The FBI has been alerted after death threats were made against Jewish students at a prestigious US university from users operating under names including “jew jenocide" and "hamas warrior",
Antisemitic posts calling for violence against Jewish students at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, were published on a forum for members of the institution's fraternities and sororities over the weekend, local media reported.
Cornell has more Jewish students than any other Ivy League university - around 2,500.
Police are now stationed outside a US university's Jewish centre after the messages, accompanied by headlines including “jewish people need to be killed” were published on the online discussion forum used by students, Greekrank.
One post read: “If you see a jewish ‘person’ on campus follow them home and slit their throats. Rats need to be eliminated from cornell.” Another post, directly threatened to "shoot up". the university's kosher multicultural cafeteria at Cornell, 104 West!.
Most of the posts have been removed but screenshots were published in the student newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun and have circulated on social media.
One threat, which remained online at the time of writing, carried the headline "if i see another jew on campus", and read: "if i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat. if i see another pig female jew i will drag you away and ràpe you and throw you off a cliff. if i see another pig baby jew i will behead you in front of your parents.
It continued: "if i see another synagogue another rally for the zionist globalist genocidal apartheid dictatorial entity known as 'israel', i will bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews. jews are human animals and deserve a pigs death.
The writer signed off: "Liberation by any means. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!"
Responding to the influx of antisemitic posts and death threats, Cornell University president Martha E Pollack said on Sunday: “Threats of violence are absolutely intolerable, and we will work to ensure that the person or people who posted them are punished to the full extent of the law."
Pollack said that the university's "immediate focus" was on "keeping the community safe".
Campus police have referred the threats to the FBI as a potential hate crime, she added.
Following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks, an associate professor in the university’s history department referred to the barbarism as “exhilarating”. That professor is now on a leave of absence until at least the end of the semester, according to the university.
Graffitied has also appeared around campus, with messages reading “Israel is fascist” and “Zionism = genocide”, according to The Cornell Daily Sun.
“We’ve been told multiple times by the university that while they understood our concerns for personal safety, that they didn’t think actual physical safety would necessarily be an issue,” one student, Talia Dror, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“On a daily basis, I’m seeing what’s going on around the country and I think it’s absolutely absurd that university administrators are acting like such cowards and not making real statements or standing behind their Jewish students until there’s a physical threat to kill students.”
Rabbi Ari Weiss, the executive director of Cornell Hillel, told the New York Times that, for Jewish people at the university, the vitriolic posts are more than empty threats: “We hear that as a call for our genocide.”
On Monday, the Biden administration announced its plan to combat antisemitism on college campuses following a surge in cases since the Hamas attacks on Israel.
Partnering with the US departments of Justice and Homeland Security, college campus law enforcement groups plan to track hate-related rhetoric online and provide federal resources to universities, according to the plan.
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