Yale University is under attack for hosting a French scientist accused of appalling anti-Semitism during Passover – defying Jewish groups who pleaded with the university to cancel the lecture.
The Ivy League college invited Franco-Algerian Houria Bouteldja to talk on April 6, the night of the second Passover Seder, despite calls for her cancellation resulting from alleged anti-Semitism and homophobia.
Bouteldja was accused of being a serial anti-Semite and homophobe after she posed with an indication demanding that Zionists be sent to the gulags, saying she identified with a terrorist who carried out a mass shooting at a Jewish school and calling same-sex marriage “a part of homonationalism.”
She also said that individuals “must support” the Palestinian “resistance”, including the terrorist group Hamas.
Bouteldja was invited to attend a series of lectures on “Decolonizing Europe” organized by Fatima El-Tayeb, Yale Professor of Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies – who described Bouteldja’s attempts to interview her file as “a waste of time.”
El-Tayeb declined to answer requests for comment from The Post.
Yale ignored demands from the group StopAntisemitism to not host Bouteldja during one in all Judaism’s most sacred times, when observant students couldn’t debate along with her.
Liora Rez, executive director of StopAntisemitism, denounced Bouteldja as a “cruel anti-Semitic and homophobic bigot” unworthy of being hosted by any institution.
“StopAntisemitism is appalled that Yale has provided this notorious racist with a platform to spread her poisonous ideas,” Rez told The Post. “As well as, we’re very disenchanted that Yale President Peter Salovey has ignored requests from students, alumni and StopAntisemitism for dialogue surrounding the Bouteldja event.”
Other critics of Bouteldji’s visit, including Jewish actor and attorney Jonah Platt, said they were appalled by the timing of her lecture, which took place on the second night of Passover.
“You can not have a free and open debate when you intentionally or unknowingly schedule that discussion for a time when the opposite side of this supposedly free and open debate is outwardly unable to attend,” Platt told The Post. “It is a mistake”.
Platt accused Yale of being apathetic or deliberately damaging by allowing Bouteldja to look during Passover.
“It feels insidious, as if there’s a sinister plan at work,” continued Platt. “I definitely feel sorry for students who feel that their university doesn’t care about them, doesn’t see them or hear them.”
Bouteldja, who was unable to be reached for comment, didn’t address accusations of homophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-whiteness during her April 6 speech at Yale, Yale Every day News reported.
When one in all the scholars tried to ask for an unequivocal statement that she supports LGBT rights and condemns the anti-Semitic mass murderer, El-Tayeb called the query a waste of time, The Yale News told The Yale News.
“Whether this event was planned for the second day of Passover intentionally or by accident, the web effect was that many students who would otherwise wish their voices were heard were unable to achieve this.” – Uri Cohen, executive director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, told The Post, adding that it disenfranchised many potential protesters.
“Jewish hatred is one in all the oldest and most despicable scourges in human history, and we at the moment are seeing it dramatically increase all around the world, including here in Latest Haven. The world needs less hate – no more, and I hope the campus community will do higher in that spirit in the long run.”
Bouteldja has long been one in all France’s most controversial academic and political figures.
Her book “Whites, Jews and Us” which has a foreword by the fiery former Harvard and Princeton professor Cornel West, argues that Israel’s existence is a conspiracy by white Europeans to uphold white supremacy.
In 2012, she she publicly allied with Mohammed Merah, the Islamic jihadist who murdered a rabbi and three children in a mass shooting at a Jewish day school and killed two off-duty soldiers in a series of attacks in Toulouse, France.
She blamed the attack on “white supremacy,” which based on French authorities on the time, was clearly anti-Semitic.
“On March 21, 2012, I went to bed as me and woke up as Mohamed Merah,” said Bouteldja, claiming that the mass murder survived an “amazing Islamophobic political and media campaign” following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“Like me, he knows he could be accused of anti-Semitism if he supported the colonized Palestinians, and of non secular fundamentalism if he advocated the proper to wear a scarf,” Bouteldja said. “Mohamed Merah is me and I’m him.”
It also dismissed the 9/11 attacks, claiming that “the towers are hit by planes and collapse like a house of cards”, and the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London in 2005, when 4 British-born suicide bombers killed 56 innocent people commuters, described as “bombs going off within the subway”.
Bouteldja, who moved to France as a toddler from the previous colony of Algeria, accused French Jews of being a part of “white supremacy” by oppressing the country’s Muslim population.
A Yale spokeswoman declined to offer additional details about Bouteldji’s lecture when contacted by The Post.
Yale’s vp for university life, Pilar Montalvo, told protesting students that the lecture wouldn’t be rescheduled resulting from his stance on free speech, the coed newspaper reported.
“Anti-Semitism has no place at this university,” Montalvo told the scholars. “Much work is being done to support the Jewish community on campus.”