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Razan Elsadi
Razan Elsadi spread hatred of Israel during its war against Hamas terrorists while she was the secretary of an anti-Israel campus activist group in late 2023.
Elsadi became the secretary of the Palestinian Student Association at the University of Central Florida (UCF-PSA) in September 2023. She still held the position in January 2024 when the group announced its board members. UCF is in Orlando, Florida.
In October 2023, UCF-PSA promoted hatred of Israel online following a series of Hamas terror atrocities and war crimes against Israeli civilians, including mass murder, torture, rape, beheadings and kidnappings, which were executed on October 7, 2023. The terror attacks left over 1,200 Israelis dead, hundreds kidnapped and thousands wounded. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.”
Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., Canada, European Union, Israel and other countries. Founded in 1987, it has killed thousands of Israeli civilians through mass shootings and suicide bombings. Hamas has also kidnapped children, families and the elderly and held them hostage in Gaza. It has desecrated [slide 7] dead bodies and launched numerous rocket attacks against Israeli civilians.
Also while Elsadi served as UCF-PSA secretary, the group promoted the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement on social media.
On September 9, 2023, Elsadi said on the UCF-PSA Instagram page that she was majoring in mechanical engineering at UCF.
On October 31, 2023, while Elsadi was secretary of UCF-PSA, the group issued an anti-Israel statement during Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group. The statement claimed [slide 3] that Israel was committing a “silent genocide” and there was “ongoing oppression and colonialism taking place.”
The statement also accused [slide 2] Israel of “ongoing apartheid and ethnic cleansing” and demonized [slide 1] Israel for “Building walls and checkpoints,” a reference to Israel’s security barrier.
Israel’s security barrier, 97 percent of which is a low chain-link barrier, was built as a deterrent to Palestinian terror attacks. The concrete portions of the fence were built in response to Palestinian sniper attacks.
Israeli checkpoints were built to prevent terror attacks, such as suicide bombings, against Israel's civilian population.
UCF-PSA also claimed [slide 1] in the statement that Israel’s founding was a “Nakba,” and it further stated that “Gaza is the largest open-air prison” and that Gazans are “held under a suffocating blockade.”
The term “Nakba” is generally translated as “catastrophe” in Arabic, referring to the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It is a term used to delegitimize the creation of the State of Israel by drawing a comparison to the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, meaning “catastrophe.”
Referring to Gaza as an “open-air prison” is a way to delegitimize the UN-approved [pp. 39–41] joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed in 2011 to prevent Hamas from acquiring more sophisticated rockets. Following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli military discovered that Hamas went around the blockade by smuggling weaponry through tunnels under the Philadelphi corridor separating Gaza from Egypt.
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by pro-terror activist Omar Barghouti in 2005 to turn “Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.” Barghouti has also called for Israel's destruction and the BDS movement demands would result in that same goal.
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 infiltrating university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments propose resolutions to boycott or divestment from Israel or Israeli-affiliated entities. 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 and pro-terror activism on campus.
