Catholic University of America Removes Israeli Flags From Oct. 7 Memorial Created by Student
“Each of those flags represented the life and experience of every victim. When the university tore them down, they weren’t just removing flags; they were erasing those stories from our campus.”
This is a horrible look for this school. No amount of spin changes that.
The College Fix reports:
Catholic U. of America removes Israeli flags from students’ Oct. 7 memorial
The Catholic University of America removed a display of Israeli flags last week that students set up in memory of the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel.
A campus spokesperson told The College Fix that the display was approved “mistakenly,” and it violated the university’s flag policy. The spokesperson said in an email Friday that the student organizers also were informed about the flag policy prior to making their request for the display.
However, Felipe Avila, president and founder of the CUA Students Supporting Israel chapter, said the university did approve the display, and it has not enforced its policy consistently.
“It is fundamentally dishonest for the university to hide behind a ‘flag policy’ that they conveniently ignore for other student organizations,” Avlia told The Fix in an email Friday. “When a rule is used to silence one viewpoint, it stops being a policy and becomes a pretext for discrimination.”
Avlia said CUA Students Supporting Israel received permission from the university to set up the display almost two months ago. On Oct. 6, he said students placed Israeli flags on the university lawn to symbolize the 1,200 lives destroyed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023.
On the next day, Avlia said he received an email from the university revoking its approval for the display, and informing him that the flags had been removed. Administrators did give the student group their flags back, but Avlia said they were “stuffed in a clear trash bag in an administrator’s office.”
“Each of those flags represented the life and experience of every victim. When the university tore them down, they weren’t just removing flags; they were erasing those stories from our campus. A university, especially a Catholic one, should be a place that bears witness to suffering, not one that hides it from view,” he said.
However, the campus spokesperson told The Fix that the university had informed Students Supporting Israel leaders back in August that the flags could not be displayed, per university policy.
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Comments
Catholic University is the national university of the Catholic church so this act represents church policy. So we have the Catholic church reverting to their previous tolerance of Jews. Where is our resident defender of the Catholic church? Any comments you wish to make or do you wish to continue to chide me for my animosity towards the church organization (and not the lay members),
I doubt anyone in the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has any idea what is this University’s policy.
I’d be interested to hear from Felipe about specific instances where this flag policy was “overlooked” for other groups. If he’s got the evidence, now is exactly the time for him to ram it up their back holes.
My father was raised in Warsaw, Poland. During the Xmas season Jewish parents warned their children not to go into town because the Catholic priests encouraged his church to take revenge on the Jewish Christ killers. Every Xmas saw the killing of several Jewish kids that didn’t heed the warning. And here we are.
Reverting to type.