‘Run by the Mob’: How Anti-Semites Took Over Stanford’s Campus
Description
On January 24, Stanford University held a forum on combating anti-Semitism. The event, which featured Stanford president Richard Saller and provost Jenny Martinez, was meant to reassure Jewish students that the university had their back amid the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping college campuses.
"We really do want to make sure that all of the communities on campus get the respect that they deserve," Saller told the forum. "We’re committed to equal treatment and equal protection."
The events that transpired that night undercut that message. By the end of the evening, protesters had physically threatened Jewish students, harassed a rabbi, and told employees of the elite university that they would "find out where you live."
David Schuller, 24, a yarmulke-wearing graduate student in Stanford’s physics department, found himself surrounded by a mob of hecklers when he approached a protest outside the forum.
"The IDF killed your hostages," the mob chanted at Schuller, according to videos of the incident obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, which show police standing by as the encounter unfolds. One protester can be seen taking the visibly Jewish student aside and whispering what Schuller described as a threat in his ear.
"He told me, ‘Watch it man, we’re watching you. You better know what you’re getting into,’" Schuller told the Free Beacon. "I had to take a couple steps back and tell the cops he threatened physical violence."
Another confrontation took place on a nearby quad where, in a video that has since gone viral, protesters told Jewish students to "go back to Brooklyn," called white people "terrorists," and promised to destroy Israel and America.
As administrators tried to keep order, some protesters began issuing threats.
"Stanford employees, we know your names and we know where you work," one protester said, according to a new video exclusively obtained by the Free Beacon.
"And we will soon find out where you live," another chimed in.
Other protesters followed people exiting the forum, which took place on the second floor of a large campus building, and pursued them down a flight of stairs, chanting "shame" and brandishing signs in their faces.
Among those targeted was Stanford Chabad Rabbi Dov Greenberg, according to videos obtained by the Free Beacon, who can be seen leading students away from the event with hecklers in tow.
"There is only one solution: Intifada revolution," the protesters chanted at the rabbi. "Zionist, Zionist, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide."
The Washington Free Beacon could not identify the protesters in the videos, who were a mix of Stanford students and members of the surrounding community, according to people who attended the forum.
A university spokeswoman, Dee Mostofi, said that Stanford had been unable to make any positive identifications, adding that "they likely came from outside our community."
The videos, most of which have not been previously reported, paint a picture of a campus in chaos where Jews are subject to physical intimidation and administrators have ceded control to agitators, standing by as keffiyeh-clad mobs rampage through the school. And according to people who have witnessed the mayhem firsthand, that night of protest was just the tip of the iceberg.
Students have called on their peers to "take up arms" and vandalized pro-Israel signage. Classes have been disrupted, buildings defaced, and campus quads commandeered.
Posters promoting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement were strewn around the room where Ari Kelman—a Stanford professor who has argued that concern about campus anti-Semitism is overblown—taught a fall-semester course called "Understanding Jews." No posters appeared in the adjacent classrooms, a student in the course said, suggesting Kelman’s class was targeted due to its subject matter.
Pro-Palestinian students have camped out overnight in the middle of campus and refused administrators’ orders to pack up and leave. And Jewish students have been harassed by the very instructors who grade their work.
In one particularly shocking incident, Hamza El Boudali, a teaching assistant for an introductory computer science class, approached Stanford’s Blue and White Tent, a pro-Israel display manned by Jewish students, with a sign that read "Ask Me About Jihad," according to audio and video reviewed by the Free Beacon.
When students confronted El Boudali, he told them he would welcome the assassination of President Joe Biden and said that Hamas would be preferable to the current U.S government.
The Jewish students—one of whom is in the computer science course El Boudali grades—asked him how he thought Jews would fare in a Hamas-occupied America.
"Very well," El Boudali replied. "Just like the hostages."
The student in El Boudali’s class, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said that the university was told about the encounter in an informal meeting, but declined to strip El Boudali of grading duties, citing a policy that lets students request a regrade of their work by a different instructor. The school did move El Boudali’s office hours to Zoom after the incident, the student said.
"Stanford takes accusations about potential discriminatory behavior by instructors very seriously," Mostofi, the university spokeswoman, wrote in an email to the Free Beacon. "Immediate steps are taken to ensure the integrity of teaching and grading."
El Boudali confirmed that the encounter took place but claimed it had been misconstrued.
"For months, the Blue and White Tent has been presenting Islamophobic rhetoric and misinformation to the campus community," he told the Free Beacon. "As a Muslim student who has been here for over 5 years, I took it upon myself to combat their Islamophobia through education."
Experts said the scope and severity of the incidents—verified through video recordings, social media posts, WhatsApp messages, and other materials reviewed by the Free Beacon—could be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit and warranted an investigation. They also stressed that threats and intimidation are not protected by the First Amendment, which applies even to private universities under California law.
Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, a <a hr