Rutgers University’s college avenue campus. Photo: Tomwsulcer.

Rutgers University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) campus chapter, alleging disorderly conduct that disrupted classes and university operations.

“We are implementing interim suspension of organizational activity based on multiple complaints against Students for Justice in Palestine, which have had multiple cases of disrupting classes, a program, meals, and student studying,” Rutgers Student Affairs said in a letter to the group that emerged online. “There are also allegations of vandalism occurring at the Rutgers Business School while your program was taking place.”

With the decision, the New Jersey university joins several other schools — Columbia University, Brandeis University, George Washington University, and Florida’s state university system — that have sanctioned the group for either uttering hate speech or breaking school rules.

Rutgers SJP was one of dozens of SJP chapters that cheered Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, an attack that resulted in some 1,200 civilian deaths and numerous rapes of Israeli women. As video footage of the terrorist group’s atrocities circled the web, Rutgers SJP shared on its Instagram pages that said “Glory to resistance🇵🇸” and “the clock started running when the majority of the Palestinian population was expelled from their land by Zionists during the Nakba.”

The group added, “You are watching an occupied people rise up against an apartheid nuclear power that has been occupying them and making their life unlivable since 1948.”

School officials have been under pressure to act.  Their decision followed the university’s investigating a Jewish student for complaining that a member of the Student Bar Association of Rutgers Law School had denied that Hamas committed any atrocities on Oct. 7.

In addition to extreme anti-Zionism, at least one Rutgers student has made a death threat against a Jewish student. In November, a local outlet reported at the time, Rutgers University Police Department charged freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, with writing on YikYak, a popular social media forum, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic], there is an Israeli at AEPi. Go kill him.”

Similar incidents at Rutgers are not new. In the past few years, the school’s AEPi house has been vandalized three times. In one incident, in April 2022, on the last day of Passover, a caravan of participants from a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) rally drove there, shouting antisemitic slurs and spitting in the direction of fraternity members. Four days later, before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, the house was egged during a 24-hour reading of the names of Holocaust victims.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.