An online petition is challenging a University of Southern California professor for drawing equivalence between North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, China’s Mao Zedong, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and Israeli Zionists.
During a recent lecture in front of 200 students taking an international-relations class, Professor David Kang displayed a PowerPoint presentation with a slide titled “Who are terrorists?” featuring a list of organizations that included “Israeli Zionists.” The slide did not list any recognized Islamic terror organizations.
Other slides in the presentation offer quotes from Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden indicating that U.S. foreign policy is to blame for terror attacks. Further slides compare the number of terror-related deaths in the United States on and before Sept. 11, 2001, to the number of deaths caused by traffic accidents, as well as by lightning.
In a recent article by The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs—a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that, according to its website, is “dedicated to educating people of all ages about Israel,” “combating anti-Semitism” and correcting “common prejudices about the Arab-Israeli conflict”—stated that Kang’s “generalization that ‘Israeli Zionists’ are terrorists is simply hate speech.”
She added that “USC should condemn Kang and adopt a policy similar to the UC [University of California] Regents Principles Against Intolerance, to make clear that anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry have no place on campus.”
