|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]
Editor’s note: Over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. Yet in the wake of rising anti-Semitism and the pro-Hamas campus rallies and occupations that were sparked by the terror group’s October 7 massacre, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart.
The Freedom Center is exposing the most egregious perpetrators of these double standards in free expression as the Top Ten Ivory Tower Hypocrites. These are universities whose leaders have permitted woke leftist activists to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views. The University of Pennsylvania is #3 on our list.
#3: The University of Pennsylvania
When Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was grilled by Congress in the spring of 2024 over pro-Hamas demonstrations and calls for the genocide of the Jews on her campus, she insisted that protecting free speech was a top priority. Magill was blatantly lying. Recent events reveal that the University of Pennsylvania has enforced radically different standards on free expression, depending on who is doing the speaking.
Even before Hamas’s October 7th massacre made pro-Hamas rallies a daily feature of campus life across the nation, Penn demonstrated an extreme tolerance for speech promoting Jew hatred. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Featured speakers at the event included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite, who has a penchant for dressing in imitation Nazi garb during performances. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, whose Jew hatred proved too much even for the legacy media. Lamont Hill was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.
The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer. Following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, Abulhawa, rather than condemning the violence against civilians, sought to justify it. “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants,” she wrote. “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”
Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum of Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”
Individual speakers at the event also demonized the Jewish people and Israel, while justifying Hamas’s targeting of the innocent.
Hoda Fakhreddine, one of the organizers of the festival who serves as a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn, invoked the genocidal phrase “From the river, to the sea,” and claimed that “Palestinians are a people who have been facing the daily brutal injustices of an apartheid regime for the past 75 years.” She invoked anti-Semitic tropes, claiming that Jews control the media, and denied the fact of the Jewish people’s historic connection to the land of Israel.
Fakhreddine laughed off concerns that the presence of so many anti-Semites on campus might cause Jewish students at Penn to fear for their safety, dismissing them as “hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas.”
“Again, this is an old, well-worn colonial script of the violent, dark, irrational and savage native,” Fakhreddine asserted.
In perhaps her most direct statement of Jew hatred, Fakhreddine alleged that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
Penn Professor Fakhreddine was far from alone in expressing her Jew hatred. Speaker Ahmad Zahid claimed not to “hate anybody for who they are” but asserted that “We hate occupation. We hate apartheid. We hate racism,” accusing Israel of all three sins.
Palestinian poet Dana Dajani vilified Jews for claiming their birthright as citizens of Israel, stating “The insanity of your alleged birthright, Israelis minting fresh citizens. They import entitlement and market it as democracy. And though your apartheid apathy acknowledges 1 million of my friends had second class citizens among you, millions still are caught in between.”
For his part, Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters endorsed the genocidal and Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, begging the audience to “please support the boycott, please, you know, please.”
Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis, the climate of Jew hatred on campus only grew worse—and yet the Penn administration stood idly by and watched their own faculty side with Hamas.
On October 16, 2023, a pro-Hamas front group, Penn Against the Occupation, held a “Collective Walk Out for Palestine.” During that event, a Jewish student was assaulted while putting on tefillin (boxes containing Torah verses used in prayer).
The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group that tracks anti-Semitism on campus, describes some of the other events that took place:
“A speaker claimed there were no ‘innocent civilians,’ since ‘all settlers and all settlements are legitimate military targets and they will be targeted until the time in which one-state, a plura-national, secular and socialist state is formed on Palestine and you can either live there in peace or you can go back to Moscow, and Brooklyn and and f**king Berlin where you came from,’ and added, ‘I can never condemn the violence [against Jews].’”
“Comments by professors further condoned terrorism directed at Jews.”
“Chants that included ‘Intifada, Intifada,’ ‘Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied,’ and ‘Free Palestine.’”
“Another speaker stated, ‘Zionism is racism’ and ‘the only solution is a one state solution from the River to the Sea.’”
“According to reports mentioned in a lawsuit against the University, Professor Biareishyk ended his Russian history class early so that students could attend the walkout. Also according to the lawsuit, a student with a yarmulke was harassed by protestors, who called out ‘how does it feel to be a part of a mass genocide?’ Similar profanities were directed at another Jewish student who was wearing a Star of David necklace. Several students yelled to Jewish students to ‘get out of here k*kes!’ Three men, whose faces were covered by keffiyehs and who were standing at the outskirts of the rally, harassed a female Jewish student with statements of, ‘you’re a dirty little Jew, you deserve to die’; ‘you don’t deserve to be on the same earth that we stand on’; and ‘the Jews deserve everything that is happening to them.’”
Penn Professor Huda Fakhreddine, one of the organizers of the Palestine Writes festival, spoke again at the Walkout for Palestine. “Israel is the epitome of antisemitism,” she claimed. “Just to assume that all Jewish people [condone] genocide is horrifying. As [Roz] said, it desecrates the memory of Holocaust victims and it humiliates every Jewish person.”
Despite abundant evidence of her Jew hatred, Huda Fakhreddine remains a professor in good standing at the University of Pennsylvania. The same cannot be said for UPenn Law Professor Amy Wax. Despite holding tenure at the university, Professor Wax was severely disciplined by the university for expressing her views on race and gender, which were judged to be controversial and potentially harmful to students. Among the comments deemed so potentially damaging were Wax’s assertion that African-American students at Penn Law “rarely” finish in the top half of their class (an assertion the university has yet to actually challenge with factual evidence) and her belief that there are two human sexes, male and female, which are binary and immutable. For these beliefs, among others, Professor Wax was suspended for one year at half pay, despite her status as a tenured professor.
According the Washington Free Beacon, which has reported widely on the case:
The embattled professor is undeniably a bomb-thrower. She has argued that the United States would be better off with fewer immigrants, that racial differences in IQ explain racial disparities in achievement, and that Asians’ “overwhelming” support for Democrats reflects their “indifference to liberty” and “lack of … individualism.” She has also invited Jared Taylor, a self-described “white advocate,” to speak to her class on multiple occasions.
But those views are not obviously more offensive than the ones Penn platformed in September 2023, when faculty members hosted a Palestinian literary festival featuring prominent anti-Semites.
Wax is now suing Penn for racial discrimination (because the university penalized her for conduct that faculty of other races committed without complaint) and breach of contract since the university promises to protect the academic freedom of its faculty, but clearly has abandoned that guarantee in Wax’s case.
In October 2023, then-Penn president Liz Magill sent a memo to trustees claiming that “Penn does not regulate the content of speech or symbolic behavior.” The case of professor Amy Wax reveals the blatant hypocrisy of this assertion.
“The [memo] makes clear that even if Jews are ‘harmed’ by the speech of radical left Palestinian supporters appearing at the [Palestine Writes] Festival, those organizing the [Palestine Writes] Festival and inviting Jew-hating Palestinian nationalists will not be punished because Penn permits and protects the expression of all viewpoints, even those that are contrary to Penn’s ‘institutional values,’” explained Wax’s lawyers in a letter to the university. “But if a strongly conservative and tenured professor invites Jared Taylor, assigns Charles Murray and Enoch Powell, and takes to social media to tell very hard-to-hear truths about group differences, she is not protected. Rather, she is sanctioned.”
Penn’s conduct in persecuting Professor Amy Wax for views dissenting with the university’s DEI orthodoxy while allowing other faculty and students to call for the genocide of the Jews reveals the university to among the worst Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
**********
Previously in this series…
#7: University of Nevada-Las Vegas
#8: University of Illinois-Chicago
#10: The University of Washington
Were getting more reasons to totally defund those places each time we See, Read and Hear about this all