
I think not.
But the UW will allow hundreds of students and outsiders to call for the elimination of the Jewish State.
Much of the organization of these gatherings is associated with an official UW Student Group (UW-SUPER-Students United for Palestinian Equality & Return), whose first rally advertisement celebrated HAMAS killers descending into Israel on paragliders.
At all three rallies signs and chants called for a Palestinian state from the river to the sea (the Jordan River to the Mediterranean), with Israel erased from existence. Like the KKK, many covered their faces, but with masks or Keffiyeh.
And if their intent to kill Israelis and Jews was not clear enough, there were repeated chants of “One solution: intifada revolution“. As you know, the intifada featured the murder of civilians and the setting of bombs on buses and public places. It was a call for murder by the UW crowd.
To attempt to prevent the outside world from knowing about the genocidal calls at these UW rallies, the organizers had bouncers in masks and yellow masks that attempted to cover the lens of smartphones and cameras of those trying to record the proceedings (the example below is from an independent journalist Jonathan Choe)
Rally supporters went around campus tearing down pro-Israel posters or signs noting the kidnapped. You can see what Hamas supporters think about freedom of speech.
Much of the organization was done by the UW-SUPER group, whose Facebook page is not a friendly place for the truth. For example, they had several posts accusing an Israeli missile of being directed at a hospital in south Gaza. Just a lie. We now know it was a failed Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israel.
How can the UW administration allow such rallies for genocide on the UW campus? Why is the SUPER group still an approved UW student group?
The UW provides unending “training” about microaggressions and the importance of using the correct person pronouns. There is a very expensive UW DEI bureaucracy (about 20 million dollars per year) that supposedly is there to prevent minorities from being discriminated against. But there is not a peep from this huge bureaucracy when Jews are being directly threatened with extinction and Jewish students on campus are in a state of fear, a situation that has gotten international attention. Jews don’t count. There is a name for this.
Even worse, some staff within the UW School of Education put out a statement in support of the Hamas efforts.“We firmly support the cause of Palestinians and their fight for freedom from the unlawful and oppressive settler colonial apartheid state”.
In addition to calling for genocide and the end of Israel, the UW students supporting Hamas show an embarrassing lack of understanding of the history of the region and of Israel. One of their big chants and talking points is that Israel is a colonial state, an outpost of the U.S. and other bad actors. That Arabs are the original inhabitants of the region, with Jews a recent addition. I confirmed this viewpoint at the Hamas rally a little over a week ago
Unbelievable ignorance. Jews have made Israel their home for over THREE THOUSAND YEARS. King David ruled about 1000 BCE. Jews are the indigenous people of the land. Time and again they were attacked or ejected by conquers: the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Romans, and the Arabs…to name only a few. Each time some remained and when possible the rest came back from exile. The Arabs took over the region around 700 AD after the Jews were there for 1700 years. The Arabs colonized a vast part of the Middle East, North Africa, and even parts of Europe. Why are they not called colonizers?
To call the Jews recent colonizers of the land is simply nonsense. To suggest Zionism is racism is untrue, toxic, and unfair. Clearly, the UW has failed to provide even a basic historical education to these students. Strangely, many of the pro-Hamas protesters are exactly the kind of folks who solemnly recite land acknowledgments for Native Americans. Not quite consistent are they?
But what may be the most disturbing aspect of the pro-Hamas and pro-genocide rallies on campus is the stunning lack of moral sense of the students and their supporters. The Hamas killers were totally barbaric. They killed unarmed civilians. They murdered children, and they beheaded and cut up some of their victims in the most brutal ways. Can there be any doubt about what would happen if they conquered Israel?
But the UW Hamas supporters are not repelled by this violence. It can be overlooked because of the higher cause to eradicate the State of Israel.
A nihilist, self-righteous worldview in which political violence is ok. A viewpoint that threatens the foundations of the civilized world.
And an attitude that threatens us here in Seattle today.
Remember the violence in 2020, when many stores were looted, damaged, and destroyed in Seattle? Same attitude: violence for a righteous cause is OK. And the city still has not recovered from their actions.
A week ago, a local evangelical church put on a rally FOR Israel on the UW campus and invited the son of one of the Hamas founders to speak at their church. A few days later, one of their churches was broken into and trashed.
Political violence is never ok. Genocide is never ok. And the University of Washington has failed grievously to teach its students this lesson.
