FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Students denounce demonization of student activism by Anti-Defamation League
CONTACTS BY REGION:
EAST COAST: Yaman Salahi [Connecticut]: 203-491-0092, yaman.salahi@yale.edu
Alex Cachinero-Gorman [Massachusetts]: 908-705-6033, alex.cachinerog@gmail.com
MIDWEST: Andrew Dalack [Michigan]:734-645-6860, ajdalack@umich.edu
Sami Kishawi [Illinois]:773-822-8157, kishawisami@gmail.com
WEST COAST: Lana Khoury [California] 650-274-9085, lkhoury06@gmail.com
Gabriel Schivone [Arizona]: 520-302-6006, gabrielm@email.arizona.edu
On campuses around the country, groups promoting Palestinian freedom respond to attack by the Anti-Defamation League
UNITED STATES (October 17, 2010) – Representing campus organizations at over 60 campuses around the country, university students promoting Palestinian freedom have responded to a vilifying report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) listing “Students for Justice in Palestine” (SJP) and a variety of other American organizations as the “Top 10 Anti-Israel Groups in America.” The report was released the same day the ADL honored Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owns Fox News Network.
The report – which also names prominent Muslim-American organizations, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Christian ecumenical organization Friends of Sabeel – criticizes SJP chapters for “regularly organiz[ing] activities presenting a biased view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including mock ‘apartheid walls’ and ‘checkpoint’ displays.” SJP chapters have independently proliferated across the country as awareness about the brutality and violence of Israel’s occupation grows on university campuses. In an unprecedented statement, 60 student groups around the country affirmed, “we are unified by our purpose of confronting these wrongs that cause so much death and suffering.”
Recent investigations by the United Nations and reports by human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch frequently criticize unrelenting Israeli settlement expansion, the siege of Gaza, the military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and brutal Israeli violence that has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. Ilana Rossoff, from Hampshire College SJP, continued, “We see the urgent need to educate our communities about the injustice of the occupation and work to hold our communities and governments accountable for our own complicity in US support of the occupation.”
The signatory groups affirmed that they were dedicated to non-violent activities, such as promoting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions in solidarity with the call from over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations. The groups explained, “we locate ourselves in a legacy of social justice movements working for a free and just world.” The groups invited the ADL “to reflect and to choose to build this world, rather than to stop it.”
See the “Joint Statement on Anti-Defamation Leagues “Top 10” List” at this url:
www.sjpalestine.com/statement.pdf
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