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By Sara Dogan
The barbaric and atrocious Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 have brought about a pivotal moment in our nation’s self-awareness. For decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been warning of the growing pro-Hamas, pro-Jihadist, Jew-hating sentiment on American college campuses. Suddenly, the depth and breadth of campus Jew hatred, fueled by Marxist ideology that divides us all into oppressors or their victims, is on display for all to witness.
Genocidal cries of “Globalize the Intifada,” “From the River to the Sea,” and “By any means necessary” have echoed as a constant chorus on America’s most prestigious campuses, fueled by faculty members and DEI officials who actively celebrated Hamas’s horrific crimes against innocent civilians.
Sensing our moment, the Freedom Center stepped willingly into this breach. In a stealth campaign to circumvent campus censors and reach students directly, the David Horowitz Freedom Center conducted a direct action campaign on three prestigious campuses that are home to some of the worst offenders: Georgetown University, Florida State University, and Louisiana State University. On each campus we distributed 2,500 newspapers containing our new report naming the “Top Ten Campus Hate Groups in America,” leaving copies in dining halls, student activities centers, attached to bulletin boards, and in other key locations on each campus.
The report exposes and ranks ten campus organizations that have become vehicles of resentment and hatred directed at our nation, at Jewish students and supporters of Israel, and at the founding principles that are supposed to buttress the universities themselves—open discourse and academic freedom.
The three campuses where we distributed our newspapers contain some of the worst hate groups in the nation. Georgetown University is home to the #1 campus hate group, the Black Law Student Association (BLSA) which has promoted racism, advocated for censorship, and destroyed the careers of faculty members who stand for meritocracy and fail to obey the racist orthodoxy mandated by DEI officials.
In January 2022, law professor Ilya Shapiro, who had just been hired as a senior lecturer and to head Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, was placed on administrative leave after he tweeted his opposition to Biden’s pledge to select an African-American woman to serve as the next justice on the Supreme Court.
Shapiro quickly clarified that he simply meant that Biden should not let racial preferences guide his decisions on Supreme Court nominees and should pick the best candidate regardless of race. But to the BLSA, his promotion of meritocracy at the highest level of the American judiciary was a racist thoughtcrime. The Black Law Student Association released a lengthy statement calling on the administration “to demand the revocation of [Shapiro’s] employment contract and to condemn his racist tweets.”
Nor was Shapiro’s persecution the only instance of the BLSA’s brutal repression of free expression and commitment to racial prejudices. In a separate controversy occurring in March of 2021, Georgetown Law professor Sandra Sellers was recorded speaking with her colleague David Batson, about how she felt badly that African-American students tended to earn lower grades in her course.
The BLSA released a statement which called on the university to fire Sellers without due process. “We demand nothing short of the immediate termination of Sandra Sellers as adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center,” the BLSA exhorted. “Not suspension. Not an investigation. The University must take swift and definitive action in the face of blatant and shameless racism.”
According to the skewed logic of the BLSA, merely recognizing that African-Americans have historically not performed as well in a law school class, is tantamount to racism.
At Florida State University, another of the campuses targeted by our newspaper campaign, the organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was ranked at #4 on our list of the Top Ten Campus Hate Groups. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the group retweeted a message from the National SDS organization praising Hamas as the “Palestinian resistance” that led “attacks that utterly humiliated Israel.” FSU’s SDS added, “Victory to the Palestinian resistance!” and pledged “complete and unconditional solidarity” with Hamas and predicted the destruction of Israel.
The group’s reaction to October 7 was merely the icing on the cake when it comes to promoting Jew hatred. In April 2022, FSU SDS released a hate-filled anti-Semitic statement claiming that the organization “Stands with Palestine.” The statement demonized and delegitimized Israel, claiming falsely that “This month the israeli [sic] occupation has continued to escalate the brutality of its occupation of Palestine and its systematic genocide of Palestinians” and that “Every Ramadan the immoral and illegitimate zionist forces go out of their way to terrorize Palestinians.” It concluded by repeating the genocidal slogan, “FROM THE RIVER, TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!” The statement also contained a de-facto endorsement of Palestinian terrorism, stating “All across Palestine, the people are rising up against the Israeli occupation. SDS supports their efforts towards national liberation and a free Palestine by any means necessary!”
In addition to their anti-Semitism, FSU SDS has repeatedly attempted to censor ideas and speakers that don’t adhere to their radical worldview. In November 2021, the group released a statement demanding that Florida State University cancel a planned speech by conservative and pro-Israel author Ben Shapiro. SDS ludicrously claimed that Shapiro “has affirmed white supremacy by pushing back against ‘Critical Race Theory’ (in other words a correct telling of U.S. history) and decrying systemic racism as a baseless belief.”
At Louisiana State University, the groups targeted in our newspaper campaign were the proudly socialist organization Cooperation Rouge and the Black Student Union at Louisiana State, which jointly ranked at #5 on our Top Ten list of the worst campus hate groups.
In May of 2021, Cooperation Rouge published a letter that was signed by 11 other organizations, including the Black Student Union (BSU) promoting the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and charging Israel with “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes.” The letter quotes holocaust-denier Normal Finkelstein and Black Panther Party arms-dealer Angela Davis (described as a “philosopher”) to promote the view that Israel is an illegitimate “apartheid” state that should not exist.
The Black Student Union also worked with Cooperation Rouge and the LSU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to organize a “March for Palestine” which was used to delegitimize and demonize Israel and promote anti-Semitic propaganda. An Instagram post from BSU showed images of members with posters expressing support for BDS as well as genocidal sentiments including “From the Land to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” “Stop Global Colonialism, Free Palestine,” “Boycott Israel, Free Palestine,” and “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”
The horrific behavior of these and other campus organizations all across the nation has made it clear that our nation’s universities are in crisis. As Daniel Greenfield wrote, just days after October 7: “The radicalization of universities made them into safe spaces for the worst possible extremists. Conservative faculty and all opposing voices have been banished from campuses. Pro-Israel and conservative students have learned to hide their views to avoid becoming targets. And curriculum changes have turned places of learning into Marxist indoctrination centers. Those are the conditions under which colleges can celebrate Islamic terrorism or Communism, in which the worst possible crimes, even the murder of children, meet with approval as long as they are dressed up in revolutionary language and woke dogma.”
Our campuses have become insular, closed environments where real-world concerns and truth cannot enter. Where the brutal butchers of Hamas are hailed as heroes while their innocent victims are told their mere existence justifies such savagery. Student organizations on campus—those targeted by our campaign, but also many others—play a key role in repackaging and rehabilitating failed philosophies like Jew hatred and Marxism for a new generation.
This is why direct action campaigns like the one conducted by the Freedom Center this fall are so important. We disrupt the illusion that academic life can exist in this parallel realm where up is down, where terrorists are freedom fighters. We call out the bigots and Jew-haters and promoters of terrorism and don’t allow them to hide behind leftist bromides. We paper their campuses with undeniable evidence of their Jew hatred and lies.
Sara Dogan is the National Campus Director for the David Horowitz Freedom Center. She has written extensively on issues including academic freedom and anti-Semitism on campus.
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