Introducing Frances Hasso, Tenured and Untethered

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Every American university has at least few of these creatures on its faculty. You know the type, the dreary type. These are the real haters of Israel, like Rashid Khalidi, Juan Cole, Hamid Dabashi, people who are wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ that the Jewish state would disappear altogether, to be replaced by a 23rd Arab state, its Jewish inhabitants expelled or disposed of in ways I need not mention. Not a few of these people long ago rushed pell-mell over the mental cliff and are now wallowing down below in a swamp of their own making. Among them is a professor of whom I was heretofore happily unaware. Her venomous anti-Israel remarks have left a deep impression. A ghoul, forsooth, haunting the toppling graves of academe. More about this person, one Frances Hasso, can be found here: “Why Is Duke Letting an Anti-Israel Hate Monger Teach — and Why Are Leaders Not Investigating?,” by Peter Reitzes, Algemeiner, May 7, 2025:

Let’s examine one department at Duke University to better understand the antisemitic fervor being experienced throughout academia, the campuses, and in academic publications.

Frances Hasso is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke “with secondary appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Sociology.” In 2024, she excitedly announced on X, “HAMAS OFFICIALLY DEFEATS ISRAEL!”…

On Oct. 7, 2023, while Israelis were actively being murdered, raped, tortured, and dragged as hostages into tunnels in Gaza, Hasso shared the following post with her accompanying comment that she agrees “1000 percent”:

Anyone who mischaracterizes legitimate Palestinian resistance against colonial occupation as aggression or any other liberal inspired adjectives is not a friend of the Palestinians but a collaborator with liberal obscurantism & mass confusion that only benefits the colonialists.

The same month, Hasso posted, “The US empire cannot end soon enough.”

I beg to differ about her complaint of the US empire not “ending soon enough.” What I think can’t come soon enough is an end to tenure for everyone and a cleansing of the academic stables. What are people such as Frances Hasso doing in our universities? The Higher Learning? Don’t be silly.

In late December 2023, The New York Times published an in-depth report detailing sexual assaults against Israelis during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led pogrom.

Hasso signed a letter calling the Times’ report “disgraceful.” She and the other signatories stated they, “Firmly reject The Times’ discreditable report and its exploitation of women’s bodies and struggles as a means to fabricate assault incidents and push propaganda for an unlawful occupation, thereby abetting the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”

Hasso is flatly denying what happened to girls and women who were mass-raped, mutilated (breasts sliced off, knives stuck in vaginas just for fun), and murdered. Though the rapes were captured on video by the Hamas rapists themselves, who were so proud of their prowess, Frances Hasso thinks those reports of Hamas rapists were all made up by Israel, an attempt by the IDF to “exploit women’s bodies,” and to push “propaganda” for an “unlawful occupation” (there was no occupation of Gaza; all the Israelis pulled out in 2005), and of course there’s the sly attempt by the Israelis to divert the world’s attention from the real crime of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” that the IDF, according to Frances Hasso, has been engaged in. The tremendous effort by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties through leafletting, text messaging, and robocalling to warn Gazans away from sites about to be targeted means nothing to Professor Frances Hasso.

Just last month, Hasso shared a post on X, in which the original poster said, “Noone was raped on October 7.”

So those videos of rapes that have been attributed to Hamas were actually fakes fabricated by Mossad. After all, the Jews control Hollywood among so many other things, so a few fake videos would be easy for them to produce.

It is concerning — to say the very least — that the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the gender and feminist program at Duke University rejected a prominent report on sexual assaults against Israelis. Perhaps the motto at Duke should be: Believe all women, except Israeli and Jewish women.

I have a more fitting motto for Duke: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

In November of 2023, Hasso was a panelist at the scandalous, “A Round-Table Talk about Social Justice in Palestine,” hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). The event — which I attended — began with the audience being shown a short anti-Israel propaganda film titled “Gaza Concentration Camp,” chosen by Hasso. The film narrator stated that on Oct. 7, “Palestinians didn’t break through a border to enter Israel. … They destroyed a fence separating them from the homes they were forced out of.”

The film did not mention any of the Hamas-led atrocities on Oct. 7.

In a now-infamous moment at the event, a panelist, Rania Masri, said: “Oct. 7 for many of us from the region was a beautiful day. It was the day in which we saw that, we saw our brothers, we saw our fathers, we saw men break out of a concentration camp.”…

What “concentration camp”? Before October 7, 2023, 19,000 Gazans entered Israel every day to work, and if the attack that day hadn’t happened, Israel was preparing to allow more Gazans to work, earning three to four times what they could earn at home, when the Hamas atrocities changed everything. And before October 7, the Israelis were not preventing Gazans from leaving the Strip through the Rafah Crossing into Egypt. Does that sound like a “concentration camp” to you? That “Gaza Concentration Camp” film has to be seen to understand why someone like Frances Hasso would find it so appealing. The link is here.

Hasso recently shared a post alleging that “Israel keeps trying to kill Israeli hostages… all as [an] excuse to prolong the Genocidal plan of erasing two million Palestinians from Gaza. Israel’s priorities are Nazi’s war-time policies – fastracking Genocide (Final Solution).”…

Yes, of course, Israel is trying to kill Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Why didn’t we think of that? Makes perfect sense. But why, then, has the IDF put such an effort into trying to rescue hostages, and in fact has managed to rescue a half-dozen? Why has it freed nearly a thousand Palestinian prisoners to get back some of those hostages that it supposedly wants to kill? Frances Hasso needs to explain.

Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Frances Hasso of Duke University has made a deep impression on me. I am sure she will have the same effect on you.