Last week, the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper of the University of Chicago, retracted and apologized for an op-ed titled “We Must Condemn the SJP’s Online Anti-Semitism,” which criticized recent actions by the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Richard Cravatts reports:
As the article by Melody Dias and Benjamin ZeBrack noted, on January 26, SJP posted on its Instagram page the shocking admonition, “DON’T TAKE SH*TTY ZIONIST CLASSES.” Students were asked to “Support the Palestinian movement for liberation by boycotting classes on Israel or those taught by Israeli [teaching] fellows.” According to the SJP post, any students who enrolled in these classes would be “participating in a propaganda campaign that creates complicity in the continuation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”
Dias and ZeBrack noted that SJP had posted the inflammatory message on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. They argued that SJP’s request that their fellow students boycott classes about Israel and Zionism “taught specifically by Israeli fellows is xenophobic, as Israelis cannot change their nationality.” They further noted that “all courses listed are explicitly within the University’s Jewish Studies center. This furthers the trope that Jewish courses and professors work to contribute to propaganda for Israel, which is a blatantly false narrative.”
SJP then demanded of the Maroon’s editors . . . the “immediate deletion of the article,” a “public apology issued by the Maroon to SJP UChicago and to Palestinian students for the dissemination of misinformation and the disregard of journalistic integrity and factual reporting,” and, most ominously, “a public recommitment to ensuring that all columns and articles abide by expected standards of accuracy and truth, particularly those written by Zionist authors or on behalf of Zionist organizations.” [Cravatts’s emphasis.]
In response to SJP’s absurd demands, two feckless editors not only deleted the offending op-ed, but published a craven, apologetic editorial of their own. “We condemn the pitting of Jewish and Palestinian students against one another,” they wrote, “and we deeply regret the extent to which the op-ed’s factual inaccuracies—which we should not have published—perpetuated such a harmful dynamic.”
Read more on Algemeiner: https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/04/06/suppressing-pro-israel-views-at-the-university-of-chicago/