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 racist ideology” and “maintains a brutal occupation of Palestine.”
An “Emergency Lecture on the Crisis in Palestine” was held Wednesday on the Los Angeles campus by professor 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 Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, heard about the presentation and signed into Zoom to watch it.
“It started as Makdisi representing Israel as a colonial power and comparing it to the colonial apartheid state,” Farahi claimed to The Post. “Razack frames it as an issue where everyone is made to see Palestinians as ‘the other’ so people won’t care when they die.”
The “Emergency Lesson on the Crisis in Palestine” took place on Wednesday, four days after Hamas launched its terror attacks in Israel. Critical Race Studies at UCLA / Instagram Sherene Razack, UCLA gender studies department chair. confirmed that the panel he chaired “does portray Israel as a settler-colonial society.”
Razack did not dispute the allegations regarding the tone and content of the talk.
“Yesterday’s panel did portray Israel as a settler-colonial society that exists through the dispossession of the Palestinian people and which maintains a brutal occupation in Palestine,” he said in a statement via email to The Post.
“Furthermore, Israel practices Apartheid and Palestinians and Jews do not have equal rights under the law, a conclusion widely shared by scholars — both Israeli and non-Israeli, and by Amnesty International, among others. As my panelist, Professor Makdisi stated in a recent article in The Nation, Israel is an ‘occupational power driven by an exclusionary racist ideology.’”
Prof. Saree Makdisi of UCLA’s English department, who also led the “Emergency Teach-In On The Crisis in Palestine” seminar, wrote in The Nation this week that Israel is “a colonial power driven by an exclusionary racist ideology.”
Several UCLA Jewish graduates accused associate professor of Asian American studies Dr. Jennifer Chun canceled her class and told students to go to the lecture, and The Post was shown a text that appeared to be from a teaching assistant telling students they could get an extra-credit class if they went to the event.
“I don’t need students to go to the event,” Chun said in an email to The Post. He did not respond to questions about whether he canceled his classes to encourage students to attend the event.
His denial was backed up by a statement released by UCLA’s official newsroom.
According to the campus organization Hillel, Jewish students at UCLA number more than 3,000 — about 10% of the student body.Getty Images
“There are various events taking place this week focused on aspects of the conflict between Israel and Hamas,” the statement said. “This event is not sponsored by UCLA, but by a group of students and faculty members whose right to free speech is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Allowing the use of campus facilities for such events is part of UCLA’s legal obligations under the First Amendment and does not constitute university endorsement of any event, its speakers or the views they express.
“There are also rumors circulating that a professor is making it mandatory to attend one of these events,” the statement added. “These rumors are false.”
UCLA said claims that a teaching assistant told students they would be given extra credit if they attended the event were false as well.
Associate professor of Asian American studies Dr. Jennifer Chun denied canceling classes specifically so students could attend a pro-Palestinian seminar.UCLA
Makdisi told The Post in an email that the event was “not a lecture; it is voluntary teaching.”
“It is for anyone who wants to attend,” he said. “Do you ask the people who … complain so loudly about an event that they either don’t attend or don’t understand whether they think it’s unfair that various events sponsored by [Jewish campus organization] Hillel and other campus organizations have been ‘one-sided’? 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 “anti-Israel, antisemitic” talk.
“These university professors are indoctrinating their own version of history and denying the deaths of innocent children,” Natan said.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
