The University of California-Santa Barbara suspended its “Multicultural Center” just a day after the center made clear that Jews were not welcome and suggested that Jews drink blood.
The Multicultural Center MCC held a “collective action” on Monday, where visible signs in the doors read “Zionists not welcome.” Signs in the windows said “F— pinkwashing. Queers for Palestine,” “Zionism is terrorism,” and “when people are occupied, resistance is justified.”
There were more than 100 signs inside the building, including “Dykes 4 Palestine,” “DEI is white supremacy,” “Zionists — just say you hate black, brown and indigenous,” and some that targeted the student association president for being “neutral.”
Chancellor Henry T. Yang wrote in an email to students that there were “offensive social media messages and signage at the Multicultural Center entrance. Campus offices are reviewing these unauthorized and unofficial messages,” the school paper reported. “The posting of such messages is a violation of our principles of community and inclusion.”
Students Supporting Israel, a pro-Israel campus group, said that the multicultural center was excluding the Jewish community.
“While the MCC prides itself on dedicating to creating a safe and inclusive space for cultural minorities, this attempt aims to silence, threaten, intimidate, and discriminate against the Jewish community,” the group said.
The Multicultural Center (MCC) social media “invoked antisemitism, including the notorious blood libel, saying: ‘Why does our school support a regime to feast on the blood of our fellow humans,’” USCB’s Hillel, a Jewish group, said. “For over 24 hours, these messages went unchallenged while extremist elements celebrated the latest attempt to harass, bully, and intimidate Jewish students.”
The gathering took place from 9am until after 3pm, and university administration were present, the school paper said.
The UCSB MCC’s official Instagram account wrote “in case we aren’t clear, let us spell it out” above a picture of the front doors with signs saying “Zionists not welcome.”
The day after Hamas’ October 7 massacre, UCSB Sociology Department Chair Lisa Hajjar celebrated online, and UCSB students ripped down posters of Israeli hostages.
UCSB History Professor Butch Ware has vocally espoused the most unhinged rhetoric surrounding Israel, with his Instagram claiming that it is a conspiracy that Hamas rapes people, and that “the white Supremacist settlers are the actual r*apists.” Another post is titled “The Death Of Israel,” continuing that “settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life.” In yet another post, he wrote that we are witnessing “the final collapse of Zionism” and “every doctrine of racial supremacy.”
On October 22, as Ware went on an anti-Israel tirade, one Jewish parent wrote to Chancellor Yang calling attention to a speech where Ware said of Israel, “slay the beast. Don’t cut off the tentacles, stab it in the heart and the tentacles die.” The email, reviewed by The Daily Wire, called him a “a black Muslim activist who is bent on tying BLM type actions to Palestinian causes.” Yang did not reply.
A year ago, the MCC held an “anti-hate” event with “ethnic studies” activist Professor Diane Fujino, who is married to Matef Harmachis, who advocated to exclude Jews from California’s ethnic studies curriculum, arguing that they “did precious little to help bring ES to our university and college campuses. And now they believe they have some say in the matter?”
Harmachis was previously suspended from his job after grabbing a boy who was wearing an Israel shirt, and later fired and convicted of battery of another student.
Also on Monday at UC’s Berkeley campus, protesters broke windows, intimidated students, and incited a mob because of the presence of an Israeli speaker, Ron Bar-Yoshafat.
WATCH: UC Berkeley Jewish Students Forced To Evacuate After Mob Storms Event With IDF Soldier
The University of California system, the largest university system in the world, was on the verge of allowing anti-Semites to make “ethnic studies” mandatory for high schoolers before they could even apply, a move that would force the content onto public and private high schools across the country.
A committee of the University of California’s Academic Senate narrowly voted not to advance a proposal under pressures from the Board of Regents after Jews pointed the regents to how UC ethnic studies professors explicitly opposed a “guardrail” that would prevent ethnic studies from encouraging “bias, bigotry, or discrimination,” which the proessors said prevented them from teaching about Israel.
