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Americans for Peace and Tolerance’s (APT) new documentary, Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus, explores the roots of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement waged against Israel, and reveals the mob mentality that characterizes antisemitic student groups on college campuses across the US.https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/12/26/a-new-documentary-shows-the-extent-and-nature-of-anti-zionist-hate-spaces-on-campus/

The 70-minute film strikes a nerve, and an emotional punch.

Authenticated cell-phone videos and recorded interviews transport viewers to hate-crime scenes where Jewish students are subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and are intimidated even by college professors and administrators.

British singer George Michael, who became one of the pop idols of the 1980s with Wham! and then forged a…

This is not a propaganda film about the Middle East conflict, Avi Goldwasser, the documentary’s executive producer, tells JNS.org. It is strictly “a film about what’s happening on campus,” he says.

Indeed, recent events at schools like Northeastern University in Boston deserve scrutiny. On that campus, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) protesters have chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the state of Israel has got to go!” Statues of Jewish donors have been vandalized, while cruel sticker campaigns and “apartheid walls” are used to single out and shame individual Jewish students regardless of their opinions about Israel.

In April 2013, Northeastern University SJP activists stormed into a classroom and interrupted a Holocaust memorial service. “The lessons of the Holocaust were not learned, you are child murderers,” SJP members are caught shouting on camera. Going beyond Northeastern, Hate Spaces tours the country, revealing a long list of hotspots where the BDS movement is spiraling out of control.

The rigid ideology of BDS

A quote from George Packer’s 2011 New Yorker article, “Deepest Cuts,” gets to the core of what is wrong with BDS: “Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.” The scenes depicted in the documentary clearly demonstrate that a rigid ideology has taken hold of BDS supporters on college campuses. Groups like SJP use megaphones to shout their rallying slogans, but adherents are fundamentally uninterested in engaging in a serious, civil debate with anyone who questions their self-proclaimed righteous position.

APT is a Boston-based non-profit whose stated mission is to advocate for “peaceful coexistence and tolerance in an ethnically diverse America.” According to Goldwasser, Hate Spaces is geared at engaging “decent people in America who would look at an indecent situation … and understand the obvious unfairness.”

“No other minority group would stand for such treatment on campus,” Goldwasser says of Jewish students’ plight.

Hate Spaces meticulously charts the flow of money from dictators in Muslim countries to American universities, suggesting that this transfer of capital buttresses support for Islamic causes among academics. Devoid of intellectual integrity, professors choose a path of least resistance when discussing Israel and the Palestinian territories, and are unfairly sympathetic to the BDS agenda. The result is a classroom where one side of the debate is permitted to demonize the other, and pro-Israel students are systematically denied a voice.

“Today on American college campuses, there is only one group of students that you are allowed to attack and you can attack at will, and those are Jews,” states the narrator in the new film Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus. This latest production from Americans for Peace & Tolerance, the makers of the J Street Challenge, engagingly examines how demonization of Israel’s Jewish state is reviving anti-Semitism in American academia.

Hate Spaces extensively documents what has become a nationwide campus “hostile environment” for Jews, according to Susan Tuchman from the Zionist Organization of America. Student signs at colleges like Columbia University appear in the film with statements such as “Israel is a swollen parasite…the Jews: Too fat…Too greedy…Too powerful…Fight the Jewish mafia.”

Quoted in Hate Spaces, University of California (UC)-Los Angeles Hillel President Natalie Charney notes an “anti-Israel culture” in which “singling out the only Jewish state creates an environment where it’s ok to single out Jewish students.” The film focuses on one of Israel’s main campus adversaries, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a leading supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel with deep links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The film notes SJP members chanting “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate the nonbinding 2013 UC-San Diego student council decision for BDS and a SJP chapter president’s 2010 assault upon a Jewish UC-Berkeley student.

Former SJP member and current “pro-Israeli Muslim” Rezwan Ovo Haq notes that “SJP largely masquerades behind the human rights issue” of support Palestinians as part of a broader human rights agenda. Yet in SJP he was “slandering Israel and I had deep-seated hatred for Israel.” Corresponding to this ugly reality, a University of Tennessee SJP member once tweeted: “What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza leaves the oven.”

Eminent law professor Alan Dershowitz notes in a film interview that “antisemitism used to come mostly from the right, now it’s coming mostly from the hard left.” Hereby “one of the strangest alliances on university campuses today is between the hard left” of minorities like blacks and Islamist groups like SJP. Accordingly, San Diego State University student journalist Anthony Berteaux discusses once identifying with SJP as a gay, Asian man.

Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens wonders at such leftwing “useful idiots of the twenty-first century.” “Why is it that the liberals and progressives who espouse a certain set of values are so intent on demonizing and de-legitimatizing the one country that shares their values” in the Middle East, he asks. By contrast, past African-American civil rights leaders such as W.E.B Dubois, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin “have been Zionists, from socialists to liberals to conservatives,” notes African-American Zionist Chloe Valdary.

Faux progressive condemnation of Israel, Dershowitz notes, arises largely because “there is no subject today in the world which has more distortion, more lies, more dissembling, than discussion about Israel.” Hate Spaces shows women from Israel’s Arab minority joining Israel’s parliament and winning the Miss Israel beauty contest, belying a sign in the film condemning Israel as the “Fourth Reich. During speaking engagements, Dershowitz challenges listeners “to name a single country in the history of the world faced with threats comparable to those threats faced by Israel both internal and external that have had a better record of human rights.”