University of Michigan to ban local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine

On Thursday evening, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE UMich), the University of Michigan’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, posted a statement on its Instagram account and the national SJP Twitter/X account announcing that the university filed a complaint and threatened to suspend SAFE as a student club.

Students demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza on March 28, 2024 at the University of Michigan.

SAFE noted that the complaint marked the first-ever attempt by the University of Michigan administration to suspend an existing organization on the Ann Arbor campus.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth wing of the Socialist Equality Party, denounces this witch hunt against SAFE and the democratic rights of all students, faculty and staff of the university. It is a direct attack on freedom of expression and the right to peacefully protest, and marks an escalation of the nationwide attack on students and others who seek to oppose the Israeli genocide that the United States is arming, financing, and controlling against the people of Israel. Gaza.

The IYSSE of UMich demands the immediate withdrawal of the complaint and unconditionally defends the right of the pro-Palestinian organization to function politically at the university.

This attack is related to a series of anti-democratic changes that the UMich government has made to its code of conduct. Earlier this year, the university administration announced changes to its policy, allowing the university to file a complaint against a student or organization with virtually no restrictions. This in turn followed the adoption of policies allowing the government to ban any protest or gathering deemed ‘disruptive’. Additionally, the new conduct policy no longer guarantees an accused student or organization the right to request an appeals panel of students, faculty and staff, erasing due process.

The threat to suspend SAFE at UMich is just the latest anti-democratic attempt to silence opposition to the American/Israeli genocide among workers and youth. In October 2023, Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts became the first private university to ban an SJP chapter from campus, based on fraudulent allegations of anti-Semitism. The university denounced students who opposed the genocide in Gaza for “celebrating the barbaric murder of Jews just because they are Jews.”

Just days later, Columbia University in New York followed Brandeis and banned the local SJP chapter alongside the Columbia chapter of the anti-Zionist Jewish student group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Florida’s far-right Governor Ron DeSantis has also banned the SJP from the entire state university system.

The UMich government’s attack on SAFE follows revelations in a Guardian report published in late October detailing how the UMich Board of Regents recruited Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (Democrat) to investigate and charge protesters involved in the pro-Palestinian encampment that occurred at UMich Ann Arbor last semester campus had been established.

According to the Guardian According to the report, Nessel’s campaign for re-election as Michigan attorney general in 2022 received significant funding from several UMich regents, as well as Zionist forces among state politicians, organizations and UMich donors, all of whom have publicly labeled the anti-genocide protests as anti-Semitic . The UMich regents – wealthy financiers, politicians and entrepreneurs – are overwhelmingly affiliated with the Democratic Party.

In September, Nessel’s office announced it would charge 11 protesters involved in the encampment, the majority of whom were students and campus employees. Seven were charged with trespassing and obstructing a police officer. The latter charge is a misdemeanor punishable by up to two years in prison. The others were charged with trespassing and various felonies.

On October 31, the Tahrir Coalition, a group of student organizations opposing the genocide in Gaza at UMich, published a open letter They are demanding that Nessel drop the charges her office filed against 11 pro-Palestinian protesters in September. The IYSSE supports the open letter and demands that all charges against the eleven demonstrators be dropped. The IYSSE has signed the open letter and urges all workers and youth to do so.

In early October, a leaked excerpt appeared on social media in which UMich President Santa Ono spoke about the repression of student protests on campus. In the clip, Ono explicitly stated that the U.S. government directed his administration and those of other leading universities across the country to suppress anti-genocide and anti-war protests.

“The government could call me tomorrow and say in a very unbalanced way that the university is not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism, and I could say it is not doing enough to combat Islamophobia, and that is not what they want to hear ”, said Ono. explained.

He continued:

You may know that my colleagues from other university presidents have served in Congress in the first place. Congress’s demand is not balanced. It’s almost entirely focused on anti-Semitism, which I think is a problem, but there’s also Islamophobia. And so, as you can see, they are a very powerful group, who are not shy about saying that they will hold the entire institution accountable for not addressing anti-Semitism.

At the end of the clip, Ono noted that the US government would “say something like, we will withhold $2 billion in funding if you don’t tackle anti-Semitism.”

On October 7, police violently attacked and pepper-sprayed dozens of protesters marching to Diag University. In late August, during U-Mich’s annual Festifall club day, police dragged, pinned and arrested three protesters while snatching signs from other demonstrators during a peaceful “die-in” protest on the Diag.