The Wellesley News “truly disgraced itself” by “supporting this vile anti-Semitic project,” said Aviva Rosenschein, international campus director for the CAMERA media watchdog.
Wellesley College’s student newspaper endorsed the controversial Boston “Mapping Project” last week in an article penned by the editorial board, claiming the project provides a “vital service.”
The project, published this past summer by BDS supporters, links a range of Massachusetts-based Jewish groups, synagogues, schools, police departments, media and other institutions that the anti-Israel activists claim participate in harmful activities and should be dismantled. The project’s website hosts a map with the locations of their targets and information about them, including the names of some of their staff.
“We believe that the Mapping Project is providing a vital service,” the Wellesley News editorial board wrote. “Collecting data about these institutions, tracing their financial and political activity and publicizing this information is incredibly important. Simply revealing that these ties exist is not justification for violence or bigotry of any kind. Rather, it forces us to reconsider our individual role in a systemic harm.”
According to the Mapping Project’s website, the purported aim of the project is the development of “a deeper understanding of local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine and harms that we see as linked, such as policing, U.S. imperialism and displacement/ethnic cleansing.” Following its launch, the project has been widely condemned by the Jewish community as steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and tropes.











