Wake Forest University has canceled a lecture that was set to be given by a pro-Hamas speaker on October 7, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel.
Rabab Abdulhadi, who was slated to deliver a speech titled “One Year since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance,” was invited to campus by the Humanities Institute, Department of Politics and International Affairs, and Middle East South Asian Studies Program.
Jewish student groups started a petition to get Abdulhadi’s speech canceled, after learning that the associate professor at San Francisco State University had made anti-Israel comments and had supported Hamas’s “right to defend themselves against colonial & racist violence.”
In an email sent on Thursday, Wake Forest president Susan Wente and provost Michele Gillespie canceled the speech and said the school would host a prayer event and a community reflection on October 7 instead:
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.
We are living in complex times, and yet we remain hopeful about the future because of this caring community and our shared mission to serve humanity.
The petition garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.