The school is currently under investigation by the Department of Education for its alleged failure to protect Jewish students.
Rutgers University faculty promoted anti-Israel sentiment and tried to defend and contextualize Hamas’s attack on Israel in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, public records shared with National Review reveal.
The school is currently under investigation by the Department of Education for its alleged failure to protect Jewish students in the wake of the October 7 atrocity.
Rutgers Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar Sahar Aziz has been at the university since 2017 and has used her position to “incorporate critical race theory, feminist theory, and constitutional law into her examination of the disparate impact of post-9/11 laws and public policy on ethnic, racial, and religious minority groups in the United States,” according to her LinkedIn.
The professor hosted a teach-in on Gaza on October 16, 2023, to discuss “the ongoing erasure of Palestinian humanity in the halls of power,” she wrote in an email to the Rutgers community, according to documents obtained by the watchdog group Defending Education and shared exclusively with National Review.
Rutgers’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights, which Aziz founded and runs as director, is “the first and only” civil rights center at a U.S. law school that focuses on the “intersection of race and religion, the criminalization of Muslim identity through securitization practices, and policies, and transnational rights and security that also impact the civil and human rights of our diverse Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities,” Aziz said during her introduction to the teach-in event.
The teach-in “intentionally” focused on the experience of Palestinians, because “in the U.S. media, in the rhetoric by U.S. government officials from local, the state, and the federal level, all of the coverage and the discourse has erased the experiences of Palestinians, and their perspectives, and their voices,” Aziz said during the event.
Aziz invited Zachary Foster, a senior law fellow at the Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights, to lead the teach-in on Gaza. In the first slide he presented, Foster offered basic “facts and figures” about Gaza, including the fact that “Gaza is ruled by Hamas, an Islamic charity first established in the 1970s that evolved into a more militant organization in the 1990s and 2000s and then took power in Gaza in 2007 and has ruled the territory (from the inside) ever since.”
Foster described Hamas’s inception by Ahmed Yassin as the founding of “an Islamic charity . . . focused on education, social services, and preaching” that stayed out of politics and “limited its activities to education and spiritual guidance.” Hamas feared “they would lose support to their rivals if they stayed out of the First Intifada, so they embraced violence beginning in 1987,” Foster continued, which led to Hamas defining the Palestinian struggle as “one ‘against the Jews.'”
Hamas only transformed from a charitable organization into a “military resistance organization” because of “incredible brutality” Israelis inflicted on Palestinians, Foster claimed. Only after Israeli aggression did Hamas “pick up [indiscriminate] attacks on civilians in Israel.” Hamas is “perceived” as a terrorist organization, he added.
Foster described various instances of Palestinian aggression against Israel as having been prompted by Israeli “occupation.” Hamas’s charter does call for “the destruction of Israel,” Foster acknowledged, “but I think it’s important to remember that Hamas leaders have been incredibly pragmatic over the years, and many statements from many Hamas leaders indicate they actually were interested in peace and were interested in negotiation and settlement, rather than violence.”
Israel’s “siege” on Gaza has worsened Gaza’s access to electricity, education, food, water, shelter, and more, Foster continued.
Aziz defended the teach-in in a statement to National Review.
“The teach ins are intended to contribute toward the national conversations about an issue of public importance in accordance with academic freedom principles, free speech rights enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the societal role of universities to be sources of information by experts,” Aziz said.
“Any attendee or viewer is free to disagree with the ideas or information in the presentation. Any Rutgers student, faculty or staff is free to hold their own events on campus or virtually that may or may not disagree with the ideas or information in the presentation. The presenter, Dr. Zachary Foster is an expert on Palestine and Isreal, holding a PhD in Near East Studies from Princeton University, and self-identifies as Jewish American.”
“Any Rutgers student can choose to never interact, watch, or be exposed to the work of the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, and as a result there is no factual basis for finding that CSRR harasses or promotes harassment of Jewish students at Rutgers University,” Aziz added.
Rutgers and Foster did not respond to requests for comment.
Aziz closed out the teach-in by thanking Foster for his thorough presentation, but emphasized that “it doesn’t do justice to 75 years of the occupation of Palestinians, but at least it does provide some of the key information that is often not included in media coverage and in our public education, and private education, about the Middle East.”
In February of last year, the Senate Judiciary Committee probed the Center for Security, Race, and Rights to discover if it was funded by taxpayers or foreign governments. Republicans at the time decried the Center’s “promotion of terrorist sympathizers, and its platforming of radical ideologues.”
The teach-in was held a mere nine days after Hamas stormed into Israel, to kill, rape, and maim Israeli civilians.
On October 12, days before the teach-in, Aziz emailed her colleagues to criticize what she called a “one-sided message” from the Rutgers president that “completely disregards Israeli war crimes against Palestinian civilians in Gaza and makes clear that Palestinian lives (and by extension Muslim and Arab lives) are not valued at this university.”
Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers Noura Erakat called Aziz’s criticisms “excellent,” and shared with Aziz a “pedagogical project” she said “debunks the talking points about Hamas and rehabilitates the systematic warfare against Gaza within a settler colonial framework.”
One day prior, on October 11, another Rutgers professor Zahra Ali asked Erakat to speak at a “Iraq Twenty Years” event hosted at Rutgers-Newark.
“As the event commemorates the 20 years since the invasion, the relationship between racism, imperialism and settler colonialism, having you talk about the situation in Gaza and in Palestine would be great,” Ali wrote in the email. “The chancellor Nancy Cantor and our Dean Jacqueline Mattis will attend the event, along with many members of the Rutgers Newark community.”