Sana Dee
Overview
On January 30, 2015, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Loyola wrote a Facebook post honoring Dee as their “SJPer of the week!” The post also said that “Our historian, Sana, is usually the one behind the cameras, but she has contributed so much to our organization to go unnoticed.”
The Loyola Divest Facebook page, created on January 30, 2014, said that it was previously named “SJP Loyola” and listed the group’s email address as “sjpluc@gmail.com” and the group’s website as “http://sjployola.com.
BDS Campus Activism
On March 10, 2015, Dee featured [00:00:33] in a promotional YouTube video for Loyola Divest. On March 9, 2015, she changed her Facebook profile picture to the Loyola Divest 2015 logo.The divestment effort culminated in a resolution titled “Divestment from Companies Profiting from the Illegal Occupation of the Palestinian Territory To ensure adherence to Loyola’s University Chicago’s Socially Responsible Investment Policy.”
The resolution resolved to urge the Loyola’s Chief Investment Office to collaborate with “students, faculty and staff” to “create and enforce a publicly available socially responsible investment policy and the Shareholder Advocacy Committee that will ensure that Loyola is upholding its Jesuit Catholic mission and Jesuit values in regard to investments” and divest from “corporations profiting from human rights violations committed against the Palestinian people.”
The resolution invoked the 2005 Palestine civil society call for BDS, and quoted Al Jazeera, claiming that “Israel had been buying and ‘weaponizing’ Caterpillar bulldozers then using them to demolish Palestinian homes, build settlements and the separation wall, clear land to build Jewish-only roads, uproot olive and fruit trees, and carry out military operation. [sic]”
The resolution, which was the third such proposed in as many years, passed on March 24, 2015, after an initial tie vote. In response to the resolution, Loyola University President Michael J. Garanzini wrote an open letter, titled “Endorsing a Community of Dialogue,” to the student body.
Garanzini’s letter decried the divestment resolution as a divisive, harmful and ineffective way to conduct discourse about the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
On March 3, 2016, Dee promoted another Loyola Divest campaign on Facebook, “to pressure faculty on University Senate to vote yes on a resolution demanding the university divest from the occupation of Palestine.”
One day earlier, Loyola Divest released a statement saying that it was re-launching a campaign to “mobilize our faculty, administrators and staff to divest from the Israeli occupation,” after Associate Professor and Chair of University Senate, Noah Sobe, refused to put divestment on the University Senate’s agenda.
On March 2, March 1 and February 29, 2016, Dee promoted the 2016 Loyola Divestment campaign on Facebook.
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.
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.
