University of Southern California (USC) economics professor John Strauss, who is Jewish, has been barred from campus because of a doctored video circulated by anti-Israel activists who claim he said all Palestinians should be killed.
In fact, as the full video (clumsily included here by an anti-Israel activist) shows, Strauss was referring specifically to the Hamas terrorist organization.
here is @USC professor John Strauss saying “every one of them should be killed, and I hope they all are” while passing by students who organised a memorial for 10,000+ Palestinian martyrs killed in the past month pic.twitter.com/Iuox2laMKL
— tara (@taraxrh) November 10, 2023
Video 1: ” … should be killed, and I hope they are.”
Video 2: ” You people are ignorant. Really ignorant. Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one of them should be killed, and I hope they are.”
Anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and Muslim activists only cited the former video in pushing for USC to take against Strauss.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday:
As [Strauss’s] remarks raced across the internet, his condemnation of Hamas was often excised, leaving only his “hope” for “all” to be killed. Captions and comments online framed his demand for “every one” to be killed in myriad, at times deceptive, ways. One Instagram post shared to millions of users claimed falsely that Strauss told the students, “[I] hope you get killed….”
Within a day, an associate dean told Strauss that he was on paid administrative leave, barred from campus, and that he would no longer teach his undergraduates this semester.
Within the week, a petition demanding that USC fire Strauss for his “racist, xenophobic behavior” and comments that “promote and incite violence” had collected more than 6,500 signatures.
The UK Daily Mail noted:
Strauss said he was provoked by what he felt were anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments overheard while walking to class.
‘I’m Jewish, I’m very pro-Israel,’ he told USC Annenberg Media. ‘And so I yelled out ‘Israel forever. Hamas are murderers.’
USC’s free speech policy states: “The legitimate expression of differing opinions and concerns, including unpopular, controversial or dissident viewpoints, is an essential element of the academic process.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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