Wake Forest University, a private university located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, planned to host an event on October 7, 2024, featuring Rabab Abdulhadi, a professor at San Francisco State University and anti-Israel Hamas cheerleader, entitled “One Year since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance.”
Abdulhadi is a co-founder of the anti-Israel Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, an organization that tried to bring U.S.-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) member Leila Khaled to speak to her students.
Khaled was one of the hijackers on TWA Flight 840 from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1969 and on El Al Flight 219 in 1970 from Amsterdam to New York City.
Wake Forest students on the Hillel and Chabad student executive boards created an online petition expressing outrage at allowing an apologist for terrorists to speak on the anniversary of the October 7 terror attacks on Israeli civilians.
From the petition:
We, the undersigned members of the Wake Forest University community, are writing to express our strong concern and opposition to the event scheduled for October 7th with speaker Rabab Abdulhadi, a self-proclaimed Hamas sympathizer. Abdulhadi is a San Francisco State University professor who has publicly threatened Jewish students and has had similar events canceled due to violations of Zoom’s, YouTube’s, and Facebook’s terms of service. She has also publicly supported and celebrated terrorists, some of whom are on the FBI Watchlist, as well as spreading blood libels about Jews. The event, titled “One Year since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance,” refers to the mission carried out by Hamas on October 7th, resulting in the most significant loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust. The title equates the murder, rape, and kidnapping of innocent Jewish and Arab life on October 7th to resistance.
While we strongly support free speech on campus, we believe that hosting a speaker who promotes terrorism and espouses hate speech against Jewish students is a failure to protect all members of the Wake Forest community. Choosing to host this event on October 7th fosters a hostile environment and detracts from the importance of allowing students to feel safe while mourning the anniversary of these atrocious attacks.
The University has now announced that Abdulhadi will NOT be speaking at the university on October 7th.
An email sent from Wake Forest President Susan R. Wente and Provost Michele Gillespie reads in part:
We recognize that this date is significant for many reasons and to many different members of our community, our country, and people around the world. We empathize with the emotions felt by many Wake Foresters as the date approaches, including those who lost friends, family members and colleagues on October 7, 2023.
We have also made the conscious decision not to host events on this day that are inherently contentious and stand to stoke division in our campus community. Thus, we have informed the academic units sponsoring Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi’s campus lecture on October 7 that it cannot take place.
Excellent job from the administration at @WakeForest in ensuring a terrorist cheerleader and violence inducing garbage human named Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi will NOT be speaking at the university on October 7th. https://t.co/IyFKhodldi pic.twitter.com/6fgp7oxttW
— Bess With The Ball (@BessWithTheBall) September 26, 2024
The post After Outrage, Wake Forest University Cancels October 7 Event Featuring Anti-Jewish Hamas Cheerleader appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.