by James A. Bacon
Matan Goldstein, a first-year Israeli-American student at the University of Virginia, has filed a lawsuit against President Jim Ryan and Rector Robert Hardie, alleging that they stood by and did nothing while pro-Hamas groups subjected him to harassment, intimidation and abuse for his religious and ethnic identity.
Goldstein drew attention as one of the only Jewish students at UVA willing to publicly defend Israel after the Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023. He was insulted, ostracized and spit upon. His pleas to the administration went unheeded. According to the lawsuit, Ryan and Hardie declined to intervene even when the president of the UVA chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) sought to silence him by filing bogus Honor Code charges against him.
“Pro-Hamas students have turned what once was a beautiful bastion of enlightened freethinking and tolerance into a trash-laden wasteland of antisemitic and anti-Israeli hate, and Defendants UVA, Ryan, and Hardie allowed it to happen,” states the lawsuit, which was filed May 17. Goldstein is represented in the case by the Charlottesville law firm Brown & Gavalier PLLC.
For a quick overview of the lawsuit, read the article in Virginia Business magazine. But that story skims the surface. The lawsuit consolidates a vast body of material about antisemitism at UVA, much of which will be familiar to Bacon’s Rebellion readers but some of which is new. Anyone deeply interested in the subject should consult the lawsuit itself, a highly readable document expressed in colorful language.
There is far too much detail to include in a single article, so I shall address major themes in separate posts. Today I will explore the lawsuit’s argument that the expressions of pro-Palestinian support at UVA were orchestrated by pro-Hamas groups, at least in part, as part of a broader propaganda campaign rolled out in conjunction with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel.
American Muslims for Palestine. The Goldstein lawsuit draws heavily upon a separate lawsuit, Parizer et al, filed May 1 in U.S. District Court in Alexandria against the National Students for Justice in Palestine.
According to the Parizer lawsuit, Hamas sent out a “global call” hours after launching its terror attacks to justify its actions.
Defendant AJP Educational Foundation, Inc. a/k/a American Muslims for Palestine (“AMP”) serves as Hamas’s propaganda division in the United States. AMP was founded from the ashes of disbanded organizations created by senior Hamas officials after those organizations and related individuals were founded criminally and civilly liable for providing material support to Hamas and other affiliated terrorist groups. In 2010, AMP expanded its operation to American college campuses when it founded … National Students for Justice in Palestine (“NSJP”) to control hundreds of Students for Justice in Palestine (“SJP”) chapters across the country….
(In November Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares announced that he had opened an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine for potential violations of Virginia’s charitable solicitation laws, including “providing support to terrorist organizations.” The group denounced Miyares’ announcement as defamatory and resisted demands for documents. Results from the investigation have yet to be made public.) The Parizer lawsuit continued:
On October 8, the day after Hamas’s terrorist attack, AMP and NSJP were prepared and responded to Hamas’s “call for mass mobilization” by disseminating a manifesto and plan of attack (“NSJP Toolkit”) which contains materials that appear to have been created before the attack….
As of the filing of this Complaint, AMP and NSJP are — among other things — coordinating the occupation of dozens of college campuses across the country to “force” the American government and academia to bend to its will….
“The Plaintiff hereby expressly incorporates and includes each and every allegation in the Parizer lawsuit as if alleged, word-for-word, in this action,” states the Goldstein lawsuit, which proceeds to describe the Hamas proxies at UVA.
Photo from a May 2024 pro-Hamas “encampment” depicting faculty members and faculty “liaisons.”
The UVA chapter of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine is a “formal faculty group” comprised of self-described scholars, teachers, faculty, staff, administrators and graduate students. Some are tenured professors who occupy endowed chairs. “FJP at UVA acts in concert with and/or acts and speaks for dozens of other pro-Hamas groups at the University of Virginia,” states the complaint. “Collectively, these groups appear to be comprised of hundreds of University faculty, staff, and administrators.”
The faculty group is not just a paper organization.
FJP at UVA raises funds and seeks donations; convenes meetings; hosts events; promotes other pro-Hamas entities and their events and efforts; makes University-wide “announcements”; issues “Open Letters” to UVA students and the world; has ratified “Principles of Unity” that include a pledge of fealty to “SJP” along with antisemitic declarations; has established a website and an email address; and has a governing body and executive, including the designation of “liaisons” to negotiate with the University of Virginia administration.
The UVA chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine was formed in response to a call by USACBI, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which in turn is a national SJP proxy, the Goldstein lawsuit alleges. USACBI urged the formation of local faculty groups to support local SJP chapters, provide faculty defense, organize teach-ins, and engage in pro-Palestinian-solidarity work generally.
Declares the lawsuit: “Defendant FJP at UVA is an ‘arm’ or ‘cell’ or ‘chapter’ of the Hamas proxy, National Students for Justice in Palestine, along with its aliases and alter-ego organizations.”
The Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA is a student group recognized by the University as a CIO, or Contracted Independent Organization. “SJP at UVA and its principals have created and act on behalf of and in concert with dozens of similar student organizations that appear to be mere alter egos or aliases for SJP at UVA and are simply additional facsimiles of SJP at UVA,” the Goldstein lawsuit contends.
These facsimile groups include “UVA Apartheid Divest” and “Dissenters@UVA,” says the lawsuit. During a recent meeting with President Ryan to discuss the divestment of UVA endowment assets from Israel, the president of SJP at UVA purported to speak for those two groups.
The UVA chapter parrots NSJP rhetorical themes and borrows graphics from the national group for its own social-media posts.
Talk to National SJP
SJP has gone so far as to direct media inquiries to National SJP, as seen in the flyer distributed by the UVA Chapter, which says, “Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA will not be commenting further or speaking to the media. We ask that you not approach students or organizers for comment. You may reach National SJP, who may be available for comment on this National Day of Action at media@neationalsjp.org.
Local pro-Hamas, UVA faculty and student groups utilized emerged with “slick messaging and public relations efforts” that bore the fingerprints of National SJP, states the Goldstein lawsuit.
One pronouncement, issued the day after attacks that killed 1,200 Israeli citizens, referred to the assault as “an unprecedented feat for the 21st century” and to the terrorists as “resistance fighters in Gaza [who] broke through the illegitimate border defense….” Reciting a litany of Israel’s alleged historical crimes, the SJP-UVA pronouncement went on to “reject the assumption that oppressed people cannot take their liberation into their own hands” and to say, “We stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters and all oppressed people around the world.”
Shortly after, the FJP at UVA published an “open letter signed by 80+ faculty members sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
In ensuing weeks and months, the SJP sponsored a series of rallies, teach-ins and protests that employed the same vocabulary and iconography as other anti-Israeli demonstrations across the country.
UVA chapters of SJP and FJP distributed the flyer shown above calling for a “teach-in.” The image, explains the Goldstein lawsuit, depicts a massacre site where terrorists (edited out of the photo) entered an Israeli kibbutz to murder civilians. “Decolonization,” says the lawsuit, “is a call to violence, in this case, a call for violence against Israelis.”
