Judge rebukes California discrimination against Jews
A Los Angeles federal district court ordered the University of California, Los Angeles, to stop allowing and assisting in self-described pro-Palestinian activists’ creation of what amount to Jew-free zones on campus, holding that the university may not offer classes if Jewish students are prohibited from participating in the programming.
Those who occupied encampments on the university’s property disallowed Jews from passing through the quad unless they would disavow Israel and, by extension, their Jewish faith. UCLA’s position had been that the encampments preventing Jewish students from accessing certain areas of campus were not its responsibility.
Despite that contention, the university erected metal barriers around the encampment and directed Jewish students to leave, according to a lawsuit.
“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote on Tuesday. “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”
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Why did it take a federal judge to tell the university that what was happening was wrong? The Palestinians who perpetrated this nonsense should be ashamed. They blatantly exposed their religious bigotry.
Back in the 1960's when I was attending the University of Texas I had Jewish friends that never had to deal with kind of discrimination by the University. There was some discrimination by fraternities leading the Jewish students to form their own.
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