The AMCHA Initiative, a coalition of 121 education, civil rights, and religious organizations, is turning up the heat up on universities with Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters, which were created following Iranian-backed Hamas' terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, in southern Israel.
The initiative claims FJP members are "abusing" their faculty positions to "escalate antisemitism," the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday.
To launch the campaign, the AMCHA Initiative said in a news release Tuesday, the group wrote a letter of behalf of its member organizations to 170 university presidents whose campuses play host to an FJP chapter.
The letter urged university heads to "establish robust safeguards and enforcement mechanisms to prevent those faculty members from using their academic positions and departmental affiliations to promote ideologically motivated activism that directly targets their own students and colleagues — your own campus community members — for harm."
The organizations include B'nai B'rith International, the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel, the Daniel Pearl Foundation, World Jewish Congress North America, and Zionist Organization of America.
"What I think should be center stage right now is this faculty organization, which is part of a national network linked to an international movement with a purely antisemitic mission and has dreadful consequences for Jewish students on college campuses," AMCHA Initiative co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told the Examiner.
According to an AMCHA Initiative report released in September, physical attacks on Jewish students are more than seven times more likely at college campuses with FJP chapters; threats of violence and death against Jewish students are more than three times likely; and student demands for academic boycotts of Israeli faculty are nearly 11 times more likely, the Examiner reported.
Rossman-Benjamin told the Examiner that tenured faculty is the "prime mover of so many of the acts of violent antisemitism that our report found increased" dramatically after Hamas' terrorist attack. Physical assaults increased by 2,500% and violent threats increased by 900%.
The next phase of the campaign will include a new ranking system that will rate schools based on "faculty abuse."
Rossman-Benjamin said the rise of ethnic studies departments has played a significant role in shielding faculty from the consequences of violent or hateful speech under the guise of academic freedom. She said although these departments might "call themselves disciplines, they are really political agendas" and their members consist of activists, not educators.
She called on schools with rules on political neutrality for faculty to enforce those rules and schools without those rules to create them.
"If university administrators are unwilling to do it because they're being bullied by faculty, then legislators need to come in and do it, because it's federal and state monies that are being used to fund this stuff," Rossman-Benjamin told the Examiner.
President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on removing federal funding and accreditation from schools fostering antisemitic activity.
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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