Law Student Uses Graduation Speech to Spew Anti-Semitic Hate

Chosen by her classmates to be class speaker at CUNY’s Law School graduation, Yemeni-American Fatima Mohammed did not disappoint. She attacked Israel as a “colonial settler state” that wantonly rains death on Palestinians, denounced the NYPD for “fascism,” and described the law itself as an expression of “white supremacy,” a claim which would no doubt come as a surprise to the thousands of lawyers and judges who have used the law – that is, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that applies to the states, and since 1954 has been applied to the Federal government through the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment – to dismantle segregation and all manner of racial discrimination.

There was applause for her five minutes of name-calling by the callow classmates who were graduating that day, but others were appalled at her spewing of vicious leftist bromides, and at the administration of the CUNY law school as well, for it could have easily discovered Mohammed’s long record of making outrageous and antisemitic statements, and prevented her from speaking.

CUNY’s Jewish Law Students Association — a collection of appeasement-minded fools — issued a statement in solidarity with “our friend and classmate Fatima.” Quoting from her remarks that Israel continued “to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshipers,” the statement said that it was “disingenuous to characterize these factual descriptions as antisemitic, when they describe the conditions of Palestinian life.”

But Israel does not “indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers”; her statement was false, and the Jewish Law Students’ Association was morally obtuse in choosing to stand in solidarity with “our friend and classmate Fatima.”

It is Hamas and PIJ that indiscriminately hurl bombs into civilian areas of Israel. It is Hamas and PIJ terrorists who “indiscriminately” stab, shoot, and ram with vehicles Israeli civilians. Perhaps Fatima Mohammed’s cheerleaders in the Jewish Law Students’ Association should google the words “terrorist attacks on Israelis” to find out more, before cheering her on. “She Attacked Israel and the N.Y.P.D. It Made Her Law School a Target.” By Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, June 2, 2023:

“Let us remember that Gaza, just this week, has been bombed with the world watching,” she said at one point. “That daily, brown and Black men are being murdered by the state at Rikers.”

Israel did not “bomb Gaza,” but with astonishing precision hit terror targets inside the Strip, right down, in some cases, to the very apartment or even the room in which a terrorist target was hiding. Even though 142 sites belonging to the PIJ were hit, only six civilians were killed by Israel. As for those “brown and black” men who are “daily” being “murdered” at Rikers Island, this is a dangerous falsehood that could whip up violent anti-police sentiment, and even encourage attacks on the guards at Rikers. About one prisoner a month – not “daily” as Mohammed claims — dies at Rikers Island. The causes of death range from hitting their heads in falls to drug overdoses on Fentanyl. No one is “murdered” at Rikers by the guards, which is what Mohammed wants us to believe. Nor are “brown and black men” the only prisoners held at Rikers.

Mohammed praised the CUNY law school as “one of the very few legal institutions created to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world.” In other words, the CUNY law school is to be commended, in her view, because it sees through the pieties and recognizes that law “is a manifestation of white supremacy.” In fact, beginning in the middle of the last century, the law became the chief instrument in the dismantling of white supremacy. See Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Bd. Of Education, Bolling v. Sharpe, among other landmark cases.

In Gaza, during Operation Arrow and Shield, Israel conducted airstrikes on 142 terror targets. They included weapons storehouses, command-and-control centers, weapons production plants, rocket launching pads, fighters’ hideouts, terror tunnels, and more. In five days of fighting, according to the figures given out by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, 22 PIJ fighters were killed, and 11 civilians died. Of those eleven Palestinian civilians killed in the conflict, four – one adult and three children – were killed in Gaza when PIJ rockets misfired and fell short, landing in the Strip; another Palestinian, who had been working in Israel, died when hit by a PIJ rocket. That leaves exactly six civilians who were killed by Israel in the five days of fighting. Meanwhile, the PIJ hurled more than 1,400 rockets into civilian areas of Israel. One Israeli woman was killed. There are two reasons that more Israeli civilians did not die. First, Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system had a 95% success rate in intercepting, and destroying, incoming rockets. Israel’s David’s Sling defense also intercepted a mid-range missile headed for Tel Aviv. Second, almost every Israeli multi-family dwelling, and many single-family residences, too, have small rooms made of reinforced concrete that are used as bomb shelters, to which Israelis can run whenever an alarm goes off signaling an incoming attack.

Fatima Mohammed’s unhinged denunciation of “Israeli settler colonialism” and of CUNY’s collaboration with “the fascist N.Y.P.D.” especially infuriated many, leading to front-page headlines including the New York Post’s “Stark Raving Grad.”

Fatima Mohammed claimed that Israel “rains bullets and bombs on worshippers.” What can she be thinking of? She has things topsy-turvy. Where are Palestinian worshippers being shot at or bombed? The only “worshippers” who are being attacked are Jews. On the Temple Mount Jewish visitors need to be accompanied by armed guards in case Palestinians decide to throw rocks and fireworks at them. The Palestinians also rain down rocks and bottles, when they can, on Jewish worshippers praying far below at the Western Wall. If the Israelis had been “raining death” on Palestinian worshippers, they certainly weren’t doing a good job of it – not a single Palestinian worshipper was killed by the IDF during Operation Shield and Arrow.

Israel, far from “indiscriminately raining bullets and bombs” on Palestinians, takes enormous pride in the precision of its pilots, hitting their targets while minimizing collateral damage. Israel is also known for the elaborate efforts it makes to minimize civilian casualties in another way. When a target is going to be hit, and the Israelis know there are civilians in the same building as, say, a command-and-control center, or a room full of rockets, the IDF makes great efforts to alert civilians to get out. It telephones the civilians, sends emails to them, drops leaflets in the area, and even uses its celebrated “knock-on-the-roof” technique to communicate the need to get out fast from areas, or buildings, about to be targeted. It is this effort by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties that led Colonel Richard Kemp, the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, and the veteran of a half-dozen other conflicts, to describe the IDF as “the most moral army in the world.”

Ritchie Torres, the Democratic Congressman from the Bronx, who is many shades darker than the “white” Fatima Mohammed prating about “white supremacy,” offered on Twitter the best comment of all on the obsessive antisemite:

“Imagine being so crazed by hatred for Israel as a Jewish State that you make it the subject of your commencement speech,” Mr. Torres wrote on Twitter last week. “Anti-Israel derangement syndrome at work.”

After what amounts to her declaration of war on Israel, on the NYPD, and on the Law itself as a vehicle for maintaining “white supremacy,” is there any lawyer, or law firm, that would hire her as an associate, or any judge who would employ her as a law clerk? Let us hope not. In the end, she may have to settle for being hired by the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to spread the same antisemitic message. After all, they deserve each other.