Noah Whinston

Overview

Noah Whinston is the only Jewish member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Northwestern University (NU).

Whinston is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

Whinston is one of the founders of NU-Divest, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign on the NU campus. He is a co-author of the NU-Divest resolution and has been the resolutions most active promoter.

Whinston is a student at NU pursuing a degree in Political Science. Whinston is very involved in NU campus life and is the Associated Student Government's (ASG) Speaker of the Senate.

Supporting Terrorist Rasmea Odeh

During 2014, Whinston was active in protesting the fresh charges laid against convicted terrorist-murderer Rasmea Odeh.

Odeh was a military operative with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization. In 1969, she masterminded a bombing that killed two university students in a Jerusalem supermarket. Odeh also attempted to bomb the British consulate.
 
Odeh confessed, in a highly detailed account, the day following her arrest. In a 2004 documentary, one of Odeh’s co-conspirators directly implicated her as the mastermind. 

In 1970, an Israeli court tried and convicted Odeh for her involvement in both bombings and sentenced her to life imprisonment. However, Odeh was released 10 years later, in a prisoner swap and emigrated to the United States. In 2017, Odeh was deported to Jordan and stripped of U.S. citizenship, after admitting to immigration fraud.

SJP NU

Whinston was one of 12 co-authors of a Letter to the Editor written to the Daily Northwestern that chastised a J Street U Northwestern hosted event, which attempted to present both a Palestinian and Israeli perspective on major milestones in Israeli history.

Whinston and his co-authors argued that an Israeli perspective on the region's history is inherently invalid and that only a Palestinian narrative showing Israel's "colonialism, occupation and settlements" should be presented. They additionally objected that the presentation did not include an "authentic Palestinian perspective," that presented the "ethnic cleansing of Palestinians" by Israelis and "the systematic uprooting of Palestinians for the Zionist project."

Pushing BDS on Campus

Whinston has invited anti-Israel speakers to NU in order to encourage students to join the NU-Divest campaign. Additionally, Whinston was a paramount figure in introducing the NU-Divest resolution and was frequently the primary speaker at ASG meetings promoting and defending the resolution.

Moreover, Whinston was one of three authorship speakers at a 2015 NU Divest hearing.

The NU-Divest Resolution, which called for the university to boycott six Israeli corporations, narrowly passed on 19 February 2015 after a hearing lasting over five hours. Prior to the vote, the NU Divest team campaigned to promote the resolution including a pro-BDS workshop to spotlight the "corporations that are profiting off of the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands."

NU Divest have continued to put pressure on the university since the vote, most recently through engaging in discussion with the chief Investment Office at NU. Despite this, it was reported in May 2015 that no policy changes or actual divestment have taken place at NU, which is usually the case following the passing of these non-binding divestment resolutions.

SJP

SJP is a student organization engaged in anti-Israel activity on North American college and university campuses.

The first chapter of SJP was founded in 2001 at the University of California at Berkeley by Professor Hatem Bazian. Bazian has spread classic anti-Semitism, reportedly promoted religious anti-Semitism and defended the Hamas terror group. In 2004, Bazian called for “intifada” in America.

SJP organizes anti-Israel campaigns, including running annual Israel Apartheid Weeks, often in collaboration with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Muslim Students Association (MSA) campus chapters.

SJP has been a major force in pushing the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement on campuses. Chapters have initiated dozens of BDS resolutions in student governments, which have been proposed on or around Jewish holidays, a time when many Jewish students are off-campus.

SJP activists have reportedly physically assaulted, intimidated and harassed Jewish students, disrupted pro-Israel campus events and demonized pro-Israel campus organizations.

Chapters have often endorsed and campaigned for numerous terrorists and whitewashed terrorism.

JVP

JVP was founded in Berkeley, California in 1996, as an activist group with an emphasis on the “Jewish tradition” of peace, social justice and human rights. The organization is currently led by Rebecca Vilkomerson and its board members include Israel critics Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky and Tony Kushner.

JVP, which generally employs civil disobedience tactics to disrupt pro-Israel speakers and events, consists of American Jews and non-Jewish “allies” highly critical of Israeli policies. A staunch supporter of the BDS movement, JVP claims to aim its campaigns at companies that either support the Israeli military (Hewlett-Packard) or are active in the West Bank (SodaStream).

Although several Jewish groups critical of Israeli policies, like J Street and Partners for a Progressive Israel, make efforts to operate within the mainstream American Jewish community, JVP functions outside. The group is often criticized for serving as a tokenized Jewish voice for the pro-Palestinian camp and is widely regarded as the BDS movement’s “Jewish wing.” 

JVP denies the notion of “Jewish peoplehood” and has even gone so far as to refer to its own Ashkenazi (Jews who spent the Diaspora in European countries) leadership as “white supremacy inside of JVP.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has accused JVP of being “the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist group in the United States,” and said the group “exploits Jewish culture and rituals to reassure its own supporters that opposition to Israel not only does not contradict, but is actually consistent with, Jewish values.”

The ADL also claimed that “JVP consistently co-sponsors rallies to oppose Israeli military policy that are marked by signs and slogans  comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, demonizing Jews and voicing support for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.”

According to the ADL website, JVP “uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility.”

BDS

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true. 

One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”  

Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”

In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.

BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.

The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.

Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.

BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.

Social Media and Weblinks

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/noah.whinston

Twitter:https://twitter.com/nwhinston

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/pub/noah-whinston/59/b48/665