In November, somebody plastered flyers all over Arizona State University’s campus in Tempe spouting, "Who controls the world? Jews do.”
But this week, Jewish students at ASU feel out of control and powerless as the campus prepares to host a public speaker who calls Jewish people “neo-Nazis.” Student fees are paying for the event, which will put nearly 10 grand into the speaker's pocket.
Controversy over the symposium has erupted, with Jewish and Muslim students debating where to draw the line between free speech and hate speech. The event lands ASU in the middle, as it strives to promote robust debate but faces allegations of hypocrisy.
Antisemitic propaganda is nothing new to ASU. Similar campaigns ran twice in 2020, with posters reading "Hitler was right," "unity of our blood," and other antiSemitic slogans posted all over campus by the Goyim Defense League, a network of internet troll and conspiracy theorists.
At the time, ASU President Michael Crow said in an official statement, " Arizona State University has a long history of opposing anti-Semitic rhetoric and acts of intimidation whether they occur on our campuses or in the community. We reject and will not accept anti-Semitism or hateful rhetoric of any kind.”
This week, Jewish groups both on and off campus are asking ASU not to break that promise as the university prepares to host a speaker who makes Jewish students and faculty members say they're scared.
Two Palestinian culture clubs at the university jointly invited Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian activist and poet who's described by Jews and gentiles alike as a “known antisemite,” to speak to students this Sunday. ASU’s Undergraduate Student Government approved nearly $10,000 last week to pay El-Kurd’s speaker fee. The sum comes from a programming fee of $25 per semester paid by all students.
“Student fees should never be used to fund hate speech,” said Liora Rez, founder of New York City-based watchdog group StopAntisemitism.
Jewish students like Elizabeth Gofman, a third-year dietetics major and ASU’s Israel on Campus Coalition fellow, are helping to pay El-Kurd without any say in the matter.
“Knowing that my dollars are funding somebody coming to tell my people why we shouldn't exist, it’s heartbreaking,” Gofman said.
El-Kurd’s activism has long been colored by antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and profanity.
Last May, he responded to a tweet about Holocaust education from Jewish author Ben Freeman, who is also gay, saying, “SHUT THE FUCK UP MY GOD YOU ARE SO DELUDED.”
El-Kurd also tweeted in June that Jewish Israelites are “terrorists” and “genocidal.”
He even likened Israeli Jews to Nazis, a harmful analogy that devalues the lives of the 6 million Jewish people who were exterminated in the Holocaust.
During Israel’s 11-day conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip in May, El-Kurd asserted that Zionists have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood.”
To add a splash of racism to the antisemitism, in March he tweeted, “‘Ancestral homeland?’ Then explain why y’all can’t walk around Jerusalem without getting sunburnt?”
When King David conquered Jerusalem in 1000 B.C., he established it as the capital of the Jewish kingdom.
“I’m disappointed in the university as a Jewish student,” Gofman said. “It’s hard knowing somebody is coming to my campus, my home away from home, telling me I deserve to die because of where my ancestors are from. It's very, very scary.”
In his debut poetry collection Rifqa, El-Kurd peddled the dangerous, totally fabricated trope that Israeli soldiers “harvest organs of the martyred [Palestinians to] feed their warriors our own.”
Rez’s group, StopAntisemitism, sent a letter to Crow on Wednesday demanding the university intervene. In the letter, she expressed concern that El-Kurd is “monetarily incentivized to speak at college campuses nationwide while spewing his anti-Jewish hatred.”
ASU took no action.