• • Berkeley prof forces students to tweet pro-Islam views
• • UT-Knoxville's Newest Student Anti-Israel Hate Group

Students in Professor Hatem Bazian's class at the University of California at Berkeley are required to publicly denounce Islamophobia on Twitter while designing strategies to help Islamic groups improve their outreach efforts.

Bazian is a founder of "Students for Justice in Palestine" at Berkeley, where he teaches in the Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies departments. One of his classes, "Asian American Studies 132AC: Islamophobia," requires students to tweet about Islamophobia, according to Tarek Fatah, a columnist for the Toronto Sun.

Fatah wrote that he received an email from a student in Bazian's class who claimed: "I've been told by one of my professors I will be required, as part of my grade, to start a Twitter account and tweet weekly on Islamophobia. I can't help but feel this is unethical. This is his agenda not mine."

Bazian is a leading expert on the topic of Islamophobia. He has worked on projects aimed at countering Islamophobia, according to his personal website. He is also the co-founder of Zaytuna College, the first Muslim college in the United States.

The student claimed that Bazian was using his class as "unpaid labor" for his agenda:

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"When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism."

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvard University 1968.

In 2013, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) announced its status as an official student organization at UT-Knoxville. With about 100 chapters at last count, SJP organizes extreme hate-filled anti-Israel activity on college campuses around the country, including:

• Israel Apartheid Week - typically held between February - March and involves:
  • Staging mock checkpoints where they stop students and yell "Are you Jewish?"
  • Erecting "Apartheid Walls" with "Hamas posters describing Jews as baby-killers and maps showing the Jewish state erased and replaced with 'Palestine.'"
• Posting eviction notices on dorm room doors to simulate housing demolition in Israel.
• BDS resolutions (boycott, divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel), calling for economic warfare agains the Jewish state. (The first divestment campaign was launched at UC Berkley on Holocaust Remembrance Day.)
• Hosting extremist/radical anti-Israel speakers who support terrorism against the State of Israel.
• Protesting pro-Israel groups, events and speakers. (SJP members at University of California, Irvine heckled Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren throughout his speech until they were removed by campus security.)
• Disrupting campus Holocaust memorial events and even worse, their perversion of the famous Holocaust quote "never again."

Reports about vandalism of campus Jewish facilities, harassment of Jewish professors and students and even physical attacks by members of SJP have been reported at some schools.

If this is what SJP is reported to do, is this what UT-Knoxville can expect?

UT-Knoxville SJP's Faculty Sponsor is Dr. Brian K. Barber, a 1996-97 grant recipient from the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (CPAP), renamed the Palestine Center, which is the educational arm of the Jerusalem Fund.

The chairman of the Jerusalem Fund is Samar Ali's father, Subhi Ali. The Jerusalem Fund's Executive Director openly advocates BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) against the State of Israel. (See, "Samar Ali: Her Father's Organization Wants to Destroy Israel.")

About SJP

Like Jerusalem Fund founder Hisham Sharabi and community organizations that support "radical Palestinian terror groups," SJP gives voice to student members who refuse to condemn terrorism.

SJP was founded in 2001 by co-founders Hatem Bazian, the Islamist, and Snehal Shingavi, the socialist - a "leftist-Islamist" alliance (also referred to as a "red-green" alliance). This joinder has allowed the SJP to appeal to a broader coalition, which includes left-wing activists and religio-cultural political groups like the Muslim Students Association.
 

Hatem Bazian Brought His Middle East Hate to School

• Virulently anti-Semitic Jew-hater who came as a college student to the U.S. from the Hamas stronghold of Nablus in the West Bank.
• Served as President of the General Union of Palestinian Students, the student arm of the PLO and an organization that was banned in Germany after the Munich Olympics massacre.
• Served as Muslim Students Association (MSA) president at Berkley
• Was a fundraising speaker for Kindhearts, a Hamas front closed by the US government after being considered for designation as a terrorist organization
• Co-founded Zaytuna College with Zaid Shakir, a repeat visitor to Nashville who tells his college audiences that, "under Islamic law the kafir won't be equal with the Muslim. The Christian or the Jew will be a dhimmi. They won't be equal with the Muslim." He was quoted in the New York Times as saying that "he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law."
• Founded and chairs the national extremist anti-Israel organization American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) which helps train and support SJP activists. SJP's 2002 national convention was sponsored by the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), with guest speaker Sami al-Arian.

The IAP was created by a Hamas leader to be its U.S. propaganda arm and raise money for Hamas. IAP was listed as one of the Muslim Brotherhood's likeminded organizations in the Muslim Brotherhood's strategic plan for North America. IAP's leadership founded CAIR - the Council on American Islamic Relations.

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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) waged a new attack Tuesday on anti-Islamist Muslim Zuhdi Jasser, asking that a federal commission investigate Jasser's financial supporters.

Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, also serves on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). CAIR and other Islamist groups tried to block that appointment in 2012. Now, CAIR wants the USCIRF to investigate Jasser's donors, who also give to other groups CAIR doesn't like. The AIFD received $45,000 from the Abstraction Fund from 2010-12, a letter from CAIR's Corey Saylor said.

The New York-based fund also gives money to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Middle East Forum and Jihad Watch. All, Saylor claimed, play an "active role in spreading anti-Islam prejudice."

"At issue here is the reasonable concern that arises regarding Dr. Jasser accepting financial support from anti-Muslim groups while he is serving on a commission advocating for religious freedom," Saylor wrote.

What a load of nonsense. As we have shown, CAIR and others toss around accusations of "Islamophobia" as a means of stifling criticism and deflecting attention from their own shady records. Jasser is a devout Muslim who repeatedly points out that Muslims are freer to practice their faith in the United States than anywhere else in the world. He calls out the victimization narrative promoted by CAIR and other Islamist groups.

In response to CAIR's attack Tuesday, Jasser posted a link to a 2011 IPT report showing CAIR solicited money from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.