The University of Rochester Department of Public Safer has arrested four university students for their involvement in posting hundreds of “Wanted” posters around the campus last week targeting Jewish faculty and staff.
DPS Chief Quchee Collins said a fifth person is under investigation. The four students have been charged with felony criminal mischief.
The posters flooded the campus last weekend and featured names and photographs of Jewish faculty and staff, as CrimeOnline previously reported. One such poster accused a target of “racism, hate speech, [and] intimidation” and is “directly complicit in the displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Apologists for the posters denied they were antisemitic, saying that criticizing the Israeli government or the Israeli military for its actions in Gaza and the West Bank is not antisemitic, although the posters did not target members of the Israeli government or the military.
The Rochester Committee to End Apartheid, a coalition of community groups that advocates for an independent Palestine, issued a statement calling the university’s response to the posters “disingenuous, discriminatory and disproportionate,” the Democrat and Chronicle reported. The group accused the university of choosing “to criminalize dissent through excessive measures” and said the university treats “advocacy for Palestinian liberation” as a threat and ignores incitements of violence.
The university did not identify the students charged with putting out wanted posters on the campus. The school said earlier that no students were named in the posters.
Collins said her department was advised that the posters did not reach the standard to be charged as hate crimes, but noted that could change as the investigation continues and “that an action can be targeted and biased, as this was, without meeting the legal definition for prosecution as a hate crime.”
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[Featured image: WHEC screenshot]
