University of Minnesota suspends, fines pro-Hamas rioters

SJP maintains that the students are innocent despite law enforcement finding cause to charge them with rioting and trespassing, and one rioter with assault.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities has reportedly suspended and demanded financial restitution from seven pro-Hamas activists who were arrested for commandeering the Morrill Hall administrative building on Oct. 21, an action which aimed to pressure school officials into enacting a boycott of Israel.

According to a statement from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and other anti-Israel campus groups posted on social media, seven of eight students charged with misconducting themselves on that day have been “found guilty” by a university disciplinary tribunal.

Each has been fined about $5,500, the statement further alleged, and suspended for periods ranging from one to five semesters.

“Alongside arbitrary suspensions, the university intends to withhold the transcripts of those arrested,” the statement continued.

“This means for the duration of the suspension the students are unable to transfer to a different institution without forfeiting the credits they have rightfully earned and paid for. To even be readmitted after suspensions, the students have to do 20 hours of community service and write a 5-10 page essay about the ‘difference between vandalism and protest.’”

A spokesman for the university declined to comment on the matter, saying “federal and state privacy laws prevent the university from confirming or commenting on any specifics related to individual student discipline.”

Instead, the university pointed The Algemeiner to the university’s “Student Conduct Code and its Administrative Policy: Resolving Alleged Student Conduct Code Violations, as well as the Twin Cities campus-specific Student Conduct Code Procedure,” noting that “together, these outline how disciplinary processes work, from collecting and investigating facts to initial recommendations regarding discipline, through appellate rights and hearing options.”

Students for Justice in Palestine is getting out ahead of the matter, however, and calling on its followers to deluge university officials and local lawmakers with demands that all charges against the students be dropped.

SJP maintains that the students are innocent despite law enforcement finding cause to charge them with rioting and trespassing. One student was charged with assault, according to The Minnesota Daily.

Additionally, it was alleged that protesters — 11 in total, three of whom are alumni — held university employees working inside Morrill Hall captive, barring them from leaving the building “for an extended period of time.”

“Spread the word!” the group said in a statement. “Talk to your friends, email your professors, don’t let this go silent!”

The October incident was not the first commandeering of a university administrative building this semester.

Last month, a mob of Students for Justice in Palestine members invaded and occupied the Westlands administrative building at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and vowed not to surrender it unless school officials adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

The action was apparently precipitated by the college’s declining to accept SJP’s divestment recommendations — which aim to compromise Israel’s national security and leave the world’s lone Jewish state vulnerable to jihadist extremists.

“Westlands is occupied,” SJP said in a series of statements published on Instagram during the occupation.

“Students have occupied Westlands to demand immediate action on the genocide of Palestinians. Administration has failed to meet our disclosure deadline. Westlands residents are safe: they can come and go at will. We need your support: Walkout to the south lawn, bring food donations, sign divestment proposal.”

SJP also called on students to obstruct justice to prevent the quelling of their activity, imploring them to amass “as many bodies blocking doors as possible” and instructing them to wear “mask [sic] and indiscernible clothing, hats, scarves, etc to support the student intifada.”

In that time, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), which coordinates activities at individual colleges, cheered the insurrectionist behavior, using the same incendiary language as the students.

The occupations of the campus buildings come amid concerns that the over 150 pro-Hamas groups operating on colleges campuses and elsewhere across the US are planting the seeds of domestic terrorism.

“The movement contains militant elements pushing it toward a wider, more severe campaign focused on property destruction and violence properly described as domestic terrorism,” researcher Ryan Mauro wrote in a recently published report, titled Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement, a project of the Capital Research Center (CRC).

“It demands the ‘dismantlement’ of America’s ‘colonialist,’ ‘imperialist,’ or ‘capitalist,’ system, often calling for the US to be abolished as a country.”

Drawing on statements issued and actions taken by SJP and their collaborators, Mauro made the case that toolkits published by SJP herald Hamas for perpetrating mass casualties of civilians; SJP has endorsed Iran’s attacks on Israel as well as its stated intention to overturn the US-led world order; and other groups under its umbrella have called on followers to “Bring the Intifada Home.”

Such activities, the report explained, accelerated after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, which pro-Hamas groups perceived as an inflection point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an opportunity.

By flooding the internet and college campuses with agitprop and staging activities — protests or vandalism — they hoped to manufacture a critical mass of youth support for their ideas, thus creating an army of revolutionaries willing to adopt Hamas’s aims as their own.

The result has been a series of the kinds of incidents seen in academia throughout 2024 fall semester since Hamas’s onslaught.

In October, when Jews around the world mourned on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities, a Harvard University student group called on pro-Hamas activists to “Bring the war home” and proceeded to vandalize a campus administrative building.

The group members, who described themselves as “anonymous,” later said in a statement, “We are committed to bringing the war home and answering the call to open up a new front here in the belly of the beast.”

On the same day, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) issued a similar statement, saying “now is the time to escalate,” adding, “Harvard’s insistence on funding slaughter only strengthens our moral imperative and commitment to our demands.”

More recently, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student wrote a journal article which argued that violence is a legitimate method of effecting political change and, moreover, advancing the pro-Palestinian movement.

As The Algemeiner has previously reported, pro-Hamas activists have already demonstrated that they are willing to hurt people to achieve their goals.

Last year, in California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument.

At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center.

Violence, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was most common at universities in the state of California, where an anti-Zionist activist punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.

AntisemitismBDSSJPUniversity of Minnesota