On May 25, 2023 CUNY Law School Released Fatima Mousa Mohammed's commencement address.
For two years in a row, CUNY Law School has enabled its podium to be used by its commencement speaker to spew antisemitic, defamatory vitriol about Israel in their commencement speaker address. Shame on CUNY for allowing this to happen yet again. We call on CUNY to condemn the use of its law school podium to marginalize Israeli and Jewish students. We ask CUNY to institute appropriate and new guidelines going forward aimed at ensuring that this is not repeated a third time. A commencement should be a celebratory event, not one that promotes hate and targets part of the student population with discriminatory rhetoric.
On May 30th, 2023 CUNY released a statement about this hateful speech. Read it HERE. We thank the CUNY Board of Trustees and Chancellor for their unequivocal identification and condemnation of this speaker's comments as hate speech and for their expressed commitment to protecting and supporting students of all religions, races, and political affiliations.
While we respect the right of speakers to convey their message, we thank CUNY for recognizing that certain speech—such as hate speech—is inappropriate at a commencement. At the same time, we are mindful of claims that some version of this year's hateful speech may have been pre-approved by one or more CUNY officials and/or faculty members. In light of the totality of the circumstances here, including that this is the second year in a row that this has happened, we once again call upon CUNY to take the necessary steps, including implementing new and appropriate policies regarding speakers at administration-sponsored events, aimed at preventing use of CUNY Education platforms for antisemitic—or any other—hate speech in the future.
About StandWithUs StandWithUs (SWU) is an international, nonprofit and non-partisan Israel education organization that works to inspire and educate people of all ages about Israel, as well as challenge misinformation and fight against antisemitism. Through university fellowships, high school internships, middle school curricula, conferences, materials, social media, educational films and missions to Israel, StandWithUs supports people around the world who want to educate their schools and communities about Israel. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Los Angeles, the organization has chapters and programs throughout the U.S., in Israel, the UK, Canada, South Africa, Brazil and the Netherlands. For the last eleven years, SWU has consistently received the highest possible ratings from Charity Navigator and Guidestar, two charity watchdog groups that assess hundreds of thousands of charities in the United States. www.standwithus.com and www.facebook.com/standwithus and www.twitter.com/standwithus and www.instagram.com/standwithus.com
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