Georgetown Law student group to host convicted member of PFLP terror group
The school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter plans to host a discussion with Ribhi Karajah, who was imprisoned in Israel for failing to disclose his prior knowledge of a deadly terror attack
Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images
A sign for Georgetown Law School, in front of the McDonough building in Washington, DC.
A member of the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who failed to disclose to authorities his prior knowledge of the 2019 bombing that killed an Israeli teenager is scheduled to speak at a Georgetown University Law Students for Justice in Palestine event next week, Jewish Insider has learned.
LSJP is hosting a Feb. 11 discussion entitled “Palestinian Prisoners, an Evening with Ribhi Karajah, student activist and former political prisoner,” according to flyers posted on campus and the group’s social media.
Karajah, a U.S. citizen, served three and a half years in an Israeli prison for his role — along with two other PFLP members — in an August 2019 roadside bombing in the West Bank in which 17-year-old Israeli Rina Shnerb was killed while on a hike with her father and brother, both of whom sustained injuries.
Karajah was informed about the planned attack by several of his PFLP associates, with specific details of where it would take place, and did nothing to stop it, he acknowledged in a plea agreement with an Israeli court.
“His presence on our campus threatens the security of all Jewish students,” Julia Wax Vanderwiel, a second-year student in the law school, told JI.
She noted that LSJP has a history of advocating “for Hamas on our campus [and] has members that attempt to discredit the Holocaust.” Weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Georgetown Law hosted Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd, who celebrated Hamas as a “liberation movement” and called the massacre a “resistance tactic.”
Karajah “will no doubt propagate those same students and validate their violent inclinations,” Wax Vanderwiel said, noting that administration has “ignored” what has “gone on so long.”
On Wednesday, Wax Vanderwiel shared her concerns about Karajah with the law school’s dean of students, Mitch Bailin. “He told me they will look into it and asked about the technicalities of [Karajah’s] charges,” she told JI.
Georgetown University Law Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JI about the upcoming event.
Wax Vanderwiel, founder and president of Georgetown Law Zionists, described antisemitism at the law school as “rampant.”
“And it’s time someone did something,” she said.