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The Honorable Merrick Garland
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20530
The Honorable Kristin Clarke
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20530
The Honorable Christopher Wray
Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20535
May 8, 2024
Re: Request for Urgent, Immediate Investigation, Arrest and Prosecution of Organized Hate Groups, Leaders, Funders and Actors Inciting and Perpetrating Nationwide Violence and Hatred Against Jewish Students on College Campuses
Dear Attorney General Garland, Assistant Attorney General Clarke, and FBI Director Wray:
We are writing to request your urgent, immediate action – including investigating, monitoring, arresting and prosecuting the blatantly antisemitic organized groups, leaders, funders and actors who are unlawfully openly supporting designated terrorist organizations Hamas and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and intimidating, threatening, inciting and perpetrating violence and hatred against Jewish students on college campuses across the nation.
The campus professionals at our organization (the Zionist Organization of America - ZOA) estimate that over 90% of universities in which antisemitic activities are taking place now have failed to comply with their obligations to provide a safe learning environment for Jewish students and faculty. Some universities, such as Northwestern and Brown, have even entered into or contemplated dangerous concession agreements with the demonstrators that will make antisemitism on their campuses worse.
Thus, we request that you assure strict compliance with universities’ obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to provide a safe, harassment-free, violence-free learning environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students, and assure strict compliance with universities’ Title VII obligations to provide a non-hostile work environment for Jewish and pro-Israel faculty. We request that wherever necessary, you send in federal law enforcement, and defund and take other legal action against universities that fail to comply. We further request that you enforce the federal criminal statute prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations” against entities and individuals providing material support to Hamas, the PFLP and their front groups on campuses.[i]
Throughout the past 18 years, the ZOA and some other Jewish organizations initiated numerous Title VI complaints regarding glaring antisemitic activities at specific schools. Some of our complaints were resolved – but others lingered at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for years despite our repeated requests for prompt action. Meanwhile, antisemitism on American campuses festered and grew exponentially. The antisemitic violence and intimidation is so out-of-hand now that this issue can no longer wait. At this point, there is no need to wait for time-consuming individual complaints. We urge you to act immediately, with the full-scale force of the law, on a nationwide basis.
It is intolerable that so many Jewish students are in fear for their lives, are prevented from attending classes that they paid tuition for, are barred from studying in libraries that they also paid tuition for, and are unable to establish Jewish organizational tables or participate in Jewish events without antisemitic mobs perpetrating nonstop harassment, interference or worse.
It is unconscionable that Jewish students are being subjected to antisemitic “no go” zones illegally taken over by mobs that establish their own laws; “checkpoints” manned by Hamas-supporters that block Jews from walking across the quad; lines of radical faculty members who link arms to exclude Jewish students from illegal pro-Hamas encampment areas; shrines honoring convicted murderers of Jews; nonstop antisemitic blood libels; mobs vandalizing Jewish centers and ripping off and burning mezuzahs (Jewish religious symbols) on Jewish students’ doors[ii]; and days-long drumbeats of threats and chants calling for Jews’ and Israelis’ murder and exclusion.
And it is frightening that Jewish students are being subjected to calls to “globalize the Intifada,” repeat October 7 every day, and make American Jewish students the next victims of multiple October 7ths.
“Intifadas” are the terror wars against Jews. In Israel, Palestinian Arab terrorists murdered or maimed approximately 10,000 innocent Jews in Intifadas, by bombing civilian buses, pizza parlors full of children, Passover Seders full of Holocaust survivors and elsewhere; and with car ramming, knifing and shooting attacks.
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