Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) members inside the Westlands administrative building at Sarah Lawrence College. Photo: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)/Screenshot
A mob of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) members has taken over the Westlands administrative building at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and vowed not to surrender it unless school officials adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
The action, the first of its kinds since the spring “uprising” of encampments on colleges across the US, appears to have been precipitated by the college’s declining to accept SJP’s divestment recommendations — which aim to compromise Israel’s national security and leave the world’s lone Jewish state vulnerable to jihadist extremists.
“Westlands is occupied,” SJP said in a series of statements published on Instagram on Thursday. “Students have occupied Westlands to demand immediate action on the genocide of Palestinians. Administration has failed to meet our disclosure deadline. Westland residents are safe: they can come and go at will. We need your support: Walkout to the south lawn, bring food donations, sign divestment proposal.”
SJP also called on students to obstruct justice, imploring them to amass “as many bodies blocking doors as possible” and instructing them to wear “mask [sic] and indiscernible clothing, hats, scarves, etc to support the student intifada.” Since then, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), which coordinates activities at individual colleges, has cheered the insurrectionist behavior, using the same incendiary language as the students.
“ALL OUT TO SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE! DEFEND THE STUDENT INTIFADA! For over 400 days our institutions have ignored the genocide for our people in Gaza, we demand that they disclose their financial investments and they DIVEST FROM DEATH ,” the group, which is linked to a slew of terrorist organizations, tweeted.
NSJP further urged the students to “bring keffiyehs, noise makers, and flags.”
Photos published by SJP show its members tied together on the floor to prevent being detained by the police and posing next to a large banner on which the phrase Dar al Fayoumi is written. Purportedly the name of a casualty of the Israel-Hamas war, SJP proclaimed that it is the new name of Westlands. Additionally, various social media reports by groups such as FreedomNews.tv, reported on Thursday that they have also set up an encampment outside the building.
The occupation of the Westlands comes amid concerns that the over 150 pro-Hamas groups operating on colleges campuses and elsewhere across the US are planting the seeds of domestic terrorism.
“The movement contains militant elements pushing it toward a wider, more severe campaign focused on property destruction and violence properly described as domestic terrorism,” researcher Ryan Mauro wrote in a recently published report, titled “Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement,” a project of the Capital Research Center (CRC). “It demands the ‘dismantlement’ of America’s ‘colonialist,’ ‘imperialist,’ or ‘capitalist,’ system, often calling for the US to be abolished as a country.”
Drawing on statements issued and actions taken by SJP and their collaborators, Mauro made the case that toolkits published by SJP herald Hamas for perpetrating mass casualties of civilians; SJP has endorsed Iran’s attacks on Israel as well as its stated intention to overturn the US-led world order; and other groups under its umbrella have called on followers to “Bring the Intifada Home.” Such activities, the report explained, accelerated after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, which pro-Hamas groups perceived as an inflection point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an opportunity. By flooding the internet and college campuses with agitprop and staging activities — protests or vandalisms — they hoped to manufacture a critical mass of youth support for their ideas, thus creating an army of revolutionaries willing to adopt Hamas’s aims as their own.
The result has been a series of the kinds of incidents seen in academia throughout 2024 fall semester since Hamas’s onslaught.
Last month, when Jews around the world mourned on the anniversary of Oct. 7, a Harvard University student group called on pro-Hamas activists to “Bring the war home” and proceeded to vandalize a campus administrative building. The group members, who described themselves as “anonymous,” later said in a statement, “We are committed to bringing the war home and answering the call to open up a new front here in the belly of the beast.”
On the same day, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) issued a similar statement, saying “now is the time to escalate,” adding, “Harvard’s insistence on funding slaughter only strengthens our moral imperative and commitment to our demands.”
More recently, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student wrote a journal article which argued that violence is a legitimate method of effecting political change and, moreover, advancing the pro-Palestinian movement.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, pro-Hamas activists have already demonstrated that they are willing to hurt people to achieve their goals.
Last year, in California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. Violence, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was most common at universities in the state of California, where an anti-Zionist activist punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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