The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) has suspended the Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity for 18 months after its members were found to have posted hundreds of flyers parodying posters of Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas.
The flyers, which appeared across campus starting in November 2023, featured designs resembling hostage posters but contained messages like "Missing Cow" and offered a reward of "a box of chalk and a can of beer."
A university spokesperson condemned the act as "crude" and "deplorable." While fraternity members claimed the stunt was not antisemitic but rather a “joke to promote veganism," UPenn’s administration demanded the group undergo a "cultural change" as a condition for resuming activities.
Meanwhile, Harvard University’s Divinity School suspended several students for two weeks for participating in a library protest last week, framed as a “pray-in.” Protesters recited texts from the Quran, Torah and New Testament while criticizing what they termed "Palestinian genocide."
The event also involved distributing posters condemning the university, Chabad and the Hillel Jewish student organization, accusing them of supporting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Dean Marla Frederick addressed the suspension in a letter to the university community, writing, “we honor the importance of prayer and what it represents for so many. And, as one colleague reminded us recently, ‘prayer is protest,’” Frederick wrote. “In and of itself, advocacy for the cause of people under duress — whether in Israel, Gaza, or other parts of the world — is noble.”
However, she clarified that the prayer protest violated university policies prohibiting demonstrations in libraries. “While some may agree or disagree on the University’s guidelines regarding protest found in the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities and their interpretation, they are the rules we currently have and as such we must uphold them,” Frederick wrote.
Course promotes pro-Hamas ideology
The University of California, Berkeley, is embroiled in controversy surrounding a course accused of promoting pro-Hamas views under the guise of academic study.
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Praise for Hamas and accusations of genocide against Israel: Course description
(Photo: Screengrab)
The class, titled "Leninism and Anarchism: A Theoretical Approach to Literature and Film," is part of the Comparative Literature department’s core curriculum. It includes references to Hamas as "revolutionary resistance forces combating settler-colonialism" and criticizes the "genocide" of Palestinians by Israel with U.S. backing.
The course description originally opened with, “With the US-backed and -funded genocide being carried out against Indigenous Palestinians by the Israeli Occupying Force, many have found it difficult to envision a reality beyond the one we are living in today.”
It praised Hamas’s fight against settler colonialism and posed questions about whether Marxism-Leninism and anarchism could offer a vision for a better future. The syllabus included readings from figures such as Stalin, Lenin and Mao Zedong and promised students an opportunity to “piece together an archive of Anarchist and Leninist theory.”
An Israeli professor at Berkeley criticized the course, calling it "a seemingly literary course that, in practice, celebrates Hamas under the cover of academia." He added, "This is overt political propaganda glorifying violence, in violation of university policies prohibiting the use of classrooms to advance political agendas."
In response to a query from Ynet, Berkeley said, "The matter is being addressed. The original course description was changed.” A university official added, " While we can’t, as a matter of law comment on personnel issues, generally speaking we take our policies that prohibit using the classroom for political advocacy very seriously. If/when there is reason to suspect those policies are being violated we respond quickly." When pressed on specific actions taken, the university cited privacy laws as a reason for withholding further details.
This incident follows previous controversies at Berkeley, including a course titled "Palestine: A Settler-Colonial Analysis," which faced protests from Jewish organizations for allegedly promoting anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives. That course, previously an elective, was briefly suspended in 2016 before being reinstated with revisions.
- A previous version of this article mistakenly identified Delta Sigma Phi as the fraternity implicated in the incident. In fact, the fraternity involved was Delta Sigma Pi, whose members were disciplined for their actions. The article has been updated to reflect the accurate details.
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