Pro-Palestinian legal groups sue U of Maryland over blanket ban on October 7 events
Citing First Amendment violations, CAIR and Palestine Legal go to bat with UMD after campus officials quash anti-Israel groups’ plan for a ‘joint vigil’ on Hamas attack anniversary
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Palestine Legal filed a federal lawsuit against the University of Maryland on Tuesday, following the administration’s blanket ban on all student-led events slated for October 7.
UMD President Darryll Pines announced the ban after the university chapter of the anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) had booked the campus’s main lawn for an event on October 7, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel and the start of the ongoing war.
Amid vocal outrage within Maryland’s Jewish community, officials decided to bar any student organization from reserving university-owned spaces on October 7, including a scheduled vigil organized by a coalition of campus Jewish groups in response to SJP’s initial booking.
At a rainy Tuesday press conference adjacent to the University of Maryland campus, attorneys representing SJP claimed that the move — which took effect on all 11 campuses within the University System of Maryland’s umbrella — infringed on students’ First Amendment rights.
“The University System of Maryland, University of Maryland, and Dr. Pines, the president of this university, all made a serious mistake: They forgot that the First Amendment applies to them,” said Gadeir Abbas, an attorney with CAIR.
Abbas said the university intended to “suppress Students for Justice in Palestine from advocating and promoting their message on their campus” with their blanket ban.
Palestine Legal, the pro-Palestinian advocacy group co-litigating the petition, claimed the ban “constitutes unlawful viewpoint and content-based discrimination.”
“The knee-jerk decision by the university to curtail free expression in response to pressure from lobby groups or individuals who oppose Palestinian rights is egregious and unlawful, and we are ready to challenge it in court,” said Palestine Legal attorney Tori Porell.
The SJP chapter filed its petition in hopes of forcing the university administration to reverse its decision through a court injunction, allowing the group to hold the vigil on October 7 as planned.
Upon hearing about the booking at the start of the school year, mainstream Jewish groups came out strongly against the event, fearing it would glorify violence against Israelis. SJP remained vague about the nature of its reservation in the first few days of backlash.
For most Jewish students, the prospect of an anti-Israel event taking up the center of campus on the anniversary of Hamas’s massacre — in which invading terrorists killed over 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 — was unconscionable.
An open letter soon began circling around the local Jewish community, calling on university administrators to “take both proactive and reactive steps to protect the Jewish community on campus.”
“Any effort to celebrate the death of 1,200 members of our community on October 7, 2023, even within the context of celebrating ‘freedom fighters,’ ‘martyrs,’ etc., will be taken by the UMD Jewish community as a direct threat to the safety of the Jewish community at UMD,” the letter read.
Rabbi Ari Israel, director of Maryland Hillel, decried in late August SJP’s reservation as an “affront to a day of Jewish tragedy and mourning,” adding that “pro-Israel student leaders have reserved a separate large space on the same day.”
The following weekend, SJP broke its silence and announced its plans to use the booking for a vigil cosponsored by the campus chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an anti-Zionist Jewish organization.
The SJP emphasized that for Palestinians, the date marked the beginning of Israel’s counter-offensive in Gaza, which has reduced large tracts of the enclave to rubble. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims the ongoing fighting has claimed the lives of over 41,000 people in the Strip, a figure that does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
That evening, however, Pines, the university president, sent out a campus-wide email announcing that he and other University System of Maryland presidents had decided “to host only university-sponsored events that promote reflection” on the anniversary of the massacre.
According to the SJP petition, the university revoked the reservation out of concern for student safety, and then informed the group’s members that it would cancel all student group reservations for October 7.
The move came as a relief to Hillel and other Jewish groups, which commended the administration for ensuring that the campus Jewish community’s “physical and psychological safety is protected on this day of grief.”
But campus pro-Palestine groups were incensed by the decision and vowed to hold the vigil on October 7 regardless, and swiftly contacted CAIR to advocate on their behalf.
This week’s petition marks the organizations’ first concrete step toward opposing the administration’s move.
“These students want to mark the beginning of an ongoing genocide, committed by a foreign country with American weapons. That is protected by the First Amendment, whether or not Dr. Pines likes that message,” declared Abbas, the CAIR attorney, at the press conference. “This isn’t up to them. This is up to the Constitution.”
Despite students’ First Amendment rights, the case is not that cut and dried, and will likely hinge on whether SJP can convince the court that the university’s ban stemmed from bias against the group’s political messaging.
“The university was fully in its right to impose neutral restrictions when it comes to time, place and manner,” Alyza Lewin, president of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.
“If they decide that, for a certain period of time, there will not be any events other than university-sponsored events, they can do that. This wasn’t singling out SJP or one group; it banned them across the board,” she said.
However, Abbas took the opposite line, insisting that the university clearly intended to silence its SJP chapter.
“Even for those types of restrictions, you have to have a legitimate interest, and it’s not a legitimate interest to exclude a viewpoint from campus,” he said.
