A small group of protesters gathered outside Baruch College in New York called for “war” in the United States and targeted the college’s Hillel Jewish student club, a further sign of escalating rhetoric on campus just ahead of the semester beginning on Wednesday.
On Saturday, the demonstrators held a banner that said “Bring the war home” alongside an image of an assault rifle, and a sign that said, “Let the intifada pave the way for people’s war.”
In an Instagram post about the protest, Baruch’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine called for the “construction of militant resistance to imperialism in all its manifestations.” The post about the protest was shared widely by other pro-Palestinian groups on campuses across the City University of New York public college system.
According to images the protesters posted on social media, the demonstrators carried a sign that said, “Hillel go to hell,” with an inverted red triangle, a symbol the Hamas terror group uses to identify targets in propaganda videos. In the images, the activists wear keffiyehs and their faces are blurred. It was unclear how many of them were Baruch students.
Baruch’s Students for Justice in Palestine also posted a recruitment notice that features two assault rifles on its Instagram account.
Student groups across CUNY, including from John Jay, CUNY Law and Queens College, signed onto a “call to action” this week, urging protests across the massive university system as the school year begins.
“We, the students, refuse to remain silent as the school year begins while our brothers and sisters are murdered by the terrorist state of Isra*l,” the student groups said in a statement led by Within Our Lifetime, New York’s leading anti-Israel protest group. The hardline activist group endorsed the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and its members are closely tied to the CUNY system.
“Baruch is appalled by the language used at a protest on Saturday on a public plaza near our campus and condemns all speech that is designed to harass and intimidate others,” the college said in a statement when asked for comment by the New York Jewish week. “NYPD and our public safety officers were on-site to ensure the safety of our students, faculty, and staff.”
The statement concluded: “Baruch remains steadfast in its commitment to a respectful and inclusive campus environment for every student.”
College activist groups in New York have escalated their rhetoric since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, including by targeting Jewish student groups and embracing terrorist organizations in recent months.
In June, pro-Palestinian groups at Baruch staged a protest against Hillel, accusing the Jewish campus group of murdering children and supporting fascism and genocide. Activists at the demonstration wore Hamas headbands and repeatedly formed inverted triangles with their hands, flashing the Hamas symbol toward counter-protesters.
Saturday’s protest, which appeared to draw about a dozen people, according to videos posted to social media, took place at a plaza adjacent to the Baruch campus in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan.
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The Anti-Defamation League condemned the Baruch protest as a “call for violence” at the college and demanded the administration “take action to protect the safety and well-being of all its students.”
The director of Hillel at Baruch, Ilya Bratman, said the protesters were escalating their rhetoric because their demands from the CUNY administration were not being met. Pro-Palestinian student groups have demanded a boycott and divestment from Israel, among other measures.
“The students are feeling at least anxious, and at most, frightened,” Bratman told the New York Jewish Week. “They’re frustrated by the recognition that the campus maybe only changed for the worse over the summer and they will be coming back to a battlefield instead of a learning atmosphere.”
The response to anti-Israel student activism is hampered by CUNY’s layers of bureaucracy, said Bratman, who also serves as the director of Hillel chapters at several other CUNY colleges. CUNY has 25 campuses around the city, a central administration, and liaises with government officials.
“There’s lots of questions for the bureaucracy of who really is in charge here, so that allows for a little bit of balagan,” said Bratman, using the Hebrew word for “chaos.”
“CUNY should be much stronger in their response and clarify to everybody, the whole community, of what is allowed, what is not allowed, how to behave on campus,” he said.
Mitch Silber, the director of the Community Security Initiative, which coordinates security for Jewish organizations in the New York area, said CSI flagged the images of assault rifles and calls for war to CUNY and Baruch.
“That is not free speech, that is an effort to intimidate Jewish students on campus and it’s problematic and we’re calling on CUNY to take some type of action,” Silber said.
CSI expects college protesters to pick up where they left off at the end of the spring semester with encampments and building takeovers, Silber said.
“We think it’s going to be a pretty raucous September,” he said.
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