Anti-Israel student group banned from Instagram

Columbia University Apartheid Divest had announced a protest that included photos of trustees with inverted triangle target markings on them.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Instagram banned a virulently anti-Israel umbrella student group on Monday after it announced a protest two days earlier that featured images of Columbia University trustees marked as targets by Hamas with inverted triangles.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) called the trustees “enemies,” “murderers,” and “violently genocidal Zionists,” adding that they were “not untouchable, and now we know their names.”

One of the images used to advertise the demonstration featured a figure throwing a Molotov cocktail.

The aggressive imagery was nothing new. In October, CUAD had called for violence and armed resistance against Israel, going as far as to say “by any means necessary.”

Among CUAD’s leading groups is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has chapters in some 200 American institutions of higher learning.

Instagram permanently deleted the account of Columbia’s chapter in late August, before the fall semester began, saying that it had violated parent company Meta’s “dangerous organizations and individuals policy.”

This is aimed at “organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence,” in order to “prevent and disrupt real-world harm,” Meta says in explaining the policy.

SJP’s Columbia account had some 124,000 followers.

Victims of the Hamas atrocities of October 7 are suing SJP’s national group and the organization that created and funds it, American Muslims for Palestine, saying that SJP is a Hamas proxy. It has been “credited” for playing a foremost role in building the pro-Hamas encampments that began at Columbia and then took over dozens of universities last spring amid acts of anti-Jewish violence, both verbal and physical, and serious vandalism at some schools.

CUAD’s anti-Israel protest was initially scheduled to take place Monday at Barnard, Columbia’s women’s college.

On Sunday, Columbia President Laura Ann Rosenbury put security measures in place, including limiting entry to the campus to those who could show student ID cards, “due to active concerns for violence.”

Most university protests against the Israel-Hamas war, of which there have been hundreds since the spring semester earlier in the year, have been found to consist of a large number of outside provocateurs.

“Inflammatory posts with violent imagery and specific calls for action against the Barnard College community have been circulating on social media,” Rosenbury said, calling statements “that advocate for violence or harm, including the destruction of property,” a violation of the school’s code of conduct and “antithetical to the core principles and mission of Barnard.”

The group then said it was changing its venue to off-campus.

Instagram has shut down harshly anti-Israel groups at other universities as well, such as the People’s Solidarity Coalition at New York University.

In February, Instagram permanently removed Within Our Lifetime, a group that openly called for the death of Jews and collaborated with SJP, citing it as too dangerous to disseminate its messages on the massive online platform.