The UCLA Daily Bruin and its editorial staff have made a mockery of the concept of a free press, opening their pages to terrorist political organizations and closing them to the opponents of terrorist propaganda and Jew hatred. The Bruin’s allegiance to the destroy-Israel left and failure to observe the core principles of journalism in a democracy was glaringly obvious in its coverage of a recent student government ruling.
The resolution passed on Tuesday, May 21, by the UCLA Undergraduate Students Association asserted that—contrary to all evidence and a long history of spreading the genocidal lies of Hamas terrorists, and harassing Jewish students and their invited speakers— the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is not anti-Semitic. The student council further condemned the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s newest report, “An Epidemic of Jew Hatred on Campus: the Top Ten Neo-Nazi Incidents” which was distributed in newspaper form on the UCLA campus, claiming that it made “racist and demonizing accusations of campus activism [against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)] being directly continuous with terrorism.”
Since the Bruin failed to interview the targets of these slanders, David Horowitz immediately reached out to UCLA Daily Bruin Editor-in-Chief Jacob Preal to ask for an opportunity to respond to the resolution’s false and defamatory claims about the Freedom Center and its report.
“I’d like you, in the interests of fairness and good journalism, to print this brief but to the point response I’ve written to the asinine resolution the undergraduate student association just passed condemning me and my Center,” he wrote.
The response which Horowitz included in his email was this:
UCLA’s Students for Justice in Palestine is a political arm of the terrorist organization Hamas, whose goal is the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state. Not a single sentence or phrase in the UCLA resolution addresses the evidence we have published and sourced that SJP is funded by Hamas through its front organization American Muslims for Palestine. AMP is headed by the notorious anti-Semite and jihad supporter, UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, who is the co-founder of SJP. AMP’s board, as Jonathan Schanzer has shown in congressional testimony, is run by former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation which was successfully prosecuted by the US government for funding Hamas. SJP is the chief campus sponsor of BDS - a Hamas orchestrated campaign to strangle the Jewish state. Everything SJP does is designed to spread the Hamas lies that Israel is an apartheid state which illegally occupies so-called Palestinian land. The UCLA resolution is a disgraceful collection of smears designed to provide a smokescreen which will deflect attention away from these undeniable facts, which obviously SJP and its political supporters can’t begin to refute.
Hi David,
Thanks for reaching out. Generally, we only print statements in articles that are slated for publication on any given day. However, we are more than happy to consider an op-ed for publication, if you would like to more thoroughly elaborate on the points made in your succinct statement here. We believe in serving as a forum for our student readership and hope that you will consider this option while students continue having these larger conversations.
I have copied our Opinion section in this thread, so they know to keep an eye out for anything you send their way.
Best,
Jacob
Preal did not respond. When Sara Dogan followed up asking why the op-ed had not been published, Preal abdicated all responsibility as editor-in-chief of the Bruin and passed the buck to his “Opinion Team.” “I have passed your message along to our Opinion Team,” Preal wrote. “They ultimately make the determination about whether to publish, depending on newspaper page space constraints. If they have not gotten back to you, it is unlikely that we will be publishing an op-ed at this time.” So much for the invitation to submit an op-ed refuting a Bruin facilitated character assassination of Horowitz and Dogan, and suppression of the sordid facts not only about SJP but also UCLA which provides funding and campus offices to the Jew-hating and terror-supporting organization.
In a further display of his editorial hypocrisy and actual allegiance to the fascistic left, on May 28, in the midst of the controversy, Preal and his board published an editorial defending a guest lecturer who had compared Zionism to White supremacy while obscenely claiming that pro-Palestinian speech is silenced on campus while pro-Israel discourse is welcomed.
The ideological gulfs that characterize the divisive Israel-Palestine debate on campus won’t be bridged anytime soon if we don’t acknowledge the double standard surrounding it: Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli speech are both protected by the First Amendment. And yet only the former has historically been stamped out by the campus administration,” claimed Preal’s editorial. In fact, and as noted, UCLA administrators provide funding and offices to anti-Israel Palestinian fanatics and have a long history of condemning and slandering critics like the Horowitz Freedom Center, tearing down its posters and describing its personnel as “racists” and “Islamophobes,” while maintaining a discreet silence about the genocidal lies against Jews spread by agents of a terrorist organization on their campus.
In May 2018, members of Students for Justice in Palestine viciously disrupted a pro-Israel event on campus titled “Indigenous Peoples Unite,” (ignoring the fact that Jews are the Indigenous People of the West Bank of the Jordan.) While a participant in the pro-Israel event was speaking about surviving genocide in his native Armenia, an SJP protestor walked over and tore the Armenian flag off the wall and threw the speaker’s notes on the floor, while screaming directly in his face. SJP protestors used horns and whistles to create a chaos of noise and chanted slogans including “We don’t want 2 states, we want ’48,” a genocidal call to abolish Israel and return to a time before it existed. Due to SJP’s protest, the event was forced to halt for over 15 minutes until order could be restored.
Despite SJP’s reprehensible behavior during this incident, which violated UCLA’s own “community rules,” UCLA administrators allowed SJP National to hold its infamous annual conference on the UCLA campus the following semester. The conference announcement even bragged about disrupting pro-Israel events. Yet the Daily Bruin maintains the lie that it is pro-Palestinian speech that is being censored.
