A pro-Palestinian campus group at Northwestern University said the medical school scrubbed photos of Arab students, some of whom were wearing traditional headdresses, from several social media platforms.

In an Instagram post over the weekend, the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine said some of the photos taken at a school event earlier this year showed medical students wearing keffiyehs, a garment widely known to symbolize solidarity with the Palestinian people. They were deleted from Flickr, an online photo-sharing platform.

The group also said officials at the university’s Feinberg School of Medicine removed photos of Arab students from its official Instagram page. In an open letter to school administrators, the club demanded a public apology and an investigation into the incident.
“After 10 months of viewing the live-streamed genocide of their people, Palestinian medical students and their families are not allowed to celebrate their achievements in public without being targeted by their own administration,” the group wrote online.

In a statement, university spokesperson Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the photos were deleted to safeguard students from doxing. The university did not immediately clarify whether the students had been doxed or endangered because of the photos. Officials made the decision, the spokesperson said, “out of an abiding concern for the safety and well-being of the students pictured.”
“Student safety is our highest priority at Feinberg and Northwestern,” Anyaso said. “We are proud of Feinberg’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

As college campuses became hotbeds for debate over the Israel-Hamas war, many Arab and Muslim students felt increasingly unsafe. Last November, three college students of Palestinian descent were shot in Burlington, Vermont, where they had gathered for a Thanksgiving celebration. One was paralyzed from the chest down. While it is unclear whether they were targeted for their ethnicities, the mother of one of the victims said she believed they had experienced a hate crime.

So-called “doxxing trucks” bearing the names and faces of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators circled campuses in the fall at several colleges. Some schools took action to protect those students, who were being accused of antisemitism.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said it recorded the highest number of discrimination complaints in its 30-year history in 2023. Roughly one in 10 of those complaints was connected to an educational program.

Source: USA Today