Students for Justice Palestine (SJP) at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, planned to host an event discussing how activists could follow a terrorist group’s “historic example” — until a Trump administration official pressured the school.
The scheduled event would have promoted the history of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an Iran-backed Marxist group that joined Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel, according to screenshots of SJP’s now-deleted Instagram post. Vassar College warned SJP that it is illegal to provide “material support for terrorism” and that its rhetoric could spark visits from President Donald Trump’s immigration officials, leading SJP to cancel the event, the organization claimed in a statement.
“Check out this teach in on the PFLP (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) titled ‘They Will Certainly Be Victorious … on Tuesday, December 9! SJP wrote, according to screenshots. “We will discuss how the Palestinian resistance group’s historic example can inform our organizing today.” The Instagram post featured the PFLP’s logo.
Vassar College did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
“I’ve seen a lot of things, but this is absolutely BONKERS!!” Leo Terrell, senior counsel at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said in a Dec. 1 X post reacting to SJP’s announcement. “[Vassar College,] what are you doing about this??!”
SJP claimed in a Saturday post that Vassar College emailed the group a day later and held an in-person meeting on Dec. 3, warning that the event could be seen as supporting terrorism and that “our post triggered threats of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] visiting campus.” The Trump administration has detained and removed some foreign nationals from the U.S. over alleged pro-terrorist or antisemitic viewpoints. The U.S. government has considered the PFLP a foreign terrorist organization since 1997.
“We then asked the administrators how they were planning to respond in a way that would protect both the safety and free speech of their students,” SJP wrote. “In their usual fashion, they positioned blame for the risk of deportation on us, a student organization, instead of the federal administration and the college’s willing cooperation with their fascist agenda.”
In addition to aiding the Oct. 7 massacre, the PFLP has been linked to suicide bombings and the 2014 massacre of rabbis at a Jerusalem synagogue, BBC reported.
“We rebuke the college’s complicity with the federal government’s fascist agenda and suppression of anti-imperial education!” SJP wrote Saturday.
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