Latino student group splits from University of Washington after being suspended for anti-Semitism

“Only when the Zionist entity is completely destroyed can Palestine be free”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Latino or “Latine” student group MEChA has “distanced itself” from the school after being suspended for its alleged involvement in anti-Semitic chalk messages.

In a statement released on Independence Day, MEChA – now known as “Mecha de Teejop” after the Ho-Chunk Indian tribe – said its members would “never write or condone the explicitly anti-Jewish views” of which the group has been accused.

The offensive chalk writings included the phrases “Al-Qassam, you make us proud, kill another soldier now,” “All power to Al-Qassam” (Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas), “All power to Hezbollah,” and “God is great, death to the United States, death to Israel, cursed be the Jews and victory to Islam.”

The statement begins by saying that the group bears no responsibility for the chalk drawings and will not participate in “manufactured controversies” that are “created and weaponized by Zionists to conceal their complicity in settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people.”

The group also accused the university of being more concerned with the “implication of the Zionist-led mass genocide” as the “actually Zionist-led (sic) genocide” (emphasis in original) and said the UW investigation was “a pattern of harassment and deliberate intimidation of our already vulnerable Latino, Chikan and Indigenous members,” according to a Daily Cardinal Report.

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From the MEChA statement:

While the rest of the “international community” debates whether genocide is taking place at all, Mecha de Teejop stands firmly behind the Palestinian and pro-Palestinian resistance, which defends the Palestinians by all means necessary. – with the understanding that our calls for the destruction of the oppressive power structures that allow these cruel acts to be committed against the Palestinians with impunity are always deliberately distorted and weaponized by Zionists. …

We join our comrades around the world in the just struggle against imperialist, colonialist, capitalist and oppressive systems and will always unreservedly support the struggle for the complete liberation of Palestine. Only when the Zionist entity is completely destroyed can Palestine be free, from the river to the sea. (Emphasis in the original).

At the time of the chalk controversy, the UW-Madison MEChA Instagram account referred to Israel as “the Israeli entity” (intentionally lowercase) and rejected a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, saying it would mean a “relationship between the colonizers and the colonized.”

MEChA is an acronym for “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano/a de Aztlán” (the “Chicano/a Student Movement of Aztlán”), with Aztlán being an “important symbol of spiritual and national unity.” It also stands for New Mexico and Arizona, which “were ceded by Mexico to the United States in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.”

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IMAGE: MEChA de UW-Madison/X

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