Rabab Abdulhadi (l) and Sami Al-Arian, well known terrorist sympathizers, dismissed American victims of 9/11. |
“9/11, as we all know, does not begin on 9/11" when Al Qaeda waged jihad against the United States, but has an imperialist prehistory that goes “back really to the birth of the colonial order,” stated UCLA history professor Robin Kelley during “Whose Narrative? 20 Years Since 9/11/2001,” a September 11 webinar. He and his fellow panelists, including two terrorist supporters, hijacked a solemn day of mourning to whitewash any Islamist involvement in that day’s horrifying events and portray America as righteously attacked by a vengeful world.
The first terrorist sympathizer to speak was San Francisco State University associate professor of ethnic studies Rabab Abdulhadi. In 2014, she used taxpayer dollars to send Americans previously imprisoned for terrorism to meet fellow terrorists at An-Najah University in the West Bank. Last September, she attempted to host via Zoom convicted Palestinian terrorist and hijacker Leila Khaled, but congressional pressure and online companies’ wariness forced the event’s cancelation.
Abdulhadi adopted an “all lives matter” stance toward 9/11 commemoration.
This year, Abdulhadi denied the victims of 9/11 their dignity by adopting an “all lives matter” stance to her “moment of silence to honor all those fallen” by the attacks. “We depart from the U.S.-centric approach by remembering and thinking of all those who have fallen around the world as a direct result of U.S. interventionist and imperialist wars,” she said. Lest anyone miss her viciousness toward her host country, she added a litany of anti-Western accusations, including slavery, “genocidal wars against the indigenous people of the Western hemisphere,” and “disaster capitalism and racial capitalism.” She thereby reflected Kelley’s view that “The lessons I think every generation learns is that U.S. empire threatens the future of humanity,”
Turning to the modern era, Abdulhadi mourned terrorist “prisoners of war (POWs) held in Guantanamo Bay” and the fake Israeli “Jenin camp massacre in April 2001.” Meanwhile she praised the antisemitic 2001 Durban, South Africa, conference “against racism and war and apartheid.” She denounced “U.S. hegemonic discourses” about 9/11 that “legitimizes imperialist wars” and “promotes hypermasculinity and a colonial gender and sexualized violent order of modernity and civilization.”
Introduced by Kelley as a “prisoner of conscience,” the event’s most infamous terrorist supporter, former University of South Florida computer science professor Sami Al-Arian, appeared virtually from Istanbul, Turkey, his home since his 2015 deportation following a federal conviction of supplying material support to the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Posing as if his support for killers was his civil right, he allusively blamed American Jews and Israel for his deportation he wailed that he “was among the first Muslim leaders to be targeted in the U.S. because of powerful interest groups that wanted to silent dissent . . . particularly with regards to Palestine.”
Al-Arian’s subsequent comments revealed his sympathy for Islamists of all stripes. He sounded like Osama bin Laden himself in citing the American policies named by Al Qaeda as justification for 9/11, including the American “occupation of the birthplace of Islam in Saudi Arabia after the Saddam invasion of Kuwait.” America has also, Al-Arian complained, long supported the “colonial-settler state of Israel” as well as Arab dictatorships.
Rutgers University professor of media studies Deepa Kumar marked her second online appearance in as many days in a 9/11 memorial weekend doubleheader by calling 9/11 a “turning point” that “strengthened and consolidated U.S. imperialism.” “Despite the failed occupations in Iraq and most recently Afghanistan, the U.S. has actually expanded its tentacles and reach around the world” with some 800 - 1,000 bases, particularly for drone strikes, she said.
Deepa Kuma (l) and Hatem Bazian said 9/11 strengthened American imperialism with the help of the “Israeli political class.” |
Turning to domestic affairs, Kumar referenced New York University adjunct professor of media, culture, and communication Arun Kundnani. He has, she said, “compared these surveillances of Muslims to that endured by the East Germans under the Stasi, one of most repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to have ever existed” – a hyperbolic smear that typifies so much academic commentary on Israel.
The antisemitic University of California—Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian similarly considered 9/11 a “rewiring of the U.S. imperial system.” After Al Qaeda’s outrages, former “Cold War warriors” had “picked up the green flag, Islam, as a new package threat through which they could still construct their imaginary imperial project,” he said. The “Israeli political class” helped them in this effort, Kumar chirped.
South African Communist Party member and former intelligence minister Ronald Kasrils declared that the “lesson from 9/11 is to resist and to form anti-imperialist solidarity” globally. Eagerly siding with Islamist terrorists, he lauded the Taliban’s “resistance,” which he claimed falsely “had nothing to do with 9/11,” even though the Taliban provided Al Qaeda with a safe haven to plan the attacks. He gleefully noted the Taliban’s “defeat for imperialism,” the torture and execution of desperate refugees and oppression of women notwithstanding. This involved, “as with Vietnam, the scurrying out, the departure, leaving people in the lurch, who they had corrupted,” i.e., Westernized.
The vain hope that the Taliban takeover presaged a future “Israeli fate” tantalized Kasrils.
The vain hope that the Taliban takeover presaged a future “Israeli fate” tantalized Kasrils. He condemned the “Zionist factor, which the Chinese in the old days would have called the running dogs of imperialism.” Spinning Israel’s founding as an international conspiracy, he stated that Israel is a “sub-imperialist power in the Middle East placed there to keep the Middle East embroiled in the control of the Western and the American empire.”
Pakistani-American panelist Fahd Ahmed leads Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), a “multigenerational, membership led organization of low-wage South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrant workers and youth in New York City.” Listed in the video as going by “any pronouns,” he denounced key post-9/11 law enforcement sting operations to nab would-be jihadists in American Muslim communities. “Informants and undercovers would go in and incite vulnerable people within our communities” for terrorism arrests,” he claimed.
The panel showed how America’s mere existence scandalizes the likes of Abdulhadi, who considers the San Francisco Bay area the “occupied territories” of various Native American tribes. She and her fellow panelists appropriated this somber anniversary for their own nefarious ends: to bury the identity of the attackers while blaming the U.S. for the violent deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. This lack of compassion for the dead, coupled with willful distortion of what happened that day, exposed the panelists as callous liars. Neither they nor their like-minded peers deserve the support of America’s universities, where their presence stains our national conscience.
Andrew E. Harrod, a Middle East Forum Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer, is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter: @AEHarrod.
