Temple president falsely targets students for Palestine

Philadelphia

On May 7, Temple University President John Fry sent a mass email to the school’s students, faculty and extended community about an incident that occurred off-campus involving a Temple student Fry claimed was “antisemitic.”

The incident and the individual involved had no association with Temple Students for Justice in Palestine, yet Fry also used his email to target SJP organizer Rishi Arun for statements he made during a webinar on April 24 celebrating the birthday of the incarcerated journalist, author and Black revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The webinar, “Twisted laws: Mumia, universities and Palestine,” was covered by workers.org. (tinyurl.com/4j8en9sd) Fry’s email implied that Arun had been placed on interim suspension, which was not the case.

Fry’s support for gentrifiers

Fry recently came to Temple after serving as University of Pennsylvania’s executive vice president from 1995 to 2010 and then president of Drexel University in West Philadelphia from 2010 to 2024. Fry gained a reputation as a strong supporter of billionaire property developers and projects that exacerbated gentrification and displacement of Black and Brown neighborhoods surrounding the two campuses.

Under Fry’s tenure, Drexel implemented policies encouraging faculty and staff to buy homes in the area and expanding campus policing into surrounding neighborhoods. Along with developers David Adelman and Brett Altman, who sat on Drexel’s Real Estate Advisory Council, Fry aided the destruction of the University City Townhomes, a low-income housing development.

Adelman subsequently became co-owner of the 76ers basketball team and pushed for building a new arena in Philadelphia’s historic Chinatown, despite broad opposition. Adelman previously served as the co-chair of the pro-Zionist Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

As Drexel president in April 2024, Fry called on protesters to disband their pro-Palestinian campus encampment, claiming it was “creating a hostile environment, including antisemitic speech, and for violating the university’s Code of Conduct.” The protesters, who were part of the Drexel Palestine Coalition, had several demands, including a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from companies that do business with Israel. The university responded by clearing the encampment with assistance from the Philadelphia Police Department.

Temple SJP: “Dear Gentri-Fry John”

Temple SJP responded to Fry’s email with the following statement issued May 9 that began: “Dear Gentri-Fry John: We are 19 months into a genocide. We read your email. We don’t care.”

The following is their full statement: “Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner whose incarceration was a direct result of malicious targeting by the U.S. government. He is a victim of the violent state repression continually faced by Black activists and political organizers, perpetrated through structures of mass incarceration, surveillance and policing.

“A report by Amnesty International released in 2000 regarding the trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal states: the FBI [Federal Bureau of Intelligence] began monitoring Abu-Jamal in 1969 when he was 15 years old because of his activities at high school and later with the Black Panther Party. … Abu-Jamal was under surveillance as part of the FBI’s counterintelligence program COINTELPRO. … 

“According to the Amnesty report, Mr. Jamal was subject to surveillance, harassment, disruption, politically motivated arrests and attempted frame-ups by the FBI, who worked in conjunction with the Philadelphia Police Department. … The FBI was continuing to monitor Abu-Jamal as late as 1990.”

U.S. and Israel share brutal carceral systems

The statement by SJP was specifically in reference to the systems of violence and mass incarceration that are used to continuously murder and repress Black and Brown communities within the United States. They wrote: “These systems cannot be divorced from the mass incarceration of Palestinian people by the occupying Zionist entity. The brutal carceral systems that oppress the poor and marginalized in the U.S. are actively developed and maintained through a reciprocal relationship with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).

“The IOF, alongside U.S. police departments, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], U.S. Border Patrol and the FBI engage in a process termed ‘deadly exchange.’ This involves U.S. ‘law enforcement’ traveling to so-called ‘Israel’ for active training, sharing of military and surveillance technology and the joint development of carceral infrastructure. This same infrastructure is then used to surveil [and] abduct thousands of Palestinians, taking them as political prisoners.

“Palestinians in the occupied territories are charged under the Israeli Military Court in order to funnel them into the prison system en masse. One in five Palestinians has been arrested and charged at some point in their life. The rate is twice as high for Palestinian men. Currently there are 9,900 Palestinian political prisoners being held by Israel. Of these prisoners, 3,498 are held under administrative detention, a procedure that allows them to be held indefinitely without trial or charge. Four hundred of these prisoners are children.

“Palestinian political prisoners are subjected to a host of human rights abuses, including medical neglect, malnourishment, torture and rape.

“As the Zionist entity deliberately starves Gazans into the 21st century’s worst famine — bombing aid workers, journalists and hospitals while escalating ethnic cleansing into the West Bank — its lobbyists shamelessly smear all resistance to this genocide as antisemitism..

“As Israel and the United States continue to export military technology and aid to nations like India, funding its own settler-colonial project through their brutal occupation of Kashmir and bombings of Pakistan, Zionist institutions like Temple University choose to racially profile individual organizers, deliberately misconstruing Palestinian advocacy with unrelated events and demonizing its students for calling out U.S. imperialism.”

Political prisoners are our North Star, from Palestine to Turtle Island. 

Free Palestine! Free Kashmir! Free all political prisoners!