North Carolinians Against Antisemitism Calls On the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to Ban Student Groups Who Celebrated Hamas’ Massacre of Jews in Israel.
RALEIGH, NC - North Carolinians Against Antisemitism will deliver a letter to University Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Chairman of the Board of Trustees John Preyer calling on them to ban 4 student groups that celebrated the barbaric genocide of 1,200 Israelis.
Immediately following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 slaughter of Israelis, UNC Chapel Hill’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) openly celebrated the horrific actions of this terrorist group via multiple social media accounts.
As Hamas terrorists were decapitating babies, burning children alive, and cutting down the lives of 260 young adults at a music festival, UNC’s SJP chapter published a post that read “From the river to the sea.” This is a slogan directly from Hamas calling for dismantling the Jewish state by violent means.
Three other UNC student groups are taking part in SJP’s National Day of Resistance: Young Democratic Socialists, Community Justice, Abolition & Antiracism, and The National Lawyers Guild.
“The timing and purpose of this event is obvious. It's to intimidate and inflame the Jewish community on campus and in the surrounding communities,” said Sloan Rachmuth, co-organizer of North Carolinians Against Antisemitism. “Taunting the Jewish community with the butchery of their own people isn’t engaging in free speech, it’s ethnic intimidation and it has no place on the campus of UNC or anywhere else.”
In a statement earlier this year, UNC Chancellor Guskiewicz acknowledged the presence of antisemitism on campus, saying that the university “unequivocally reject[s] and deplore[s] antisemitism.”
UNC has been a hotbed of taxpayer-funded antisemitism during Chancellor Guskiewicz’s tenure. In 2019, the university hosted an anti-Israel event that encouraged students to engage in antisemitism and received a complaint from the U.S. Department of Education. In 2021 UNC came under fire again from the DOE for installing an instructor of Middle East studies who referred to Jews as “dirtbags.”
“It should be a universal taxpayer value that we do not provide a platform to elevate or celebrate any murderous ideologies or opinions. It is utterly repugnant for a taxpayer-funded university to allow its name and space to be used as such a platform, said Deb Fillman, Co-Organizer of North Carolinians Against Antisemitism. “If UNC stands idly by while students, employees, and other members of its community not only cheer for murderers but call for more of the same, the taxpayers of NC should demand immediate defunding.”
UNC chapters of SJP, Young Democratic Socialists, Community Justice, Abolition & Antiracism, and The National Lawyers Guild appear to have violated the school’s risk management guidelines for school clubs. The “Day of Resistance” event supporting the Hamas massacre stoked feelings of marginalization, discrimination, and trauma for the university’s 1,000 Jewish students.
In the letter to UNC’s Chancellor and Board Chairman, North Carolinians Against Antisemitism said the goal of these organizations is to create a traumatic and hostile environment for the Jewish community, not to engage in mutual learning and understanding about Israel.
"Permitting events like these, and groups like this, after they have clearly demonstrated their hate-driven agenda, isn't just a signal to Jewish students that UNC doesn't include them, and doesn't care about their safety, it's a signal to parents, and taxpayers, and rational decent people of all faith," said North Carolinians Against Antisemitism member Leroy Ortiz.
North Carolinians Against Antisemitism demanded that groups that celebrate violent jihad should be banned from UNC’s campus. As part of its commitment to diversity, the group suggests the university embraces student organizations that foster discussion and debate on every topic.
North Carolinians Against Antisemitism represents hundreds of people from all faiths who joined after the Hamas massacre to combat the state's rising antisemitism. Leading the group are Jewish mothers who are deeply concerned about the rising dehumanization of Jews and Christians on North Carolina’s college campuses.
CONTACT:
Sloan Rachmuth
srachmuth@penandshield.org