CUNY Law commencement speaker Fatima Mohammed. Photo: Screenshot

Just days after the City University of New York (CUNY) issued a statement condemning a CUNY Law School graduate’s commencement address that demonized Israel as hate speech, groups of professors from the school are trading letters debating whether CUNY should have addressed the issue at all.

Speaking at the law school’s commencement on May 12, student Fatima Mohammed alleged that Jewish money manipulates school policy towards Israel and said “our morality will not be purchased by investors.” She also accused Israel of “settler colonialism,” charging that it “continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshipers, murdering the old the young, attacking the funerals and graveyards as it encourages lynch mobs.” Flexing her knowledge of radical left-wing literature, she called on her peers to oppose “Zionism around the world…by any means necessary,” setting off applause from students in the audience and law school deans sitting behind the podium.

Facing widespread criticism from Jewish groups and lawmakers over the incident, CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez, as well as William Thompson and Sandra Wilkin, the president and vice president of the CUNY Board of Trustees, said on Tuesday that the speech amounted to “hate speech…a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race, or political affiliation.”

40 CUNY law faculty disagreed, however, and on Thursday issued a letter accusing Jewish civil rights activists, CUNY, and the so-called “right wing” of being the ones promoting bigotry and, additionally, of targeting “people of color.”

“No reasonable interpretation of the student speaker’s remarks would suggest it was ‘hate speech’ given that none of the student’s comments attacked any persons or protected classes,” the letter said. “This casual and inappropriate characterization also undermines the identification of actual hate speech and state-sponsored bigotry that is sadly on the rise in the United States and often targets many of us in the broader CUNY community.”

The professors went on to describe Mohammed’s remarks as “heartland First Amendment speech” and, alluding to recent efforts in Florida to counter the influence of left-wing identity politics, compared CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently denounced neo-Nazis and signed one of the most punitive hate crime laws addressing antisemitism in the US.

“Lastly, we have no doubt that this controversy emerged not from within the CUNY community, but was manufactured in bad faith by right-wing media and other conservatives activists who have long south to disparage and undermine CUNY Law’s social justice mission,” the letter continued. “We are deeply disappointed that CUNY leadership gave further amplification to this ugly and dangerous smear campaign.”

On Thursday, CUNY Alliance for Inclusion (CAFI), a group formed by Jewish and non-Jewish CUNY leaders in 2022 during an intense period of antisemitic activity within the university system, expressed gratitude for the statement by Rodriguez, Thompson and Wilkins, writing that both Mohammed’s speech and the apparent approval she received from law school faculty and leadership in the audience continued a “disturbing pattern” of antisemitic behavior that, allegedly, has been present at CUNY for years.

“This alarming incident brings home the urgent need for moral clarity and a system-wide action plan to counter the abandonment by many within CUNY of civility and minimal academic standards when it comes to Israel,” CAFI said. “This feeds antisemitism and degrades the university.”

Miriam Elman, who participated in drafting CAFI’s letter, told The Algemeiner on Friday in a statement that the CUNY faculty who defended Mohammed lack awareness of how her speech affected the school’s Jewish community.

“The incendiary address trafficked in antisemitic tropes, demonized Israelis, and singled out the Jewish state,” Elman said. “It appears that these faculty need a refresher on how to differentiate legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. They are clearly clueless about to identity contemporary anti-Jewish animus, especially when it’s disguised as anti-Zionist and anti-Israel rhetoric.”

Writing to The Algemeiner as well, Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said the letter is a “clear illustration of ignorance and discrimination by faculty who are willing to give a pass for clear documented hate speech and antisemitism in the name of political propaganda to validate their own progressive political views.”

Romirowsky also speculated that the CUNY law faculty’s views are a snapshot of  what “they subject Jewish students to in the classroom.”

In Sept. 2022, it was announced that CUNY was selected to participate in Hillel International’s Campus Climate Initiative (CCI). CCI’s aim is to help universities better understand, recognize, and combat anti-Jewish discrimination on campus. At the time, Chancellor Rodriguez acknowledged that “more needs to be done” to fight antisemitism at  the university’s 25 campuses.

“Some of the harassment on CUNY campuses has become so commonplace as to almost be normalized,” a civil rights complaint filed by the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) alleged in July 2022. “Attacking, denigrating, and threatening ‘Zionists’ has become the norm, with the crystal-clear understanding that ‘Zionist’ is now merely an epithet for ‘Jew’ the same way ‘banker,’ ‘cabal,’ ‘globalist,’ ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘Christ killer,’ and numerous other such dog-whistles have been used over the centuries to target, demonize, and incite against Jews.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.