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Verified verbatimUMass Amherst — 'Nov. 5, 2023: A Message from Student Affairs and Campus Police Leadership' (Interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life Shelly Perdomo-Ahmed and Chief of Police Tyrone Parham)1272 chars
Dear UMass Amherst Community,
We are writing today to share information on a deeply disturbing incident that occurred at the conclusion of an otherwise peaceful event on campus on Friday. UMass Hillel organized 'Bring Them Home: Solidarity Walk and Installation,' which featured a Shabbat table set with empty seats representing each of the 240 hostages taken during Hamas' October 7 attack in Israel.
As the gathering was concluding, an individual approached participants and made aggressive and rude gestures. Later, this person returned, assaulted a student who was holding an Israeli flag, and proceeded to steal and spit on the flag.
Fortunately, the student who was assaulted was not injured. UMass Police investigated and arrested a suspect, identified as a UMass Amherst student, that night. The individual was released on bail, with conditions prohibiting them from returning to campus.
What this student is accused of is reprehensible, illegal, and unacceptable. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, or any form of bigotry have no place in our community. Let us be clear, these were the actions of an individual who did not speak for nor act on behalf of a group or anyone other than themselves. Peaceful advocacy and protest must and will be protected on our campus.
Issued jointly by Interim Vice Chancellor Shelly Perdomo-Ahmed and Police Chief Tyrone Parham — not by the chancellor — a deliberate signal that this was a student-affairs-and-safety communication rather than a presidential statement
The message named the hostage count (240) explicitly — a number that was the contemporaneous Israeli government figure and rooted the message in the post-October 7 timeline
The phrasing 'Antisemitism, Islamophobia, or any form of bigotry have no place in our community' was the carefully balanced civic framing used by many Massachusetts public universities in this period
UMass treated the case as a same-day arrest plus a community statement rather than a Clery timely warning — the perpetrator was in custody, eliminating any 'continuing threat' under § 668.46(e)
The closing line 'Peaceful advocacy and protest must and will be protected on our campus' was a deliberate First Amendment cushion intended to distinguish protected speech from the criminal assault