A national anti-Muslim group plastered Brooklyn College with cartoonish posters on Monday claiming that a campus organization is a front for terror group Hamas, calling out students by name, and even showing a caricature of one with the hashtag “#JewHatred” beneath it. But it’s a bogus charge, according to the caricatured scholar, who said perpetrators are bullying him for criticizing Israel’s occupation of his homeland Palestine.
“It’s a really tough situation, I feel targeted and I feel attacked for basically raising my concern for Israeli crimes overseas,” said Raja Abdulhaq, a political science graduate student who was born in Palestine. “This is not to target me personally but anyone on campus that has different views than the Zionist propaganda machine in the United States. It’s clearly an Islamophobic attempt to put fuel to the fire — to dehumanize and demonize Muslims in the U.S.”
Members of the Horowitz Freedom Center, a California-based group with no ties to the school, took credit for the posters, which read “Do you want to show your support for Hamas terrorists, whose stated goal is the elimination of the Jewish people and the Jewish state? Join us” — and which appeared to be signed by political science department chairman Corey Robin and five members of the Palestinian group.
Abdulhaq called the allegations absurd.
“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “It’s not only disturbing, but laughable.”
But Horowitz claims the college is a hotbed of free-speech suppression and the student group is ground zero — and he put up the defamatory signs in the spirit of “civil dialogue,” he said.
“Brooklyn College is a disgrace. You have these radicals invading faculty meetings and attacking people verbally, it’s just gross,” Horowitz said, referring to allegations that members of the Palestinian group yelled “Zionist pig” at teacher wearing a yarmulke. “It’s not a college atmosphere. How can you have a civil dialogue about these issues if you have groups like Students for Justice in Palestine? We put up the posters to let the campus know that these groups are funded by and orchestrated by a terrorist organization like Hamas.”
Civil rights think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Horowitz Freedom Center as a hate group, and even the Jewish Anti-Defamation League has criticized Center founder David Horowitz for pushing an Islamophobic agenda.
The college removed the posters a little after 5 am — shortly after they were put up, according to a spokesman.
“We support free speech, and we seek to maintain a safe and tolerant campus for our students, faculty, and staff. We also do not permit public defacement or illegal postings on our property,” a rep wrote in an e-mailed statement.
