A new round of flyers calling multiple California State University employees “genocide deniers” were posted at Cal State Long Beach Thursday.
This time, they also targeted the CSULB president, who, a day earlier, had denounced similar flyers targeting a Jewish studies professor.
President Jane Close Conoley said in a campuswide email Wednesday that the original batch of flyers posted around two Liberal Arts buildings were antisemitic and defamatory.
The original flyers, first reported by the Daily Forty-Niner student newspaper, targeted CSULB’s Jewish Studies Director Jeffrey Blutinger, showing his picture and calling him a “violent Zionist.”
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The flyers appeared not long after Blutinger gave a lecture on the Israel-Hamas war at San Jose State University last month titled “Constructing a Just Solution: Where Israelis and Palestinians Go From Here.” Students protested the lecture, forcing the school administration to end it early and police to escort Blutinger off campus, according to the Spartan Daily student newspaper.
Amid the protest, students alleged SJSU Professor Jonathan Roth assaulted a student by grabbing and twisting her wrist, according to the Spartan Daily. No injuries were reported, campus spokesperson Michelle Smith McDonald said, but a report has been filed with university police.
“The circumstances of the incident, which led to the guest speaker and students being removed from a classroom, are still under investigation,” Smith McDonald said in an email Tuesday. “An SJSU employee involved in the altercation with protestors was immediately placed on administrative leave, pending additional review pursuant to campus protocols.”
Blutinger, Roth, Conoley and CSULB vice president of student affairs Beth Lesen were all targeted in Thursday’s second round of flyers.
Aside from “genocide denier,” each flyer features the same messaging: “CSU accepts violent zionists, white supremacists, colonizers and genocide deniers” and “as students, is this the administration you want on campus?”
Several of the flyers had additional messages, including the university president’s, which identified her as “Jane Colonist” and claimed she “disrespects indigenous culture.”
The university is reviewing the situation. It remains unclear at this point who posted the flyers.
While it looks into the situation, a university spokesperson declined to comment on whether the university believes the flyers are protected speech.
“We cannot speculate on the outcome of that assessment,” CSULB spokesperson Jim Milbury said. “That said, the president’s message made clear the seriousness with which the university is approaching this matter.”
In her earlier campuswide message, Conoley said the flyers that targeted Blutinger were “not aligned with our core value of being a place where diversity of thought is welcomed and where compassion and respect characterize all we do. Our strength must be in our embrace of pluralism and in the rejection of any glorification or threat of violence. We must also reject Islamophobia and antisemitism.”