George Mason University Gaslights Jews
A sick, twisted proclamation was passed by the George Mason University (GMU) Undergraduate Representative Body (URB) on November 20. The URB representatives voted fourteen to two – with four abstentions – to redefine what anti-Jewish hatred is. The result of this exercise? A significant scaling back of the protections available for Jewish students on campus.
Imagine a student government announcing that cross-burnings and the KKK do not represent anti-Black racism. Imagine a student government declaring that LGBTQ+ students must put up with the Westboro Baptist Church demonstrating on their campus. This is what the URB has done to Jewish students at GMU.
GMU formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in March 2025. The IHRA is not unknown or controversial; it is the international gold standard, adopted by 35 democratic nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, and Australia. IHRA’s basic insight is simple and overwhelmingly supported by Jewish communities worldwide: antisemitism includes not only classical Jew-hatred but also modern forms that target Jews as a people, including campaigns that deny Jewish self-determination or apply blatant double standards to the world’s only Jewish state.
In contrast, the “alternative” definition now championed inside the URB – the so-called Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) – strips away most protections that Jewish students actually need. The American Jewish Committee notes that the JDA was drafted explicitly to undermine IHRA’s consensus, and it does so by rejecting the very examples of contemporary antisemitism that Jews overwhelmingly report experiencing: the demonization of Israel, the singling out of Jews for collective guilt, the appropriation of Nazi rhetoric to attack Jewish identity.
And who is demanding this rollback of protections?
At GMU, the anti-Israel faction’s leaders included sisters Jena and Noor Chanaa, who, according to police, led a group of vandals who spray-painted “student intifada” messages on campus buildings, causing thousands of dollars in property damage. A county judge approved a warrant to search their home, and authorities found weapons, Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and signs reading “Death to America” and “Death to Jews.” These discoveries were so extreme that the university temporarily banned their organization, the misleadingly named “Students for Justice in Palestine” (SJP) from campus – a ban later reversed.
The same campus produced another extremist: Egyptian national Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan, who ran pro-ISIS and al-Qaeda social media channels encouraging violence against Jews. He was charged with plotting a mass-casualty attack on the Israeli consulate in New York, involving bombs and a rifle.
This is the milieu from which the demand to weaken Jewish protections now emerges. The same circles that have produced vandalism, explicit calls for violence, open celebration of the October 7 massacre, support for Hamas terrorism, and a terror-linked arrest are the ones telling Jewish students they are “incorrect” about antisemitism – and the URB is listening.
Represented by Palestine Legal (an organization tied to American Muslims for Palestine, which is under investigation by Virginia’s Attorney General for allegedly providing material support to Hamas), GMU’s SJP chapter is threatening to sue the university to overturn IHRA altogether. Their own recruitment video shows a masked activist calling on students to support the Palestinian radical movement’s “honorable martyrs” – followed immediately by the chant: “From the river to the sea,” the eliminationist slogan calling for the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state.
That is the campaign the URB just decided to validate.
And make no mistake: weakening protections for a targeted minority always empowers their harassers. GMU’s student government already has a troubling history on this front. In April 2024, the Student Government passed a resolution calling for boycott and divestment from the Jewish state. In July 2025, the university came under federal investigation for discriminatory hiring, and the Department of Education concluded that GMU had violated Title VI for “policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race.”
So now comes the moment of accountability.
Because of how the vote was conducted, the public does not know which fourteen representatives chose to gut protections for Jewish students at GMU, which four refused to take responsibility by abstaining, and which two showed moral clarity by voting no. However, we do know the names of every elected representative who participated in that vote. They owe their Jewish classmates – and the broader public – an explanation.
Here are their names:
Tami Adejumo
Imani Anzaya
Luciano Byrd
Ty Carson
Iman Chaudhry
Andrew Colasanto
Quinn Fenicle
Michael Kaleem
Hannah Kohler
Emebet Neale
Amaiyahmonet Parker
Kaylah Pratt
Jada Ricks
Draac Saunders
Gus Schmoll
Efrata Tewobros
Andrew Tonkinson
William Valentin Puello
Ella Waters
Angel Williams
To the two members who voted against this disgraceful measure: thank you. You took a stand for decency when it mattered. To the abstainers: you abdicated responsibility at the moment your Jewish classmates needed you most. And to the fourteen who voted for this resolution – whoever you are – you have aligned yourselves with those who spray-paint “intifada” on campus walls, who glorify Hamas’s mass rape and slaughter of Jews, who possess “Death to Jews” signs and ISIS propaganda, and who seek to strip Jewish students of the very protections GMU adopted to keep them safe.
You did this while hiding behind a secret ballot.
Jews at GMU deserve better than cowardice. They deserve better than equivocation. They deserve better than elected representatives who outsource their moral reasoning to extremists with weapons caches and terror paraphernalia. Every one of the twenty representatives named above should now publicly state how they voted and why.
And GMU’s administration must hold firm. Uphold IHRA. Reject any official adoption of JDA. Reverse the reinstatement of SJP, an organization whose leaders have crossed every conceivable line of decency.
Because allowing the people who chant “Death to Jews” to define antisemitism is not inclusion. It is not equity. It is not academic freedom. It is moral insanity. And history will remember where each of you stood.
