By Kayla Bartsch
Thursday, February 06, 2025
Although Trump’s election has signaled a radical
cultural shift against “wokeness” in America, some things haven’t changed. The keffiyeh
kids are still at it, continuing to harass Jewish students under the banner of
“Students for Justice in Palestine.”
Last week, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz-Birkenau — also known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day —
60-some Ohio State University students, armed with bullhorns, posters, and
winter jackets, encircled the Schottenstein Chabad House, OSU’s Jewish Student
Center. The Chabad House — a temporary rental while the original building
undergoes renovations — sits on a quiet residential street corner a few blocks
from the main campus.
Inside, 130 students stood shoulder-to-shoulder and sat
knee-to-knee in the house’s living area to hear the testimony of two Israel
Defense Forces soldiers who were seriously wounded during the October 7 attacks. The event, titled “Courage &
Sacrifice,” was sponsored by Belev Echad — a nonprofit dedicated to serving
wounded IDF veterans — and hosted by a coalition of Jewish student
organizations at OSU.
In the days leading up to the event, members of Students
for Justice in Palestine’s Ohio State University chapter called on their
comrades to assist in protesting the Chabad-hosted event through an Instagram post: “WAR CRIMINALS OFF OUR CAMPUS!”
Join us TOMORROW at 6:30PM, where
war criminals directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing and occupation of
Palestine will be on campus. These individuals played an active role in the
brutal attacks that have devastated Gaza. . . . We vehemently oppose any
attempts to commemorate or honor war criminals, in addition to any acts of
normalization with the zionist entity. We will not stand by and allow them to
be welcomed onto our campus.
In reality, these “war criminals” were victims of real
war criminals — the Hamas terrorists who breached the Israel-Gaza border on
October 7, 2023, to murder, rape, and maim Israelis.
Saar Arie, a combat medic in the IDF, was dispatched with
his team to attend to the wounded families of the kibbutzim raided by Hamas.
Arie saved many lives that day — including those of a baby and his parents who
were trapped in a burning building. During a rescue operation, Arie was shot in
the stomach and in the foot, and he was left bleeding for hours. After doctors
told him he would never walk normally again, Arie pushed through months of
rehabilitation to get back on his own two feet, with the help of a cane. He
then re-enlisted in the IDF.
Maya Desiatnik served
in the Border Protection Force as a noncombatant surveillance soldier — a
“lookout” — with 22 other young women. When Hamas ambushed their base, the
female soldiers had no weapons with which to defend themselves, so they hid.
After struggling to penetrate the barrier, Hamas gave up and lit their whole
base on fire. Crouched in the command room alongside her fellow lookouts,
Desiatnik started to cough up blood and black tar as the smoke intensified.
Fifteen of her colleagues — and close friends — died in the fire. Seven more
were taken hostage. Desiatnik was the only lookout to escape. After months of
physical and psychological rehabilitation, she too re-enlisted in the IDF.
Speaking over the screams, car horns, and megaphones of
the SJP students outside, the IDF soldiers told their stories to a large,
captivated audience.
Ironically, SJPOSU’s original post — which was meant to
intimidate guests of the Chabad House event — rallied the pro-Israel students
of OSU to attend. Ava Zweig, a freshman at OSU and co-founder of the group
Students Supporting Israel, helped host the event. She told National Review that RSVPs for the event
weren’t very high — until SJPOSU’s contemptuous post.
Zweig estimated they had “maybe, like, five RSVPs; it was
bad. The day before the actual event, we’re freaking out trying to get everyone
to sign up. Then, SJP posts in conjunction with OSU Divest and Jewish Voice for
Peace in a collaborative Instagram post.” She continued, “after that, we got
130 students . . . to RSVP and attend that event,” including “a decent amount
who weren’t Jewish.”
Adam Kling, a fourth-year student at OSU and student
leader of Chabad, described the scene to National
Review. Kling said, “Just for safety reasons, we had about five or six
security guards that we hired, and the Columbus police also showed up.” Because
of the collection of screaming students out front, “the two soldiers had to
basically jump over a fence in the backyard to sneak in so they could avoid
them.” Zweig added that Arie “was on a cane,” but he still had to “make his way
up to the house from the back stairs.”
While the private security may seem excessive, it has
become the norm for most public Jewish organizations. Kling mentioned two
recent acts of violence against Jewish students at OSU in the past
two years: In November 2023, two Jewish students were approached by a group of
guys leaving a bar who asked them if they were Jewish. After saying yes, “one
was punched in the nose, broke his nose. The other was punched in his jaw and
broke his jaw. And then the next day, our Hillel was broken into and vandalized
on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.”
As the students made their way up to the house to attend
the talk, they were met with antisemitic slurs from the SJP crowd. Zweig said,
“It was just ironic for a bunch of people who were calling for peace to be
screaming ‘globalize the intifada,’ ‘baby killers,’ ‘war criminals, come out,
we know you’re in there.’ They didn’t skip a beat. And so hearing all that,
even though it was only like 60 people, they’re loud. They’re all screaming,
and we’re in a little rental house.”
For many of the younger students attending the event,
this was their first personal encounter with radical antisemitism on campus.
Kling, a senior student, said he is “numb to hearing those words.” As he said,
“If I got one dollar for every time I was called a racist, terrorist, white
supremacist just because I’m Jewish, I’d be out of college right now buying a
house for myself.”
Once the event concluded, attendees were directed to stay
inside the house until all the protesters had dispersed. While the initial
chaos was over, the campus fallout was yet to begin.
The student-led newspaper of OSU, The Lantern,
published a biased article about the event, which sympathetically quoted SJP
student leaders and failed to report the protesters’ conduct.
Jane Shevkin, student vice president of OSU Chabad,
submitted a letter to the editor concerning The Lantern’s reporting.
Shevkin’s letter corrected the previous article, which failed to mention
that the 60-some SJP protesters were screaming anti-Israel chants at the
gathering of mostly Jewish students. “Ohio State’s Students for Justice in
Palestine chapter stood outside with their faces covered, and its members
proudly shouted their Jew hate. . . . After the event ended, a few protesters
stayed around to ensure we got their final message for us ‘to kill ourselves.’”
SJPOSU was quick to attack Shevkin for setting the record
straight. The group posted on Instagram:
The contents of the article spew
vile and disingenuous statements with the sole purpose of demonizing Muslims,
Palestinians, and Arabs. . . . We, Students for Justice in Palestine at The
Ohio State University, condemn The Lantern for platforming explicit hate
speech masquerading as ‘journalism,’ and we reaffirm our commitment to
vehemently opposing any and all manifestations of normalization of genocide,
settler colonialism, and zionism within our universities.
While the rest of the country has rejected this mode of
critical race theory, the keffiyeh kids just can’t help themselves — it’s the
only language they know.
Despite SJP’s best efforts to miseducate their fellow
students, the truth remains. As Zweig said of the event: “These students, let
me tell you, were sitting there, captivated. And really, really [engrossed] in
every single word that these soldiers said. . . . Obviously, it was so
distracting to hear all the chanting, but it was a very memorable night that I
think every single student who was there wouldn’t have missed for the world.”
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