The Freedom Center made it into the Daily Bruin’s editorial as well. “For years, organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center have been slapping targets on the backs of students and faculty who advocate for Palestinian human rights,” it states. “The Center has taped posters several times on campus walkways claiming student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA and the Muslim Students Association are supporters of terrorism... Less than a month ago, the DHFC circulated a newspaper-style brochure with similar messaging.” The Center’s newspaper actually documented its claims, which the Bruin and its Jew-hating friends are unable to do. Which is why they resort to suppression of the arguments of their opponents and slanders and name-calling to discredit them.
The Daily Bruin’s editorial does exactly what the UCLA student council resolution did: it discounts the conclusion of our report—that SJP was created by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and has strong institutional and financial ties to known terrorist groups—without once acknowledging let alone attempting to answer our carefully sourced research verifying these statements.
Nor is this the Daily Bruin’s first foray into anti-Semitism. In February of 2017, the Daily Bruin printed an anti-Semitic caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, drawn with an exaggerated nose and standing in front of an image of the Ten Commandments. The image is captioned “Israel passes law seizing any Palestinian land.” The commandment “Thou shalt not steal” is shown with the word “not” crossed out, and Netanyahu is shown to be thinking "#7 is next.” Commandment #7 is depicted on the tablets stating “Thou shalt not kill.” After widespread criticism, the Daily Bruin apologized for the cartoon.
The mission statement of the Daily Bruin’s editorial board claims that “The members of the board believe an independent and accessible student press is critical to ensuring a well-informed student population. As part of the Daily Bruin’s commitment to its readers, the board hopes to present a responsible and clear analysis of relevant events and news items affecting the lives of those we serve.” What hypocritical b.s.
The opinion piece we sent to the Daily Bruin is published below. It is a shame that UCLA’s student body was prevented from seeing it.
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Students for Justice in Palestine is funded by Terrorists and Exists to Advance Their Agendas
By David Horowitz and Sara Dogan
The UCLA Undergraduate Students Association passed a resolution last Tuesday to condemn the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s report on “An Epidemic of Jew Hatred on Campus: the Top Ten Neo-Nazi Incidents”. The report was distributed in newspaper form on the UCLA campus on April 30. As the founder of the Freedom Center and the author of that report, we wish to respond to the false and defamatory accusations made in the student council resolution.
UCLA’s Students for Justice in Palestine is a political arm of the terrorist organization Hamas, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas’ goal, stated in its charter, is the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state. Not a single sentence or phrase in the UCLA resolution passed last Tuesday by the Associated Students Association addresses the evidence we have published and sourced to support our statements, or to refute the claim that SJP is funded by Hamas through its front organization American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, an expert who previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury, detailed the methods and means through which American Muslims for Palestine disburses Hamas funds to SJP chapters across the nation for the purposes of promoting its agenda on college campuses.
AMP is headed by the notorious anti-Semite and jihad supporter, UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, the co-founder of SJP. AMP’s board, as Jonathan Schanzer has shown, is dominated by former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation which was successfully prosecuted by the US government for funding Hamas. SJP is the chief campus sponsor of BDS - a Hamas orchestrated campaign to strangle the Jewish state.
Schanzer testified, “At its 2014 annual conference, AMP invited participants to ‘come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.’” He described AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States” and revealed that AMP “provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and grants to SJP activists” and “even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.” He added, “according to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”
The UCLA resolution charges the Freedom Center with “falsely and slanderously equating Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activism with Nazism and terrorism” and making “racist and demonizing accusations of campus activism [against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)] being directly continuous with terrorism.”
Our report does state that the BDS movement against Israel is funded by terrorist organizations whose goal is a genocide of the Jews. It also states that these terrorist organizations funnel money to SJP to propagandize for BDS on campus. These statements are not slanderous or demonizing because they are true.
A recent study presented by Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy Gilad Erdan described a “Network of Hate” connecting the most prominent BDS organizations worldwide with the terrorist organizations Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Minister Erdan described how BDS organizations disseminate false propaganda provided by Hamas and the Palestinian authority and stated, “The relationship between terrorist organizations and the BDS movement has never been closer, ideologically or operationally.”
As for equating SJP propaganda activities and BDS with Nazism, the comparison is reasonable. Just as Hitler’s reforms aimed to marginalize Germany’s Jews through increasingly restrictive laws and sanctions, the BDS movement seeks to isolate and delegitimize Israel, cut it off from the world community, and bankrupt its resources in the hopes of destroying it.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Muslim scholar Hassan al-Banna. An ardent admirer of Hitler, al-Banna translated Mein Kampf into Arabic in the 1930’s and launched the Islamic-Palestinian movement to “push the Jews into the sea.” The George Washington of the Palestinian national movement Haj Amin al-Husseni went to Berlin during WWII to raise an Arab Legion for Hitler and planned to create an Auschwitz in the Middle East. Thus, Hamas—the organization funding SJP’s BDS activism—has a demonstrable lineage extending back to Nazi Germany.
Everything SJP does is designed to spread the Hamas lies that Israel is an apartheid state which illegally occupies so-called Palestinian land. The UCLA resolution is a disgraceful collection of smears designed to provide a smokescreen which will deflect attention away from these undeniable facts, which obviously SJP and its political supporters can’t begin to refute.
