Susan Tuchman, legal director of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), says the individual was invited by the oldest anti-Israel organization in the United States.
"Georgetown Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP) didn't advertise it as hosting a convicted terrorist; they said that they were going to be hosting somebody who was a student activist and former political prisoner," she details. "This individual … Ribhi Karajah, is a United States citizen, but he was a member of a terrorist group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)."
Tuchman says the U.S. rightly recognizes that as a terrorist organization, and she notes that Karajah was specifically involved in a 2019 terrorist attack in Israel.
"A 19-year-old girl was on a hike with her father and her brother, and there was a roadside bombing in which this guy, Karajah, was involved," the attorney relays. "The 19-year-old girl died. Her father and her brother were injured."
Karajah acknowledged his role in the attack. He was convicted and served several years in an Israeli prison.
At Georgetown, though LSJP misrepresented him, the university either cancelled or postponed the event, and under pressure from outsiders, an investigation has been opened
Still, Tuchman finds it "appalling and unacceptable" that the school was going to bring in a terrorist. She likens it to inviting someone like Dylann Roof, the mass murderer responsible for the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to speak on campus.
She reiterates that she does not understand why U.S. campuses are so hostile to Jews right now, or why such hostility is only tolerated when the targets are Jews or Israelis. She submits that this student group was trying to normalize terrorism.
