
While the media has been attacking Trump over his pro-Israel speech, this is what a federal agency is comfortable funding under the Biden-Harris administration.
Wake Forest students on the Hillel and Chabad student executive boards created an online petition early this week urging the administration to cancel an event scheduled for Oct. 7 featuring speaker Rabab Abdulhadi. The petition, which has garnered over 7,000 signatures, pushes for the event to be canceled due to claims of Abdulhadi spreading antisemitic rhetoric and supporting Hamas.
The event, titled “One Year Since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance,” will be held in the ZSR Auditorium on Oct. 7.
Al Aqsa Flood is the Hamas name for the Oct 7 attacks.
The Change.org petition created by Jewish students states that “we, the undersigned members of the Wake Forest University community, are writing to express our strong concern and opposition to the event scheduled for October 7th with speaker Rabab Abdulhadi, a self-proclaimed Hamas sympathizer.”
“Abdulhadi is a San Francisco State University professor who has publicly threatened Jewish students and has had similar events canceled due to violations of Zoom’s, YouTube’s, and Facebook’s terms of service. She has also publicly supported and celebrated terrorists, some of whom are on the FBI Watchlist, as well as spreading blood libels about Jews.”
“The event, titled “One Year since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance,” refers to the mission carried out by Hamas on October 7th, resulting in the most significant loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust. The title equates the murder, rape, and kidnapping of innocent Jewish and Arab life on October 7th to resistance.”
“The event is sponsored by Wake Forest University’s Humanities Institute, Department of History, Department of Politics & International Affairs, Middle East South Asian Studies Program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is crucial that Wake Forest upholds its values and ensures that speakers who promote hatred and violence are not given a platform on our campus. Jewish student leaders have made several attempts to address these concerns with the administration, only to be dismissed.”
The most striking thing here is not even that such an event is taking place on a college campus, but that it’s being sponsored by a Federal agency. The National Endowment for the Humanities is a federal agency and its name appears on a flier advertising an event by a terror supporter who wants to destroy Israel and America.
On July 4, 2021, Abdulhadi wrote on Facebook: “… We will never celebrate, accept, nor condone the founding of the US settler colonial racist state on the lands of our Indigenous relations …”
The NEH information does not appear on an email sent out by Barry Trachtenberg, an ally of Rabab, but it is there on the flyer.
Is a federal agency sponsoring pro-terrorist events on campus?
Whether the NEH is specifically funding the terror event or being referred to as funding the Wake Forest Univerity Humanities Institute through the existing “major grant” from the federal agency, this is a serious issue that Congress may wish to investigate.