Last month, Fatima Mousa Mohammed gave the valedictory speech at City University of New York (CUNY) Law School’s graduation ceremony. Rather than urge her classmates to pursue their dreams or utter other benign platitudes, Mohammed made various absurd claims about Israel’s supposed evildoing, condemned the metropolitan police as “fascist,” and praised her school for being “one of the very few legal institutions created to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy.” Her tirade attracted a fair amount of criticism—not only from Jewish organization, but also from Mayor Eric Adams and from a group of state legislators who are threatening to take punitive action. Benjamin Kerstein comments:
Mohammed’s rant was no surprise to anyone who has been following anti-Semitism in higher education and especially at CUNY. Among the institution’s more egregious crimes was another Jew-hating graduation speech last year and the vicious persecution of the Jewish student Rafaella Gunz, who was pushed out of the school in 2020 by a campaign of racist harassment and intimidation.
[The reaction to Mohammed’s speech is] a welcome development, but one must be cautious. CUNY’s systemic anti-Semitism has been a problem for the better part of a decade, and up to now, no one did a thing about it.
There is also the simple fact that none of the proposed remedies, whether they be efforts to combat anti-Semitism at the school (sure to be half-hearted and pro forma) or defunding the institution (which will never happen), are likely to work.
They will not work because Mohammed and those who cheered her did not emerge out of a vacuum. They are a deliberate creation of the CUNY faculty and administration, who by and large share Mohammed’s anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments. These “educators” have spent their lives and careers inculcating their prejudices and hatreds into their students. That these students act accordingly should not be a shock. Nor is this a problem confined to CUNY. American higher education in general suffers from the same problem.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/jns/antisemitism/23/6/5/292772/