University of Maryland Will Pay Anti-Israel Group That Planned Campus Rally On October 7

The University of Maryland has agreed to pay Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) $100,000 after the university first defended, but then briefly tried to reschedule, a rally on the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks by a campus group that advocates “the right of Palestinians to carry out armed struggle.”

The public university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter “will spend every dollar we receive from the $100,000 penalty for banning our vigil on organizing and supporting the movement for a free Palestine,” group member Daniela Colombi said in a statement.

“Capitulating to bad faith, anti-Palestinian pressure will cost you,” Ahmad Kaki, a CAIR attorney, added, calling it a “transparent censorship attempt”—although even as CAIR fought for the right of students to demonstrate on October 7 on free speech grounds, it tried to force the university’s medical school to cancel a lecture by an Israeli surgeon.

CAIR noted that the Maryland public institution agreed to pay the anti-Israel group even as the Trump administration has extracted massive payments from other universities for failing to protect Jews from antisemitism on campus. 

University president Darryll Pines had in fact gone to great lengths to allow Students for Justice in Palestine to rally on the anniversary of the terror attack — an event advertised as “honor[ing] the 150,000+ martyrs who have lost their lives within the past year” — including his personally echoing the false claim that Israel had killed 150,000 people, which not even Hamas contended.

But that freedom appeared to extend only to certain groups. In an email obtained by the Daily Wire, Pines threatened to call the police on a Jewish woman if she did not stop emailing faculty and staff with complaints about antisemitism.

When Jewish critics raised that double standard by wondering how Pines, who is black, would respond if it were a KKK rally instead of an anti-Israel rally, or confederate flags instead of Palestinian ones on the campus’s central quad, the rhetorical device seemed to go over Pines’ head: he took it as a literal assertion that there was actually a KKK rally planned for October 7, and suddenly his prior First Amendment concerns no longer seemed to apply.

Patricia Perillo, the University of Maryland’s Vice President of Student Affairs, later said in an affidavit that “on August 26, 2024, an individual emailed University President Darryll J. Pines, who is Black, advising that if the University was going to permit SJP’s event to go forward, ‘then my Klan Rally with sheets and a noose are also approved.’”

Pines cancelled all events on October 7, not because of his aversion to the anti-Israel event, but because of what he suggested was anti-black racism and threats by Jewish people, requiring the cancellation of events to protect the safety of the Palestine activists, according to prior Daily Wire reporting and CAIR’s summary of the lawsuit.

“The University responded to CAIR and Palestine Legal’s lawsuit by claiming that it was forced to cancel all events due to racist threats from pro-Israel individuals, who had threatened to organize a KKK rally and come to campus armed if SJP’s vigil was allowed to proceed. At the hearing, University of Maryland Police Chief David Mitchell testified that pro-Israel individuals even threatened UMD President Darryl Pines’ family and used the N-word,” CAIR said in its statement heralding the settlement.

But the postponement of all October 7 gatherings on campus was short-lived. Despite Pines’ general sympathy to the group, SJP sued his university in federal court, backed by lawyers from CAIR. On October 2, U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte wrote that the Palestinian group would suffer “irreparable harm” if it could not congregate on that date to mark “what it calls Israel’s most recent ‘genocidal campaign,'” and ordered the event reinstated.

In its statement on the settlement, CAIR cast the planned event as a “vigil” somberly mourning the deaths of people in the Israel-Hamas war, but that is not what contemporaneous documents indicate. SJP’s national headquarters had called for a “Week of Rage” coinciding with the anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist group’s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis.

An application for reserving campus space, filed August 1, contained only a nine-word description of the event (“One year since the genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza”), according to documents obtained under public records laws, and Jewish critics have raised questions about whether the group failed to properly comply with the university’s rules for getting events approved, which would have given Pines a mechanism for blocking the event.

Pines dismissed complaints from Jews by claiming that the group had “condemned the horrific attack by Hamas,” but a Daily Wire review of SJP’s social media showed no such sentiment. SJP instead said on Instagram that it supports the “right of Palestinians to carry out armed struggle,” and “unequivocally states that the Zionist state of Israel has no right to exist.”

Pines was so invested in defending the anti-Israel group that he resorted to academic misconduct, sending a Jewish critic what he said was original “faculty research” from Middle East scholars on campus that proved that the Palestinian flag was not objectionable. The Daily Wire found that what he called the “consensus opinion from these faculty scholars,” whom he claimed he personally consulted with, actually came from ChatGPT.

That misrepresentation spurred The Daily Wire to check Pines’ past academic work for plagiarism, and it found that nearly one-third of a 5,000-word paper was copied and pasted from an Australian student, who was never referenced anywhere in the paper. There was evidence that Pines (or his co-author) had not accidentally mixed up someone else’s work with their own, because the British spellings in the Australian version had — with one exception that was missed — been changed to the American versions.

Pines acknowledged “recurrent language” but denied misconduct, and the state’s university system opened a review into his academic integrity. Ten months later, the review panel has issued no findings.

The University of Maryland did not answer The Daily Wire’s questions, but said in a statement that “the litigation in federal court has been mutually resolved through a settlement agreement with no admission of liability by the University.”

“UMD SJP is a registered University student organization in good standing which has had more than 100 events on campus since October 7, 2023, for which it consistently followed the University’s policies and procedures governing such events,” it added. “The University reiterates its support for the First Amendment and particularly making campus space available for individuals and groups of all viewpoints to share their opinions pursuant to its Guidelines for Expressive Activities and the First Amendment. The University takes very seriously its responsibilities for the safety and security of all University students and other members of its community.”

A top senator this week called for CAIR’s tax-exempt status to be examined due to its “ties to terrorists.”