Northwestern University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter held an anarchist training session for its members at which it cited propaganda from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group urging U.S. students to “build an Intifada” and “destroy amerika.”
Northwestern’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter featured two radical pamphlets as part of its materials for the Thursday training, titled “Organizing Safety 101.” One of those, an anarchist pamphlet, quoted a PFLP leader and called on students to “build an Intifada” so they could “destroy amerika.” The other, crafted by the SJP chapter, featured a PFLP cartoon on the cover and encouraged students to “channel [their] anger” so they could “aid in the fight” against Israel.
The event coincides with the Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to address anti-Semitism on college campuses across the nation, slashing more than $430 million in federal funds at Columbia University and threatening to cut another $9 billion in grants and contracts at Harvard University. And on Tuesday, the Trump administration froze $790 million at Northwestern amid a civil rights investigation, the New York Times reported.
Still, a Northwestern graduate student told the Washington Free Beacon he doubts the university will take action to address the anti-Semitic training. He said seeing the SJP pamphlet, which was passed out on campus and obtained by the Free Beacon, made his “stomach drop.”
“Seeing the [SJP] pamphlet made my stomach drop. If you put that next to Nazi or Communist propaganda from back in the day, you would not be able to tell the difference. This is how they signal their true intentions- getting rid of Jews everywhere,” he said. “It’s terrifying that they are planning out how to subvert the university’s rules and get away with it. Unfortunately, it’s likely that they will because Northwestern has an extensive track record of refusing to enforce their own rules.”
Northwestern did not respond to a request for comment.
The anarchist pamphlet included in the SJP chapter’s training, titled “The Battle of Hind’s Hall, From Our Side Of The Barricades,” was produced by Unity of Fields, a self-described “militant front against the US-NATO-zionist axis of imperialism.” The anarchist group has played a significant role in fomenting unrest at Columbia University, most prominently when radicals stormed Hamilton Hall and symbolically renamed it “Hind’s Hall” last spring.
The pamphlet opens with a quote from Ghassan Kanafani, a PFLP leader, and suggests that in order “to destroy amerika,” students on college campuses nationwide must violently escalate.
“A message to the student intifada: Let us not dialogue with our persecutors. In the words of Ghassan Kanafani, we must reject the ‘conversation between the sword and the neck’ … [T]o build an Intifada here is to build a popular cradle of resistance and a unity of fields to destroy amerika,” reads the pamphlet. “There is no end to our struggle. Intifada until victory. Which side of the barricades are you on?”
“Put simply, we can’t keep bringing a knife to a gunfight,” it goes on. “These institutions, as apparatuses of the state, will only answer to organized force. Negotiations only matter if we have the leverage to make the enemy acquiesce to our demands. That leverage can only be obtained through continuously raising the stakes. Their actions against the people cannot continue with impunity. … There’s no end to the violence they’ve wrought upon the world. There must be consequences—and it is consequences alone that will bring them to the negotiating table and force them to play ball.”
The SJP pamphlet, meanwhile, titled “Taking Action For Palestine: Knowing What to Expect from Repression at Northwestern,” bears a violent cartoon on the cover showing a crowd rising up in armed resistance. That image was originally included in a PFLP bulletin published in 1980.
It goes on to list the core tenets of “Al-Thawabit,” a foundational creed created by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1977 “to which all Palestinian factions must pledge fealty.” The principles include the “right to resistance,” the “right to self-determination,” the designation of “Jerusalem as the capital” of a Palestinian state, and the “right to return.”
The SJP pamphlet features a section offering students guidance on “mitigat[ing] University repression.” It includes strategies to “prevent identification from administration” during protests, such as wearing masks and avoiding interactions with school officials. The pamphlet also provides tips on how to handle disciplinary notices from Northwestern and what steps to take if arrested, such as contacting the National Lawyers Guild. That group defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on the grounds that Palestinians have a right to use “armed struggle” against Israel and called on the U.S. government to remove terrorist designations for Hamas and Hezbollah because they are “exercising their fundamental and protected right to self-defense.”
The pamphlet concludes by declaring, “Glory to the martyrs, freedom for the prisoners, healing to the wounded, disgrace to the traitors, victory to the resistance,” and includes a QR code encouraging students to “get involved,” which directs to a recruitment form for the Northwestern SJP chapter.
“[I]t is imperative that we take into account our personal situations, evaluate our ability to participate in given actions, and escalate for Palestine,” the pamphlet continues. “Feel your fear and channel it into anger. The genocide in Palestine will not stop on its own accord, its our job to aid in the fight! Until liberation.”
In an effort to address concerns, Northwestern released a progress report on March 31 detailing steps campus officials have taken to combat anti-Semitism, including the implementation of mandatory anti-discrimination training. The training, however, relies on unverified data from the Council on American-Islamic Relations that inflate Islamophobic attacks, giving the false impression that those attacks vastly outpace anti-Semitic hate crimes, the Free Beacon reported in February.
The progress report further stated that, as of last month, “there has been a significant decrease in reports of discrimination or harassment based on antisemitism or shared Jewish ancestry at Northwestern compared with the same period last academic year.”
The SJP pamphlet called the new policies a form of repression.
“Policies such as those added into the Code of Conduct were made specifically to repress us because the University understands the danger of a strong, unified student movement willing to risk their privilege as students for the liberation of the Third World poses to their interests in maintaining the Empire,” the student group wrote.
The Northwestern grad student called on the Trump administration to step in to protect Jewish students.
“I hope Northwestern will start to care about their large Jewish population and will defend them as they would any other group. In the likely case this doesn’t happen, I call upon the Trump Administration to please help us and force Northwestern to protect their students equally,” he said. “The pamphlet is a clear call for violence, not peaceful demonstration or civil disobedience.
“It’s infuriating, dehumanizing, and terrifying that these people are so invested in attacking Jews and Jewish identity.”
Another student, a sophomore in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, accused the university of turning “a blind eye” to Jewish students’ concerns.
“It made me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome on campus to see the same offensive rhetoric coming up again and again—‘Glory to the Martyrs’ and violent pictures on the cover—it was like nothing had changed since last year,” she told the Free Beacon. “When marginalized groups determine that political phrases are offensive and further contribute to their exclusion, our norm is to alter our language. I am appalled we can’t extend this basic human decency to the Jewish people as NUSJP continues to double down on rhetoric that has led to a rise in hate crimes.”
“And none of NUSJP’s actions even help the Palestinian cause; it only serves to make Jews feel unsafe on campus,” the student added. “The university says they are all for inclusion, but when it comes to Jews, they turn a blind eye.”
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