Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that some of the activities of pro-Palestinian student groups may be violating federal law. The governor added that in response to Students for Justice’s support for the Palestinians in the wake of the attack on Israel, he is going to “deactivate” the group in his state.
Pro-Hamas protests have cropped up in urban areas across the country, from large cities like New York and Washington to places like Allentown, Pa., where Muslim activists rallied this week at a monument dedicated to Pennsylvania’s Civil War volunteers to declare purported “Gaza genocide” at the hands of Israel.
However, across Europe there have been prohibitions on such activity, including in Germany, where police reportedly cracked down on a pro-Palestinian demonstration near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate this week.
In Florida, DeSantis said he has tried to curb the activities of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, telling FOX News he ordered the states’ universities to disband chapters on their campuses.
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“If you look at how Florida’s universities respond to this for our college presidents, you didn’t see them behave like Harvard president and [officials at the University of Pennsylvania]. They put out a very clear statement saying that what Hamas did was barbaric, that we stand with Israel and that we are going to make sure that our Jewish students are able to … be protected on our campuses,” he said.
DeSantis called the pro-Palestinian student group “very radical” and claimed some involved don’t delineate themselves from the governing terrorist group Hamas itself.
“They say we’re not standing in solidarity with Hamas. They say they are the same movement,” he said.
Therefore, he posited, it is different to be protesters who are in support of a wrongful or controversial entity than it is to consider oneself one-in-the-same.
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“You don’t have a First Amendment right to provide material support to terrorists. So we have deactivated the Students for Justice in Palestine groups on university campuses and our state university system in the state of Florida. And I think we’re the first state to do that,” he said, in an apparent nod to a federal law – 18 USC 2339b – that deems “providing material support or resources to foreign terrorist organizations” illegal.
DeSantis added he would do the same at the federal level as he has at the state level in terms of groups tied to or considering themselves consubstantial with designated terror groups.
He said he called on President Biden to do so but is not anticipating a response.
“Some of these people that are demonstrating in favor of Hamas terrorism – and these demonstrations started before the blood was even dry of these Israeli civilians who were massacred – they immediately were praising this,” he said, adding that some protesters are foreign nationals on student visas.
Those students, he posited, no longer have a right to be in the United States.
“That’s a privilege. I will cancel that visa and I will send you home.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the national Students for Justice in Palestine and this article will be updated with any comment.
