The University of California, Berkeley, is allowing its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter to include an inverted red triangle—a symbol Hamas uses to denote Israeli targets—in its logo. The image is displayed on an official university webpage for the group and is permitted to appear at its sanctioned events on campus.
UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof told the Washington Free Beacon that the logo is part of the group’s “First Amendment rights.” Berkeley’s online “Free Speech FAQ,” however, says incitement to “commit acts of violence” is not protected—and Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior analyst Joe Truzman said the Hamas triangle is “absolutely” an example of such incitement.
Hamas has “used it countless times in videos that they’ve published of attacks against Israeli soldiers,” Truzman told the Free Beacon. “This is a symbol of a foreign terrorist organization that’s been designated by the United States.”
“Berkeley is absolutely promoting this, and that’s a problem,” he added. “This red triangle symbol is very deliberate. [SJP] knows what they’re doing.”
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, echoed Truzman’s assessment. “It is a symbol used by Hamas to designate targets to attack,” he said, describing the inverted triangle as a “terrorism symbol” used to “communicate a message of threat, intimidation, and violence.”
UC Berkeley has been known to take a permissive stance when its campus groups affiliate with terrorist groups and espouse violence. In October, the university’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine chapter endorsed a post echoing Hamas’s call to avenge a Gazan propagandist’s death: “Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to all collaborators.” Berkeley’s Bea
On Monday, meanwhile, the university convened a panel, which the Free Beacon attended, to discuss the “humanitarian and geopolitical ramifications” of the joint U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran. Instead of discussing the regime’s long list of human rights abuses, the panelists argued that the effort was a project of “Jewish supremacy” and said Hezbollah was needed to prevent Israel from seizing Lebanon.
“This is a project that is completely directed towards one aim, and that aim—we should state it very clearly—is Jewish supremacy,” Rice University professor and Arab studies chair Abdel Razzaq Takriti said during Monday’s discussion. Karim Makdisi, an international politics professor at the American University of Beirut, said, “Hezbollah and those who support resistance will say, ‘if we do disarm and if we don’t resist Israelis, Lebanon will end, because Israel will simply take it over, and that will be the end of Lebanon as we know it.'”
Berkeley’s defense of the SJP chapter comes amid a spate of posts by the group promoting violence against Israel. On March 3, the group posted a video of rockets flying through the night sky with a caption that read, “Children of Gaza are chanting, ‘O Allah, guide and make their aim accurate,’ after watching the Iranian missiles strike Israel.”
The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, is rooting for Iranian missiles to strike Israel.
“O Allah, guide and make their aim accurate.”
CC @FBIDirectorKash @EDSecMcMahon @HarmeetKDhillon pic.twitter.com/pWHQaxLkkd
— Jessica Costescu (@JessicaCostescu) March 3, 2026
Two days later, the SJP chapter posted a propaganda video accusing the Iranian diaspora of being “traitors” and “internal agents.” Then on Sunday, the group shared praise for Oct. 7 and its mastermind, Yahya Sinwar.
“Al Aqsa Flood was initiated by Yahya Sinwar to reorient global attention toward the Palestinian struggle and to confront the criminal depravity of the zionist entity,” read the post. “Al Aqsa Flood opened a portal towards a new world—causing ripples through the fabric of the old world order by confronting the most vital colonial outpost in the American imperialist apparatus.”
The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at UC Berkeley is now posting propaganda videos accusing the Iranian diaspora of being “traitors” & “agents”
“The real patriots are those who come out into the streets on cold nights for the Iranian Republic.”
CC… pic.twitter.com/Ln95v7x2xK
— Jessica Costescu (@JessicaCostescu) March 6, 2026
Mogulof said those posts are protected under the First Amendment.
On Tuesday, UC Berkeley SJP posted a statement on Instagram calling upon its community to “reject sectarian narratives—fomented by the Axis of Genocide—that seek to divide” the Muslim world. “We must unequivocally condemn these egregious transgressions against our sisters and brothers and emphatically reject narratives that attempt to justify their murder,” the group wrote.
The post included an image of an index finger pointing upwards. A day earlier, Emir Balat, one of the accused terrorists who pledged allegiance to ISIS after throwing an explosive into a crowd of anti-Islam protesters in New York City, flashed the same sign.
The gesture is both a universal salute for ISIS and something that “only very conservative Muslims do,” according to Lorenzo Vidino, director of the program on extremism at George Washington University. “The index finger up is the symbol of unity, of God. It’s definitely not just ISIS.”
Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project, called it “a little more interesting that SJP would offer this, as typically SJP branches end up functioning as leftist outfits rather than Islamist ones.” Collectively, they form “one of the most extreme student groups operating in the United States.”
It isn’t clear what the UC Berkeley chapter intended by including the gesture. The group did not respond to a request for comment.
Several universities—including Columbi
Mogulof, the UC Berkeley spokesman, said that while SJP is a “Registered Student Organization,” it is “legally and financially independent from the campus” and “in no way represent[s] the views and values of the University.” But the group has received university money: It collected $450 for the 2026 fiscal year from UC Berkeley’s student government, which is funded by a mandatory campus student fee.
Jessica Schwalb contributed to this story.
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