UT Dallas anti-Israel activists disrupt graduation, SJP leader says genocidal slogan

Anti-Israel students disrupted the commencement ceremony at the University of Texas at Dallas on May 10. 

UT Dallas’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) posted an Instagram video showing students walking out during University President Richard C. Benson’s speech while chanting “Disclose, divest, we will not stop we will not rest.”

The students were wearing keffiyehs and holding Palestinian flags. 

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Students also chanted “40,000 people dead,” referring to the supposed death toll of the Israeli war against the terrorist group Hamas. Those numbers and others frequently cited about the Palestinian death toll, however, originate with the Gaza Health Ministry and have been consistently viewed as unreliable. 

In a separate video posted by the UT Dallas SJP, the SJP chapter’s president disrupted a different graduation ceremony for the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science on May 15, standing up and holding a banner reading “Divest from death.” As a result, he was escorted out of the ceremony. 

Speaking in the video after his being escorted out, the SJP leader said: “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a statement that has been called genocidal and a call to ethnically cleanse Jews from their homeland. 

The SJP stated in the caption of the video: “Despite the fact that many graduates this week took on similiar [sic] actions, [the chapter president] was subsequently escorted off the stage and outside by Dean of Students Amanda Smith, who not only called him a ‘disappointment’ but also threatened him with arrest for criminal trespass. He was then forced off campus by UTDPD, who acted as agents of our cowardly administration, utilizing various intimidation tactics and issuing similiar [sic] threats.”

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“For UTD to deny a Palestinian student his own graduation, and for administration to target him specifically for his identity and affiliation with organizing for Palestine, on the 76th anniversary of the Nakba that displaced his family, is clear anti-Palestinian discrimination. We angrily condemn their racist and disrespectful actions,” they continued. 

Campus Reform has contacted UT Dallas and the school’s SJP chapter for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.