‘Solidarity’: Faculty for Palestine Groups Urge Students to Stand With Jihadists, Remnants of Iranian Regime

Anti-Zionist faculty on college campuses are cajoling students to support Islamism, jihad, and terrorism by recruiting them to participate in demonstrations for the revolutionary government of Iran, a regime which is responsible for killing American soldiers through proxy groups across the Middle East.

“Dear Students, I know it is very short notice, but for those who would like to participate in social protest against the US and Israeli war on Iran, Angelenos are gathering in 2 hours at City Hall,” Elizabeth Ribet, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, wrote on Saturday, signing off the note with “solidarity.”

“This email is a blatant example of a professor abusing her academic authority to politicize the classroom,” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, higher education expert and executive director of the campus watchdog group AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner in an exclusive statement. “AMCHA Initiative’s latest report documents hundreds of similar examples and concludes that when faculty blur the line between teaching and anti-Israel political advocacy, antisemitic hostility on campus rises. Recognizing this danger, more than 350 UC [University of California] faculty have recently urged the Regents to act. UC leaders must recommit to academic integrity and ensure classrooms remain places of scholarship and rigorous inquiry, not platforms for political mobilization.”

Ribet’s note is one of many communications that pro-jihadist student and faculty groups have issued since the US and Israel launched military strikes against Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei over the weekend.

Since then, The Algemeiner has reviewed over a dozen examples of faculty, specifically the Faculty for Justice in Palestine organization, proclaiming solidarity with Iran’s Islamist, authoritarian regime and lambasting the US and Israel for their joint operation.

“These u.s.-backed attacks are designed to spark a regional war, sacrificing the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and beyond to further amerikkkan and zionist domination [sic],” said a post liked by the University of California Ethnic Studies Council, a body of professors who proposed an ethnic studies high school requirement for UC admissions. Critics have noted that the proposal pushed anti-Zionism in the classroom.

“Every drop of their blood spilled ignites our rage, our grief, and our duty,” the post continued. “We must continue to organize in solidarity with the Palestinian people, until the end of zionism [sic] and the liberation of Palestine.”

It added, “RESISTANCE IS GLORIOUS.”

The UC Ethnic Studies Council also shared a post by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, a far-left group that has defended terrorism against Israel, which said, “We reject imperialist and wear mongering narratives that position Iran as the intruder in the region, rather than US military bases and US interventionism.”

In Bronxville, New York, Sarah Lawrence College’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter posted a volley of messages which called for “de-platforming Zionists” and ending military operations in Iran. The group also shared false claims that the US opened fire on Pakistani civilians.

Just miles away, Saint John’s University FJP group shared agitprop falsely alleging that the US intentionally targeted an Iranian school with an airstrike and has “always … sacrificed” children. The group also called for sabotaging the war effort by refusing to file taxes or to file by paper to delay the government’s receiving revenue. Meanwhile, the post suggested that agents in the government are prepared to participate in the conspiracy.

“The absolute bare minimum those of us in the imperial core should be doing is NOT FUNDING THIS SH—T,” said the post. “For example even just filing your taxes via paper slows down the IRS and makes it easier for other tax registers to make an impact with their actions as well.”

Bowdoin College, New York University, Bryn Mawr College, and Haverford College all have Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups sharing similar social media content.

The posts come after the Iranian regime killed tens of thousands of civilian anti-government protesters last month in a brutal crackdown. Iran for years has also been the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, according to Western intelligence agencies. For example, Iran funded, armed, and trained Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that perpetrated the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

College faculty not only promote terrorism but also play a singular role in triggering and accelerating the campus antisemitism crisis, according to a recent study by AMCHA Initiative.

Focusing on UC campuses as case studies, the study exposed Oct 7 denialism; faculty calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; the founding of pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups; and hundreds of endorsers of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

“While students are the most visible actors, faculty and academic departments are key institutional drivers of the hostile environment,” the AMCHA Initiative said following the report’s publication. “Across three campuses, many faculty who promoted anti-Israel activism through university channels had previously endorsed an academic boycott of Israel (academic BDS). The boycott’s guidelines explicitly call on supporters to implement ‘anti-normalization’ in their professional roles. These include excluding Zionist perspectives, speakers, and programs from academic life.”

The report followed previous studies revealing the extent of faculty misconduct in higher education promoting anti-Israel animus and even outright antisemitism.

Just last month, The Algemeiner learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”

Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: a Cornell University praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University chapter of FJP shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.

“The report documents how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization,” the report stated. “It shows how those pathways are associated with recurring student harms and broader campus disruption. It then outlines concrete steps the UC Regents can take to restore institutional neutrality in academic units and set enforceable boundaries so UC resources and authority are not used to advance activist agendas inside the university’s core educational functions.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.