A ring of anti-Israel students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) has created a “cesspool” of antisemitism and racist behavior, a campus watchdog group revealed to The Algemeiner on Thursday.
Canary Mission — a secretive group that monitors anti-American, anti-Israel and antisemitic activities on college campuses — said it has uncovered a “disturbing trend” of extreme Jew-hatred and other forms of bigotry at UTK. This, it says, is being spread by members of the school’s branches of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
“We know that SJP nationally has an antisemitic agenda to remove Israel from the river to the sea,” a Canary Mission representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Algemeiner. “However, they usually attempt to clothe their hatred with a thin veil of human rights. In the case of the University of Tennessee, there is no veil, just raw bigotry.”
The watchdog named six key individuals at UTK responsible for the dissemination and active promotion of antisemitic and racist ideologies: Eyad Hijr, a 2016 graduate with ties to the MSA; Mohamed Ali, a sophomore and member of SJP, MSA and the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; Hesham Annamer, a sophomore affiliated with MSA; Stori Nuri, a junior who is the president of SJP, co-president of MSA and a supporter of BDS; Jordan Welsh, a BDS-supporter who recruits members to the UTK SJP’s Facebook page; and Afeef Youssef Kamah, a student connected to MSA.
According to Canary Mission, the UTK chapter of SJP has morphed into an “echo chamber of hate speech,” where each offending post by one of its members is re-posted and re-tweeted to its followers. “We have never seen such a like-minded group of bigots,” the watchdog told The Algemeiner.
According to UTK SJP’s mission statement on Facebook, the group “categorically opposes any form of prejudice or discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. At the same time, SJP manifestly rejects attempts to equate principled criticism of Zionism, or of the character or policies of Israel, with antisemitism.”
These words, Canary Mission said, are to be taken as antisemitism hiding behind a mask of human rights activism, with open Jew-hatred, support for terrorism and homophobic and racist slurs — all-too-common themes, spanning several years, found in the social media postings of key members of UTK’s SJP and MSA groups.