Students raise awareness for hostages held by Hamas
Many posters were ripped down in videos that have gone viral across the nation.
By TENAJAH ELDRIDGE
“Missing” posters of the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attacks can be found on bulletin boards and poles across USC’s campus. Since mid-October, students have been placing bright red and white missing posters around University Park Campus.
Last Thursday, students brought the campaign to the center of campus with a display incorporating blue and white balloons — reminiscent of the Israeli flag — as part of an ongoing global awareness campaign to “help bring them home alive,” the posters read. Both USC Hillel and Chabad at USC praised students for placing the balloons on campus.
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The demonstration aimed to garner attention from the USC community to people kidnapped from Israel.
Andrew Turquie, a junior majoring in intelligence and cyber operations, helped organize the balloon demonstration. One poster depicts Daniel Perez, a friend of Turquie who was classified by the Israel Defense Forces as presumed to be kidnapped after he and his tank battalion went missing in action Oct. 7.
“My main motivation is to bring awareness that Israeli people are suffering and Israeli people are being held hostage by Hamas, and that Jewish students on campus are also suffering and they’re hurting and to bring awareness to that,” Turquie said.
Two Israeli street artists, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, started the kidnapped posters campaign, called “Kidnapped from Israel,” after feeling compelled to act.
On Oct. 26, a video posted to social media showed two people tearing down the posters on USC’s campus. This video has since been viewed by thousands. Individuals, like the ones shown in the video, have been removing the posters as a form of protest against Israel, according to The New York Times.
Canary Mission, a website that documents individuals and organizations they consider antisemitic or that “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews,” has compiled and published personal information on students across the country. The organization runs a “live updates” page on “kidnapped poster rippers,” on which no USC students are listed as of the time of publication.
In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, instances of Islamophobia, antisemitism and hate crimes have risen in the United States. According to publicly available Los Angeles Police Department data, reported antisemitic hate crimes in L.A. between Oct. 7 and Oct. 30 increased by 250% compared to the same time period last year — jumping from eight incidents in 2022 to 20 this year.
The city saw eight hate crimes and incidents against Muslims between Oct. 7 and Oct. 26 of this year, according to LAPD data, and none in the same period last year.
Much of the hate can be found on college campuses; across the U.S., there has been a reported rise in antisemitic occurrences among university students, according to The Washington Post.
Turquie said he has felt silenced on USC’s campus since the Oct. 7 attacks.
“I’ve heard friends have taken off their kippahs, friends that are afraid to walk around and be openly Jewish,” Turquie said. “In the past, I have had experiences with hate crimes and antisemitism — last week, I had three. I had disgusting comments on Instagram … I caught people ripping down the flyers, and my friend had ‘Free Palestine’ written on the back of his T-shirt.”
Universities across the country — including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University and Columbia University — have seen conflict between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protesters.
President Carol Folt released a communitywide statement condemning all forms of hate Oct. 31, writing that it is “antithetical to our values and any threats of violence are unacceptable.”
Turquie said the idea of a statement was positive, but failed to address the issue well enough and in a timely manner.
“It’s great that they’re making a statement, but I feel it’s too little, too late,” Turquie said. “The University should be ahead of [incidents of hate] because they’re a campus.”
Rabbi Dov Wagner, director of the Chabad Jewish Student Center at USC, said it’s important to “call out both antisemitism and Islamophobia.”
“USC did stop short of any type of clear direction as to what they would do about it when [antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents] occur, and I think that’s an important conversation to have,” Wagner said. “It’s one thing to call out hatred, but it’s another to actually figure out, ‘Okay what are we going to do about it when it comes here?’ Because it is here.”
Havanna Flores, a sophomore majoring in human biology, said she feels tension on campus and believes the University shouldn’t “pick a side.”
“[The war] creates tension, especially with the protests,” Flores said. “As people [in] power and, as a university who’s supposed to support everybody, you need to have more of an unbiased opinion and be able to support everyone.”
Turquie said he hopes students can unite and transcend the conflict.
“I really hope [the USC] community, this entire campus, finds a way to bring the stakeholders of the conflict — the Israeli students, the Jewish students, the Palestinian students — together to have a collective good dialogue and discourse,” he said.
