“The university requires a complete overhaul, top to bottom,” says group advocating for Jewish and pro-Israel students and staff.
By Adina Katz, World Israel News
Senior officials associated with the City University of New York (CUNY) were ordered to avoid cooperating with an ongoing investigation into antisemitism on campus, a Jewish rights watchdog group announced in a media statement on Wednesday.
The S.A.F.E. CUNY group, which has advocated on behalf of Jewish and Zionist CUNY students and staff who have been made to feel unsafe due to rampant antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments at the institution, revealed that CUNY officials were instructed to skip critical meetings on the subject.
“For a year, the Chancellor of CUNY [Félix V. Matos Rodríguez] has deservedly taken flak… for skipping out, at the last minute, from not one but two City Council hearings probing CUNY antisemitism,” S.A.F.E wrote on its Twitter account.
“We have just learned from an immaculate source that his absence goes higher than the chancellor. The decision was made above him,” the group continued, adding that they “learned that CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Bill Thompson told the chancellor not to attend the antisemitism hearings.
“If this is true, [New York Governor] Kathy Hochul must get involved in this horrifying antisemitic mess immediately.
“The university requires a complete overhaul, top to bottom. Governor Hochul Must step in. Bill Thompson, Felix Matos Rodriguez, and [CUNY Chief Diversity Officer] Saly Abd Alla must be out,” S.A.F.E stated. “Today. Right now.”
Jewish students and staff have been subject to an intensely antisemitic environment at CUNY for years.
In late May, CUNY’s law school released a video of a commencement ceremony speech in which the speaker accused Israel of “indiscriminate” murder, “raining bullets and bombs,” encouraging “lynch mobs against Palestinians,” and “settler colonialism.”
That marked the second consecutive year in which the law school’s commencement speaker used the graduation as a platform to promote anti-Israel views. Nasreen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist, delivered the May 2022 speech.
Kiswani, the founder of pro-Palestine advocacy group Within Our Lifetime, has repeatedly called for the state of Israel to be destroyed and ‘liked’ an Instagram post praising the Palestinian terrorists who brutally murdered four Israelis with an axe in Elad.
In July 2021, Kiswani advocated for the murder of people who support Israel. “I hope that a pop-pop [of gunfire] is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime,” she said.