“Inspired” by CUNY Law School’s recent antisemitic graduation speaker, who accused Israel of “indiscriminate” shootings, bombings, and lynchings of Palestinians, a graduation speaker at El Camino Community College, in Alondra Park, Calif., “gifted” her speech to Palestinians who “lose their lives due to the oppressive, apartheid state of Israel, killing and torturing Palestinians as we speak.”
On stage, Jana Abdulan, a Palestinian immigrant who was speaking as head of the college’s Associated Students Organization (ASO), promised to use what she has learned to fight for Palestinians alongside other marginalized groups, encouraging her peers to do the same. After the speech, Abdulan told the New York Post that she “felt the need to shed light on the atrocities that Israel as an apartheid state is committing. . . . I’m not talking about Jewish people torturing and killing Palestinians,” but rather “the Israeli government.” She identified with the CUNY speaker’s “courage to speak up.”
Moreover, Abdulan, just like the CUNY speaker, had her speech reviewed and approved by a college administrator. Also, both speakers were speaking in an elected capacity — CUNY’s speaker was elected to give the address, and Abdulan was speaking as the elected ASO president. Upon her election, Abdulan told the school newspaper that she aimed to achieve “more safety” on campus, without specifying what that might mean, and planned to work on the campus’s “social justice center.”
The two speeches, which occurred only weeks apart and were strikingly similar in message, bring us to two important factors in these events: They were backed by popular student support and given administrative green lights. Trying to change student opinion is a difficult task, given that student residence-life programs are often staffed by low-level administrators who have graduated from education schools, which instill a social-justice mindset.
Instead, we should focus on the administrators who either passively or actively support antisemitic students’ efforts and ask ourselves: Why don’t they face formal repercussions? CUNY Law condemned its speaker’s remarks as “hate speech,” but what will the college do about its own administrators who allowed this to happen? The same question could be asked regarding El Camino. If Joshua Katz was fired at Princeton on weak grounds (in reality, for criticizing Princeton’s anti-racism initiatives) and Bakersfield College professor Matthew Garrett can be formally charged by administrators for “immorality” (he questioned identitarian dogma within faculty circles), then administrators who green-light actual bigotry should face real repercussions.
The pattern of antisemitic graduation speeches needs to come to an end. Why don’t the leaders of the colleges that host them, who at times condemn the speeches, take the opportunity to do what they do best — and fire each other?