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Students United For Palestinian Equal Rights
Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights (SUPER) is an affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
There are currently four campuses with active SUPER chapters, including: University of Washington,Seattle (SUPER UW), Portland State University (PSU), Western Washington University (WWU) and Macalester College (Mac). Chapters have regularly sent their members to the National SJP conference.
SUPER chapters consistently advocate for violent resistance against Israel and glorify militants and terrorists. The two largest and most active SUPER chapters are SUPER PSU and SUPER UW. Below is a summary of these two SUPER chapters’ activities.
Honoring Terrorists
On November 19, 2014, SUPER PSU hosted an event for Rasmea Odeh, calling the charge on which Odeh was tried and convicted “nothing but a pretext to attack this icon of the Palestine liberation movement.”
Rasmea 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.
On February 27, 2016, SUPER PSU hosted a Palestinian Cultural Night, featuring multiple visual displays that honored terrorists, like Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) members Leila Khaled and Rasmea Odeh.
Leila Khaled was a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and participated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and El Al Flight 219 in 1970.
In a 2014 interview, Khaled opined that the Palestinian second intifada failed because it was not violent enough.
As of 2016, Khaled remained a member of PFLP's Political Bureau. The PFLP claimed “credit” for the 2001 assassination of the Israeli tourism minister and the 2014 Har Nof Massacre, where six people were murdered during morning prayers in a Jerusalem synagogue.
The same event honored the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat and senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi, as well as Haneen Zoabi — a member of Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) — who has been investigated for inciting violence on a number of occasions.
On March 1, 2014, SUPER PSU hosted another Palestinian Cultural Night where they honored Yasser Arafat.
Defending A Terrorist
On February 3, 2015, SUPER UW posted an article to Facebook defending Rasmea Odeh and committed to “participate in local action” during the “National Week to Defend Rasmea” prior to her sentencing on March 12th for immigration fraud.
On December 8, of 2014, SUPER UW again posted to Facebook in defense of Odeh. calling on followers to telephone the St. Clair County Sheriff and “ask that Odeh be released “from solitary confinement immediately.”
Glorifying Militants
On May 18, 2016, SUPER UW announced on Facebook the first “Ghassan Kanafani Scholarship,” offering a “creative arts and writing scholarship to three Palestinian youth in the diaspora.”
Kanafani was a leading member and spokesperson of the designated terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in its early years.
Kanafani announced the PFLP’s responsibility for the Lod Airport Massacre of May 1972 and was linked to the airport attackers. The attack killed 26 people.
The scholarship was offered by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM USA). PYM’s website states, “Our liberation...will be gained with the path that was written with the blood of our martyrs. We reaffirm that the only path that we are concerned with is the path that explicitly heads towards the liberation of our land and the return of our people to Palestine… All Palestine.”
On June 30, 2015, SUPER UW encouraged students to “please take action” and sign a petition calling on Israel to free Khader Adnan, who was in his 54th day of a hunger strike at the time.
Khader Adnan is a senior member of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). PIJ “is dedicated to the violent destruction of Israel,” and has no ‘political wing’ or ‘social wing’, only a ‘military wing’ that focuses solely on promoting terrorism and the murder of Israelis. It is reported that the group is backed by Iran and has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks.
A 2007 YouTube video showed Adnan praising and encouraging suicide bombings: "Who among you will carry the next explosive belt? Who among you will fire the next bullets? Who among you will have his body parts blown all over?”
Promoting Incitement
On October 13, 2016, SUPER UW shared an article on Facebook that accused Israel of arresting Palestinian Astrophysicist and Professor at Al Quds University Imad Barghouthi for getting “likes and shares on Facebook,” trivializing the effects of Barghouthi’s incitement. The article was published by the anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada.
Barghouti is a vocal supporter of Hamas’s military wing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades and has called for killing and being killed in the name of Islam.
A video, published on October 22, 2014, showed Barghouthi, at an Al-Quds University Hamas rally, draped in a Hamas banner, calling upon students to design weapons. He urged students to devote themselves to designing precision-guided missiles and sniper rifles to target “zionist soldiers” and “to hunt them down in their bedrooms.” Barghouthi also called the people of the “West Bank” to be “the spearhead” and be “ready to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
On May 18, 2016, SUPER UW encouraged students to sign a petition to Israel to release Barghouthi from jail. Barghouthi was sentenced to prison for seven months for incitement to violence.
On July 13, 2016, SUPER UW also invited students on Facebook to sign a petition calling on Israel to release Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour from house arrest.
Tatour was placed under house arrest for poetry that fueled the violence known as the “Knife Intifada” the previous fall. Tatour had supported the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and posted to her 4,800 + Facebook friends, “I am the next shahid [martyr]” on Facebook under a picture of attempted-murderess Asraa Zidan Tawfik Abed. Tatour also posted a YouTube video of stone-throwing Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers, voiced-over by a woman reading a poem that glorified violence and rejected peaceful solutions. The poem urged listeners to “follow the caravan of martyrs and shred the disgraceful constitution which imposed degradation and humiliation and deterred us from restoring justice.”
On May 23, 2016, SUPER PSU hosted an event featuring Nada Elia who — in October of 2015, while Palestinians across Israel stabbed scores of Israeli civilians during the “Knife Intifada” — wrote an article titled “Why Be Afraid of an Intifada?” where she said “Intifadas are good.”
For more information on the history of SJP, an affiliate of SUPER, see SJP.
