Kefiyyah-wearing Kentucky students get schooled on hate

The Kentucky state capitol. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

By Rabbi Shlomo Litvin

(JNS) — The Kentucky State House Committee for Postsecondary Education recently met to discuss Senate Joint Resolution 55, aimed at combating the horrific rise of antisemitism on college campuses in Kentucky. I was among those invited to give testimony on the importance of this measure.

The bipartisan resolution—backed by statistics from the Kentucky Jewish Council and the Anti-Defamation League and supported by free speech advocates and every major Jewish organization in Kentucky—was sponsored by State Sen. Lindsey Tichenor (R-06) and unanimously adopted by the state senate.

However, the resolution received some offensive pushback during the committee hearing for singling out protection for Jewish students. State Rep. Lisa Willner (D-35) said that people are claiming things are antisemitic that aren’t, seeming to imply that Jews are lying about hate crimes against them. She also said suggested that government efforts to combat the antisemitism she claimed did not exist would prove true antisemitic conspiracies like Jews control the government.

Her colleague, State Rep. Sarah Stalker (D-34), meanwhile, called Jewish leaders “tone-deaf” for their efforts to combat antisemitism, but not including Muslim, LGBTQ and black students.

Following formal testimony, three young people addressed the committee, including representatives of Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical, antisemitic hate group with ties to American Muslims for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation, which the U.S. Justice and State Departments have tied to Hamas—the genocidal terrorist group that perpetrated the Oct. 7 attacks, the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, which continues to hold civilian hostages, including Americans.

The students’ testimonies were thinly veiled antisemitic diatribes and blood libels centered around the outrageous antisemitic claim that Israel, backed by the United States, is committing genocide in Gaza, despite the Palestinian population there increasing during the recent Hamas war.

Their racist rants were made worse by the performative donning of a keffiyeh by two of the students. The keffiyeh, a headdress originally from Iraq whose distinctive black and white colors were invented in the 20th century, was first popularized in the 1930s by terrorists fighting the British in the Arab Revolt, with the intent of ensuring Jews could not flee to the Jewish indigenous homeland as Hitler’s evil unfolded, and by those seeking to hide and protect those terrorists.

It was included in the uniform of the Arab Liberation Army, a foreign force that invaded Israel, had as its slogan a sword through a Jewish star and whose genocidal motto in Arabic was, “From the water to the water, this land will be Arab.” It was made famous by arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist Leila Khaled, with Arafat styling his scarf to issue a genocidal threat to Israel. It then became an icon of Islamic terrorism across the globe, sported by the ayatollah of Iran and members of Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

Following their students’ testimony, State Rep. Steve Bratcher (R-25), a decorated war hero who combated terrorists wrapped in those same scarves, asked the American student who put on the keffiyeh just moments before he came up to speak if he understood the meaning of his symbol and who wore it. Struggling to remember the propaganda, the student claimed it was for “human rights,” ignoring the ironic fact that he was there to advocate against a resolution asking for Jewish student’s human and civil rights to be respected.

Bratcher then made clear for the student and anyone else watching who actually wears the keffiyeh, as he said: “Terrorists.”

If activists had shown up to combat a resolution on racism while wearing Klan robes, they would have been widely condemned. Showing up to oppose efforts to combat antisemitism while wearing the symbol of those who call for a Jewish genocide is no different.

For decades, the keffiyeh has been a symbol of antisemitism and terror, known by anyone who paid attention. It was particularly centered in the so-called “Student Intifada,” the antisemitic campaign on campus that SJR 55 was created to combat.

Amid silence from many, I am grateful that one man had the courage to say the antisemitic emperor had no clothes—just a terrorist scarf.

Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, the “Bluegrass Rabbi” at Chabad in Lexington, is chairman of the Kentucky Jewish Council.