The College Fix

Students organize a petition against the pro-Hamas speaker with over 8,000 signatures

Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, canceled an event featuring pro-Hamas speaker and Professor Rabab Abdulhadi on Oct. 7 amid student opposition.

WFU Provost Michele Gillespie and President Susan Wente announced the cancellation Thursday in a letter to faculty and students.

“Inviting a scholar to give a lecture titled ‘One Year since al-Aqsa Flood: How do We Review a Year of Genocide and Resistance?’ on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel led to a series of cascading events that eroded the University’s confidence in ensuring security in the rapidly-evolving environment surrounding the public event date,” they wrote.

Abdulhadi (pictured) is an associate professor for the Ethnic Studies Program and the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, as well as the senior scholar and founding director of the SFSU Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program.

Jewish students at WFU organized a petition after Abdulhadi’s event was announced, asking the administration to call off the event. It currently has over 8,000 signatures, according to to WFU’s student newspaper Old Gold and Black. The original goal was 7,500 signatures, The Carolina Journal reported.

Some of the students’ concerns are related to Abdulhadi’s 2019 collaboration with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Front, in addition to Hamas, is classified by the U.S. as a terrorist establishment.

Abdulhadi hosted a Zoom event with a member of the Front, Leila Khaled, who unlawfully skyjacked a commercial airplane in 1969, according to PBS. The virtual event breached Zoom’s terms of service, leading to its cancellation.

In an email statement before the event’s cancellation, Cheryl Walker, WFU’s executive director of strategic communications, told The College Fix, “The University actively fosters a culture of respectful dialogue on the most pressing social, political and religious issues of our time.”

“Academic departments and organizations bring speakers with a variety of viewpoints to campus each year. Students can engage with a wide range of ideas, including those they support and those they oppose,” Walker said.

Walker also said the university communicated with organizers of the event as well as opponents.

“It’s deeply upsetting to see [Abdulhadi’s event] scheduled on a day that marks the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust,” said Isabelle Laxer, president of WFU Chabad, a Jewish student organization. Laxer, who helped organize the petition against the event, shared her thoughts with Fox 8 before the event was ultimately cancelled.

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Laxer also said the event was advertised with “antisemitic” and “pro-terrorist” posters on campus.

“Hate speech is hate speech whether or not it’s Oct. 7, 8 or 9…Obviously I think the date adds insult to injury but I think holding a speaker like this at all on Wake Forest campus is upsetting and should not be allowed,” Laxer told Fox 8.

Further, groups like the Anti-Defamation League and Campus Watch criticized Abdulhadi, accusing her of “being antisemitic, pushing an anti-Israel agenda and promoting terrorism,” according to Old Gold and Black.

The College Fix reached out to Abdulhadi, campus Jewish organizations Hillel and Chabad, Students Supporting Israel and the Coalition for Jewish Values for comment via email in the last week. None responded by publication.

The department of history, department of politics and international affairs, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Middle East South Asian studies program, and the Humanities Institute at WFU co-sponsored the event.

Wake Forest has since scheduled two events on Oct. 7: “Interfaith Prayers for Peace” and a “Community Reflection Event,” according to the statement by Gillespie and Wente.

“At both events, students, faculty and staff are invited to pause, reflect, and write a prayer or light a candle for peace,” the email reads.

The school has not indicated whether it will reschedule Abdulhadi’s event.

Campus Jewish organizations have also collaborated with the university to organize a memorial service on Oct. 7 in honor of the one-year anniversary of the attacks by Hamas against Israel.

“We have worked meticulously with Student Engagement to ensure that our event is safe and secure,” WFU Hillel President Andrew Orfaly told Old Gold and Black.

Terrorists have killed over 1,200 Israelis since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and still hold over 100 people hostage, according to the American Jewish Committee. Israel’s response attack on Hamas has caused more than 40,000 deaths, Fox 8 reports.

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IMAGE: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs/Youtube

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