Federal court orders UCLA to stop aiding antisemitic activists to target Jewish students

On Tuesday, a Los Angeles federal judge slammed UCLA’s hands-off policy in response to a Gaza encampments on the university campus that discriminated against Jewish students and faculty as “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”

US District Judge Mark C. Scarsi ordered University of California Los Angeles to prevent any future alleged antisemitic zones such as the encampments that in the spring blocked Jewish students from accessing parts of campus.

The order was the result of a lawsuit against UCLA filed by two law students and an undergraduate following anti-Israel activists setting up an encampment that blocked Jewish students and faculty from accessing parts of campus unless they “disavowed Israel’s right to exist.”

UCLA made matters worse by providing metal barricades and sending away Jewish students but did not take any action to ensure safe passage for the students. The administration ordered police to stand down and step aside and even assigned security officers to keep those who would not agree to disavow Israel’s right to exist away from the area, according to the suit.

The judge wrote in the order, obtained by The Ari Hoffman Show on Talk Radio 570 KVI, that UCLA disavowed any obligation to protect its Jewish students. “In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”

“This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters.”

The judge continued, “But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”

Scarsi denied UCLA’s attempt to stay the permanent injunction, which goes into effect Thursday. However, the university is expected to appeal the ruling to the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Scarsi previously ordered the the university to craft a plan so that Jewish students would have equal access to the campus after anti-Israel activists blocked parts of the school’s Los Angeles campus and set up checkpoints.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the students by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty to “ensure that Jewish students will never again face such antisemitic bigotry on campus.” The suit also described the “identification system” used by the radical activists to give out “wristbands to those who had passed their anti-Israel ideological test.”

Associate clinical professor at the university’s medical school Kamran Shamsa said that while the Gaza camp, referred to in the lawsuit as the “Jew Exclusion Zone,” was at UCLA in April “a large, masked man approached me and aggressively pushed me to the ground,” within “plain sight of at least a dozen UCLA security guards” who “did nothing to intervene.”

The Gaza camp was finally dismantled by police after weeks of violence on campus. UCLA had to pay in excess of $12 million to repair all the damage and spent $29 million on security and cleanup services across its ten campuses, the majority of which was spent on security.