Jay Sures, a regent for the University of California, part of the governing board for the state’s college system, responded to a letter from the UC Ethnic Studies Council demanding the retraction of a statement from the school describing the massacre of Jews on Oct. 7 as terrorism.
“Your letter is rife with falsehoods about Israel and seeks to legitimize and defend the horrific savagery of the Hamas massacre of October 7,” Sures wrote on Tuesday. “Your council has willingly chosen to be surrogates and supporters for Hamas’ destructive actions.”
Sures quoted the letter the council had sent, which called on the university system to reverse its “charges of terrorism, uplift the Palestinian freedom struggle, and to stand against Israel’s war crimes against the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.”
He replied, saying: “I will do everything in my power to never let that happen. Full stop.”
And he called the original school statement “absolutely justified and necessary because terrorism has no place in our world.”
The letter from the council said that UC’s labeling the Hamas attacks as terrorism stokes “anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian sentiments, which have resulted, for example, in the stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy and the serious wounding of his mother in Illinois.”
The letter makes no mention of children tortured, murdered and being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It also doesn’t note that the U.S. government officially labeled Hamas a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997.
Sures wrote that it was “beyond shocking and almost hard to believe that your entire council would stand by your letter’s falsehoods, inaccuracies and antisemitic innuendos.”
He noted that 300 professors had co-signed the letter, saying “the thought that young and impressionable students might be taught the falsehoods of your letter absolutely sickens me.”
He concluded by urging the council’s members to learn more about antisemitism.
