For $1,700, plus transportation costs, one can attend a summer school August 1-12, 2016, at Sehir University in Istanbul, Turkey, which seeks to undermine Israeli statehood. Some of the following topics include:

-Colonialism, settler colonialism and the meaning of de-colonization

-Understanding Zionism, as a colonial, racial and Euro-centric Project

-The Palestinian Nakba and the dispossession

One of the main propaganda points behind the school is that Palestine is a “colonized land” and the Palestinians are victims of “an on-going settler colonial project that is working constantly to bring about their total dispossession and transfer from their ancestral lands through the systematic deployment of violence.” There’s also a concerted effort to advocate that “Palestine should be examined within a colonial paradigm and nothing else.” This is an attempt to simply exclude any discussion of Zionist ambitions and their legitimacy.  It also means painting Israel’s Western allies as evil oppressors with malicious intentions for the land.

The intent is to blame the Jews for a kind of ethnic cleansing. “The current occupation,” organizers say, “is one manifestation of the colonial project that intended from the beginning to dispossess and expel the population.”

The program is star-studded by the standards of radical anti-Israel standards.   Present will be Omar Barghouti, who is the founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).  The program has a faculty saturated with radical activists such as Professor Hatem Bazian of UC Berkeley.    Bazian is also a supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement and has a storied history of radical Islamist ties. Several of his notable past statements include:

“Well, we’ve been watching [an] Intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an Intifada in this country?”…

“We need to make a link between what is taking place today in Palestine and the whole transnational, anti-colonial, anti-slavery, and anti-oppression struggle…. You need to understand the link of Israel to what’s taking place in Latin America…. Israel was helping the death squads and training them.”

There’s more to the school and to the BDS movement than just territorial disputes and ‘justice’ for Palestinians.  The whole movement is a blatant attempt to try and remove any Jewish connection to their historical homeland, and to also degrade the Jewish people. There’s a reason why one doesn’t find any condemnation of Hamas or any other Palestinian terrorist group at these kinds of events. For these Palestinian activists, Jews are the enemy. It’s obvious where some of these anti-Semitic attitudes came from.  Here are just a few examples:

O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people. –Quran 5:51

You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews and those who associate others with Allah… –Quran 5:82

The Jews say, “Ezra is the son of Allah”; and the Christians say, “The Messiah is the son of Allah.” That is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved [before them]. May Allah destroy them… –Quran 9:30

The Palestine De-Colonial Summer School is just another effort to spread radical Palestinian activism aimed at demeaning the Jewish people and propagating revisionist lies. It’s an example how Islamists have penetrated the world of academia. We must unveil this agenda in order to defeat this academic jihad.