Students, Parents, Alumni, faculty, and staff in the Claremont Colleges community,

Yesterday you received a broadcast email from CUC's campus safety department addressing Students for Justice in Palestine’s Mock Eviction Notices. The “campus safety alert” – typically used for kidnapping, sexual assault, and burglaries – was a response to flyers we distributed raising awareness about the Israeli government’s policy of home demolitions. The alert falsely accused us of threatening other Jewish students, an accusation with no factual basis.  
Campus Safety and the Administrations of all five campuses must immediately recall the email and apologize to our student community for instilling fear.

The following are facts about our demonstration that we believe need to be circulated:

1. On Monday 3/7/16, we posted 400 mock eviction notices on dorms throughout the five colleges. The flyers were about Israeli state policy of home demolitions. 
2. In preparation for this action we got these flyers approved from the colleges, through the office of student affairs. You can see the Claremont College approval stamp on the left top corner of the flyers. 
3. We spread these messages throughout the five colleges to make sure that the information was widely distributed. We distributed the flyers evenly on every other door in every dorm. We did not target any specific students or groups. 
4. There was no language on these mock eviction notices that referenced religion, and most certainly no references to Judaism. The flyers were about Israeli state policy, pulling facts from an Israeli group called Israeli Coalition Against Housing Demolition. 
5. The following night we posted a public statement on our facebook page explaining more about the action and our motivations. In it, we explicitly state that we did not target any specific students or groups and deplore any form of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, [and] xenophobia. 
6. All of this evidence was readily available to Campus Security or anyone else interested in learning what the flyers were about.

The Council of Presidents and Campus Safety chose to respond to our political speech about Palestinian human rights by threatening to send the police after us. They ignored the clear facts that our flyers were about state policy. They violated our privacy and put as at risk by broadcasting false accusations to the entire campus community.
Although we asked Pitzer administrators to reassure us, and inform the campus that Campus Safety’s email misstated the facts, they rejected our request. Dean Carlisle said, “our hands are off.” President Poon and Dean Carter both have declined to clarify the facts as we requested.
We demand that the Council of Presidents at the 5C’s (1) apologize to our community for criminalizing political speech and scaring all of us (2) clarify the facts and acknowledge that the Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine was not an incident of bias. (3) Acknowledge the clear difference between criticizing Israeli state policy and anti-Semitism, and (4) reaffirm the 5C’s commitment to free speech, as required by California law. We demand Campus Safety send out an email correcting their previous email.

Signed by, 

Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace