The College Fix

Socialist student group says it’s not responsible

Someone graffitied “Free Palestine” on the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The vandalism occurred on Saturday. Students for a Democratic Society and other groups have demanded a removal of Meir’s name. She led Israel as prime minister from 1969 to 1974. and attended the public university.

Fox 6 reported, “two people were involved in throwing an object through a first-floor window and defacing the exterior of the building with graffiti. Spray paint on the west wing of the library reads ‘free Palestine.’”

The university did not blame SDS and is still investigating the incident.

“SDS has no involvement in this incident,” according to a statement by the group on Instagram. It called the destruction “miniscule” when compared to what it calls Israeli genocide.

“SDS or any other organization cannot control the people’s reactions to having a building on campus dedicated to a racist, Zionist war criminal,” the statement read.

“This and further escalation by community members is not surprising as the university continues to ignore the students’ demands,” the group wrote on Instagram.

“A broken window and some ‘defacement’ is miniscule relative to the neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, places of worship destroyed and 30,000 lives lost in Palestine at the hands of the genocidal settler ‘Israel[,]’ all funded by our own government,” the group wrote.

It reiterated its demands, including the removal of Meir’s name and a divestment from “weapon manufacturers” which it says “aid the Palestinian genocide in ‘Israel.’”

It wants the university to halt study abroad trips to Israel. The group also rallied outside Chancellor Mark Mone’s home last Thursday, according to Instagram posts.

The activism campaign to cancel Meir previously included a “prayer and vigil” and the writing of names of the “martyrs of Palestine” on the pillars of the library.

“Meir was a Zionist known for her crimes against Palestine,” one speaker declared.

But Yaakov Menken, a rabbi, criticized the group’s claims in previous comments to The Fix.

The petition “certainly has nothing to do with Golda Meir, who famously said ‘We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.’ Hamas is now using children to protect their murderous terror operations from elimination, so nothing has changed,” Menken said.

The managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values also questioned the accuracy of the name “Palestine.”

“For 2,000 years, the only people called Palestinians were Jews, from the time of the Palestinian Talmud to the 1940s when the Palestine Post was the English-language Jewish paper, still printed today as the Jerusalem Post,” Menken said.

“Palestine has never been more than a European colonialist name for the Holy Land of the Jews, a territory with at least six indigenous names identified in the Bible.”

MORE: Broken glass as pro-Palestinian students disrupt UC-Berkeley event

IMAGE: Fox 6

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