Hamas Loyalist Professor: Huda Fakhreddine at the University of Pennsylvania “While we were asleep [on October 7th], Palestine invented a new way of life.” by Sara Dogan
#4: Huda Fakhreddine, University of Pennsylvania
An associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Huda Fakhreddine has repeatedly voiced praise for the Jew-hating terrorist group Hamas and has specifically lauded their barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians on October 7th during which over 1200 were slaughtered and many more raped, mutilated, and taken hostage.
On October 7, 2023, just hours after this massacre, Fakhreddine tweeted in Arabic, “While we were asleep, Palestine invented a new way of life,” clearly celebrating the brutal slaughter of Israeli innocents.
A few days later on October 12, Fakhreddine doubled down on her warped view of the conflict, posting a “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine” which charged Israel with “sole responsibility” for Hamas’s October 7th massacre. The statement claimed that “The Palestinian resistance efforts”—note the whitewashing of mass rape and baby-killing as acts of “resistance”—“are a response to 75 years of occupation, colonization, and apartheid by the Israeli settler colonial regime.”
In a Facebook post one week later, Fakhreddine added: “When we chant, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ we are calling for a one state, one person=one vote, where everyone living between the river and the sea is free and treated as a human being with rights and dignity. If some see freedom and equal rights for all as an existential threat, then they are the problem. No country should require oppression and apartheid to exist.”
As the anti-Semitism watchdog site Canary Mission notes, “‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’ is a chant calling to dismantle the State of Israel. It has also been employed by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal to call for the replacement of Israel with an Islamic state.” It is a genocidal call for the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of its entire Jewish population.
So extreme are Fakhreddine’s views that she rejects even the common pro-Palestine descriptor of Gaza as an “open-air prison,” tweeting that, “Gaza is not an open-air prison. Prisoners receive visitors and aid is allowed to be passed to them. Gaza is a Nazi-style concentration camp, a concentration camp under bombardment.” Fakhreddine’s comparison of Israel’s conduct to Hitler’s Nazi regime is a common and widely-used form of Jew hatred.
The professor has repeatedly made clear that she supports Hamas’s attack on innocent Israeli civilians. In a civil rights case filed in U.S. District Court, Jewish students at Penn allege that at a pro-Palestine rally on October 16, 2023, one speaker declared that “all settlers and all settlements are legitimate military targets and they will be targeted.” The same speaker also told Jewish students to “go back to Moscow, Brooklyn . . . fucking Berlin where you came from.” According to the case filing, “Professors, including Huda Fakhreddine, cheered the speaker on and clapped in approval.”
Last May, when students created an illegal pro-Hamas encampment on Penn’s campus, Professor Fakhreddine was on hand to support them. When university officials finally allowed city police to clear the encampment, Fakhreddine sided with the students who illegally occupied university land and claimed that students were “brutalized” by law enforcement. She further drew a parallel to the actions of Philadelphia and campus police and an instance from her childhood when Israeli military forces “invaded” her village in Lebanon.
Fakhreddine was one of the faculty organizers of the notoriously anti-Semitic Palestine Writes Literature Festival, held on campus in the fall of 2023. At that event, which brought many known Jew haters to Penn’s campus, Fakhreddine used the genocidal phrase “From the river, to the sea,” promoting the destruction of Israel and its Jewish population.
The professor also denied the well-established fact that the Jewish people have deep ancestral ties to the land of Israel, stating “And now, as Zionists continued to forcibly remove us from our homes, destroy and build over our ancestral villages, cemeteries and archaeological heritage. They have invented a stunning new tale of indigeneity [that is] propagated in popular culture throughout the West in particular.”
She also invoked anti-Semitic tropes that Jews control the media, stating “An open collaboration with Israel media continues to remove or shadow ban Palestinian content on social media, a phenomena that was verified by an independent investigation commissioned by Facebook itself that revealed unequivocal anti Palestinian bias. Financial platforms like PayPal have been pressured by Zionists to disallow Palestinians even the most mundane of transactions.”
Fakhreddine mocked concerns about the potential for anti-Semitism at the festival as “Hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas” adding, “Again, this is an old, well worn colonial script of the violent, dark, irrational and savage native. Which I will not dignify with a response.”
In perhaps her most direct statement of Jew hatred, Fakhreddine alleged that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
For her outright and enthusiastic support for Hamas’s October 7 massacre targeting Jewish civilians in Israel and her well-documented record of anti-Semitism, Penn Professor Huda Fakhreddine deserves her place on the list of Hamas-loyalist professors.
Previous Articles in the Series:
#5: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Joseph Massad at Columbia University.
#6: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Samer Alatout at UW-Madison.
#7: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Steven Thrasher at Northwestern University.
#8: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Noura Erakat at Rutgers University.
#9: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Jairo Fúnez-Flores at Texas Tech University.
#10: Hamas Loyalist Professor: Jeffrey McCully at Moraine Valley Community College.
Comments are closed.
