Controversy has erupted at UCLA over a pro-Palestinian presentation on Zoom this week that was allegedly offered as extra credit for some students.
And one of the professors behind the seminar told The Post that Israel is “a power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology” and “maintains a brutal occupation of Palestine.”
The “Emergency Teach-in on the Crisis in Palestine” was convened Wednesday on the Los Angeles campus by professors Saree Makdisi of the school’s English department and Sherene Razack, chair of the gender studies department.
A 2015 UCLA alumna, Davina Farahi, 31, who works with the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, heard about the presentation and signed up for Zoom to watch it.
“It started out as Makdisi depicting Israel as a colonial power and comparing it to an apartheid colonizing state,” Farahi told The Post. “Razack framed it as a point that everyone needs to see Palestinians as the ‘other’ so that people don’t care when they die.”
The “Emergency Teaching on the Crisis in Palestine” took place on Wednesday, four days after Hamas launched its terrorist attack in Israel. Critical Racial Studies at UCLA / Instagram Sherene Razack, chair of the gender studies department at UCLA. confirmed that the panel she co-chaired “represented Israel as a settler colonial society.”
Razack did not dispute the claims about the tone and content of the talk.
“Yesterday’s panel described Israel as a settler colonial society that emerged through the dispossession of Palestinians and that maintains a brutal occupation of Palestine,” he said in a statement emailed to The Post.
“Moreover, Israel practices apartheid and Palestinians and Jews do not have equal rights under the law, a conclusion widely shared by academics, both Israeli and non-Israeli, and by Amnesty International, among others. As Professor Makdisi, a member of my panel, put it in a recent article in The Nation, Israel is ‘a colonial power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology.'”
Professor Saree Makdisi of the UCLA English department, who also led the seminar “Emergency Teaching on the Crisis in Palestine,” wrote in The Nation this week that Israel is a “colonial power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology.”
Several Jewish UCLA graduates accused Asian American studies associate professor Dr. Jennifer Chun of canceling her class and telling students to go to the conference, and the Post was shown a text that appeared to be from a teaching assistant telling students they could get extra classes. credit if you attended the event.
“I did not require students to attend the event,” Chun said in an email to The Post. She did not respond to questions about whether she canceled her class to encourage students to attend the event.
His denial was backed up by a statement released by the official UCLA newsroom.
According to the university organization Hillel, Jewish students at UCLA number more than 3,000, about 10% of the student body.Getty Images
“A variety of events focusing on aspects of the conflict between Israel and Hamas will take place this week,” the statement said. “These events are not sponsored by UCLA, but by groups of students and faculty whose free speech rights are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Permitting the use of campus facilities for such events is part of UCLA’s legal obligation under the First Amendment and does not constitute the university’s endorsement of any event, its speakers, or the opinions expressed by them.
“A rumor also spread that a professor made attendance at one of these events mandatory,” the statement added. “This rumor is false.”
UCLA said claims that a teaching assistant told students they would receive extra credit if they attended the event were also false.
Associate professor of Asian American studies Dr. Jennifer Chun denied canceling class specifically so students could attend the pro-Palestinian seminar.UCLA
Makdisi told The Post in an email that the event “was not a conference; “It was a voluntary teaching.”
“It was for whoever wanted to attend,” he said. “Have you asked the people who…complain so loudly about an event they didn’t attend or didn’t understand if they think it’s also unfair that the various events sponsored by [Jewish campus organization] Have Hillel and other university organizations been “unilateral”? Or do these accusations of ‘bias’ only work in one direction?
Businessman Shervin Natan, another UCLA graduate, told The Post he was disgusted by what he called the “anti-Israel and anti-Semitic” speech.
“These university professors are indoctrinating their own version of history and denying the death of innocent children,” Natan said.
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