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Editor’s note: Since the barbaric Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7th, American universities have become an undeniable locus of Jew hatred within our nation. Much attention has deservedly been paid to the radical campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine who call for the genocide of the Jews and cheer the terrorists of Hamas. What has received less attention—but should in fact rank as the universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves. In the case of our campuses, Jew hatred is “the call coming from inside the house.”
The Freedom Center is exposing these academic institutes and programs as “The Top Ten Jew-Hating Academic Departments” in a new report. We will be publishing one school per day as a series on Frontpage. The Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign is #9 on our list.
In a “Letter to Our Students on Palestine” dated from December 18, 2023, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies sought to whitewash the atrocious actions of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. The date of the letter’s posting is significant in that it came two months after Hamas’s October 7th genocidal attack on Israel, long after the barbaric details had been established and confirmed—women raped and mutilated, children set on fire, and over 1200 civilians butchered for the sole crime of being Jews.
The narrative set out by the Department of Latina/Latino Studies in their letter, which was posted on their official university department webpage and co-signed by the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African-American Studies, focused not on Hamas’s brutal attack but exclusively on the “historical context of Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.” It placed all blame solely on Israel, the victim of this brutal ethnic crime, instead of condemning Hamas. The atrocities committed by Hamas are described merely as an “attack against Israel…which led to the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, both civilians and soldiers.” The mention of “civilians and soldiers” is an obvious attempt to whitewash Hamas’s genocide. The terrorist organization attacked solely civilian targets—a music festival, a kibbutz—and overwhelming killed and raped civilians. The handful of “soldiers” who met their deaths were only present by happenstance or raced to the defense of the civilians who were attacked.
In that same passage, the letter refers to Israel as “the U.S.-backed nuclear power” which “has intensified its long-running siege on the Gaza Strip”—again, entirely obscuring the history of Gaza which Israel handed over to the Palestinians in 2005, as well as the Palestinians’ unceasing attempts to wipe Israel and its Jews off the world map. The letter goes on to quote Hamas-generated statistics—acknowledged by all independent observers to be highly suspect—that “the Israeli bombing campaign has killed over twenty thousand Palestinian people –the average age of the dead being just five years old.”
“We have a responsibility to name clearly what is happening, and to hold space and honor the grief, fear, and anger so many are feeling right now,” states the Department’s letter, adding, “we must recognize and name continuing settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples everywhere.”
The entire content and tone of the letter is rife with Jew hatred—from minimizing Hamas’s atrocities, to obscuring the historical record of Jewish settlement in Israel dating back over two millennia, to demonizing and delegitimizing Israel, a form of anti-Semitism condemned by the U.S. State Department. The Department of Latina/Latino Studies makes its biases and priorities unmistakably clear.
The letter goes on to ludicrously claim that “expressions of solidarity with Palestine are regularly criminalized and repressed at institutions of higher education”—it is not expressions of solidarity with Palestine that are criminalized but rather the blatant refusal of hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association to operate within the law and university regulations that leads to their censure—and even then, only rarely.
“We are aware that many of our students are targeted, alienated, or harassed while navigating a climate that erases their suffering and dehumanizes their existence,” states the letter, speaking not of the Jewish students on UIUC’s campus, who could understandably fear for their lives given such blatant departmental support for their enemies, but rather of students who support Palestine.
“We denounce the virulent anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism, erasure, and dehumanization circulating around us, from peers, administrators, political leaders, and mainstream U.S. media,” continues the Department’s official communication. “We also condemn anti-Semitism and the erasure of a rich tradition of Jewish critique that refuses the conflation of Judaism with Zionism.”
This one small aside to condemn “anti-Semitism” is rendered insincere by the anti-Semitic vitriol underlying the entire letter.
The conclusion to the letter reads like a caricature of woke DEI-speak: “Finally, we stand with and beside those targeted by colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and state-sanctioned violence. And in the absence of its recognition in the current moment, we affirm the value of all Palestinian life, and we know a free Palestine is only possible through queer, racial, gender, reproductive, and environmental justice. We offer our classrooms as a space for you to take refuge and find the strength to change the world together.”
The notion that Palestine—an entity ruled by a terrorist Islamic tyranny which criminalizes homosexuality, denies women any semblance of rights, and uses its citizens as human shields—could be freed through “queer, racial, gender, reproductive, and environmental justice” is so ludicrous that it almost defies comment. That the Department of Latina/Latino Studies supports such a barbaric and backwards culture over the liberal democracy of Israel where women, gays, and ethnic and religious minorities actually have constitutional rights, is yet more evidence of their Jew hatred.
The letter was accompanied on the departmental website by an extremely one-sided and anti-Semitic list of “Resources to Learn About Palestine” including links to the Palestinian Feminist Collective and a No Pride in Apartheid Toolkit.
Roughly two weeks after its posting, the letter was removed from the official website of the Department of Latina/Latino Studies, apparently at the behest of administrators who rightly felt that academic departments should not be weighing in on controversial political topics.
The blatant Jew hatred evidenced in the letter and the misuse of university resources to promote it earns the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at UIUC a place on the list of the worst Jew-hating academic departments.
Previous articles in the series:
[1] ‘Jew-Hating’ Asian American Studies Program Exposed at Northwestern University.
