Harmeet Dhillon, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, said on Monday that she authorized the department to open a civil rights investigation of the University of Washington, a public school in Seattle, for its response to Jew-hatred on campus.
Dhillon stated that a student group, Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return (SUPER) UW, plans to hold a fundraising event for the “Lebanese resistance.” The group “has a history of violent antisemitic activity on University of Washington’s campus,” she stated.
It wasn’t clear if the department had opened the probe or intended to do so. JNS sought comment from the Justice Department.
The event, scheduled for Tuesday, is a “fundraiser for Lebanon” organized by the group with the Seattle University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Seattle Palestine Action Network. It is slated to include a screening of “The Last Sky,” a film billed as “a groundbreaking new documentary about the Gazan genocide.”
“With the recent escalated attacks on Lebanon, it is a crucial time to raise funds to materially support as well as deepen our understandings of the Lebanese resistance,” the groups stated.
University of Washington has told JNS and stated publicly often that SUPER UW’s recognition “was permanently revoked in May of last year and applications for reinstatement will not be considered.”
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, told JNS that the public school “wants plausible deniability by stressing that SUPER UW is not an officially recognized student group.”
“That excuse falls apart under even minimal scrutiny,” he said. “A cursory look at SUPER UW’s social media or at its on-campus presence—such as post-suspension tabling covered in pro-Sinwar flyers—should have been enough to raise serious alarm.”
“These are universities with reporting mechanisms for virtually everything. It is hard to believe they were incapable of recognizing what was unfolding in plain sight,” Smith told JNS. “Rather than acting proactively, they seem to have put their heads in the sand while an obvious student group maintained contact with international actors sanctioned by the U.S. government and others around the world.”
Thirty-three people associated with SUPER UW face charges related to $1 million in damage to a university engineering building during a protest calling on University of Washington to divest from Israel.
Members of the group participated in a protest that turned violent Sunday night outside a StandWithUs Northwest event at Town Hall in Seattle, SUPER UW said on Instagram. (JNS sought comment from the university.)
The news comes weeks after Robert Jones, president of University of Washington, held a town hall at an Orthodox synagogue on combating Jew-hatred on campus.
At that event, Jones told JNS that he wasn’t worried about the Trump administration suing the school while he works to fix the problem. He said that he knows federal lawsuits were possible but is focusing on “advancing the university and fundamentally addressing the issues of antisemitism and the violations of civil rights.”
