Jewish Groups Condemn Stanford Student Who Threatened To ‘Fight Zionists’
(JTA) — Three Jewish organizations called on Stanford University to take action against a student who threatened to “physically fight Zionists” on campus in response to a recent law passed in Israel.
A statement by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the World Jewish Congress and the Lawfare Project called on the university to “effectively address [the] threat of violence against Jewish students.”
The groups call “on the Stanford University administration to take immediate action in response to this clear threat to Jewish students,” the statement, released Thursday, said. “There should be no room on any campus for these kinds of threats and intimidation. No students should have to live with threats of physical violence because of who they are.”
In a Facebook post which appeared on Friday morning, Hamzeh Daoud, 20, wrote, “I’m gonna physically fight Zionists on campus next year if someone comes at me with their ‘Israel is a democracy’ bullshit. And after I abolish your ass I’ll go ahead and work every day for the rest of my life to abolish your petty ass ethno-supremacist, settler-colonial state.”
Daoud later amended the post to say “intellectually fight,” and added, “I edited this post because I realize intellectually beating zionists is the only way to go. Physical fighting is never an answer to when trying to prove people wrong.”
Daoud is a residential assistant on campus, as well as an active member of Students for Justice in Palestine. He is of Palestinian descent.
The school’s College Republicans have called for the university to fire Daoud from his residential assistant position. A spokesperson said the administration is following up on the matter.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO