USC Removes Anti-Semitic Quote from Campus Website after Center Protest

The Simon Wiesenthal Center and campus outreach program, iACT@WIESENTHAL.COM, commended the University of Southern California and its Provost, C.L. Max Nikias, for ordering the removal of an anti-Semitic text from a website sponsored by the Muslim Student Association. The text, taken from Book 041 of the Hadith, a Muslim religious text, read:

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying:

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

In a letter to USC Trustee Alan Casden, who brought the website to the Provost on behalf of the Wiesenthal Center, Nikias wrote, "The passage in the Hadith …violates the USC Principals of Community and it has no place on a USC website." The website was hosted on the USC server.

"This is an important reminder that when free speech becomes a platform to encourage violence, then it has crossed the line," said Rabbi Aron Hier, Director of iAct@wiesenthal.com. "We commend USC for having the moral courage to stand up against those who hijack speech and religious freedoms and the goodwill of the campus community in order to spread a message of hate and extremist violence."

Rabbi Aron Hier and Reut Cohen, Senior Associate of the Horowitz Freedom Center, brought the matter to the attention of Mr. Casden.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe.

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