Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, did not respond to a Daily Caller inquiry asking whether professors and student groups who support Hamas’ attack on Israel should be given taxpayer funding.
Temple University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a “Philly: Emergency Solidarity Rally” on October 8 in support of Palestine. The student group also told its followers to wear their keffiyehs — a traditional Arab headdress — on the public university’s campus Thursday to signal their solidarity with Palestinians. (RELATED: Dem Rep Renounces Membership In Socialist Org After Pro-Hamas Rally)
The day after the Oct. 7 attack, the student group called for an on-campus rally to “support the resistance movement.” Other posts compared the incursion into southern Israel to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and insisted that Hamas has the right to “liberate our homeland by any means necessary.”
Hamas terrorists killed at least 1,200 Israelis — mostly unarmed civilians — injured thousands more and took as many as 150 hostages back to Gaza, according to CNN. Videos circulating online showed Hamas members mutilating and parading the corpses of their victims.
The Temple SJP’s official web page listed Alexa Firat as the faculty advisor. Firat serves as a professor in the college of liberal arts at Temple University.
Firat is also featured on the Palestine Writes Literature Festival’s website and served as the editor of “Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production, and the State in the Middle East and North Africa,” a book which documents different uprisings in the Middle East.
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The Daily Caller reached out to Shapiro to ask if university groups and professors who praise acts of terrorism should be funded with taxpayer dollars. The governor did not respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment.
Temple is a public university in Philadelphia and is classified as a “state-related” institution, meaning it receives public funds while remaining a private, self-governing entity. Shapiro has proposed to increase funding to Pennsylvania’s four state-related universities by seven percent over the previous year, with Temple set to receive $170 million, according to outlets WITF and Spotlight PA.
The governor publicly condemned Hamas’ attacks on Wednesday, saying that there was “no moral equivalency” between Israel and Hamas and urging his fellow Pennsylvanians to support Israel.
“We need to stand with Israel. We need to stand up against this type of terror. We cannot allow this anywhere in the Middle East or anywhere in our area,” Shapiro said.