Wake Forest University Cancels Pro-Palestine Speaker's Oct. 7 Event After Fierce Backlash

Wake Forest University has canceled a lecture set to be delivered by Palestinian-American activist Rabab Abdulhadi, scheduled for the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, in which 1,139 people were killed, and an additional 251 were taken hostage.

In an email addressed to the Wake Forest community, University President Susan R. Wente and Provost Michele Gillespie indicated that Abdulhadi's lecture, scheduled for Oct. 7, "cannot take place."

"We have also made the conscious decision not to host events on this day that are inherently contentious and stand to stoke division in our campus community," they wrote. "We are living in complex times, and yet we remain hopeful about the future because of this caring community and our shared mission to serve humanity."

On Sunday, an online petition was started by the executive boards of Jewish student organizations Hillel and Chabad in order to protest the event featuring Abdulhadi. As of Thursday, the petition has received over 8,000 signatures. The university's undergraduate student enrollment stands at 5,471. Wake Forest's student-run newspaper, The Old Gold & Black, could not confirm what percentage of Wake Forest University students made up the signatories.

"We support free speech, we encourage the university to host people with a variety of different viewpoints, to share different perspectives, encourage and foster dialogue on our campus. However, about a week ago, they put up posters for this event with antisemitic and pro-terrorist language," Isabelle Laxer, president of the WFU Chabad student organization, told Fox 8. "It's incredibly disheartening to see this happening on a day that saw the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust."

The petition refers to Abdulhadi as a "self-proclaimed Hamas sympathizer." Abdulhadi, director of San Francisco State University's Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, has aimed to strengthen ties between SFSU and Palestinian universities An-Najah and Bir Zeit, which have been described by Campus Watch as "Hamas-dominated."

"Over the last 12 months we've heard the claim repeatedly that this was the worst of violence that Jews have suffered since the Holocaust, and I get that — I'm a scholar of the Holocaust; I am Jewish. Oct. 7 was an incredibly horrible day," Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History Barry Trachtenberg told the Old Gold & Black. "We also must recognize that, since then, at least 42,000 Palestinians have been murdered, the vast majority of them being noncombatants. It is the largest loss of life in Palestinian history ever, and I believe that makes it worthwhile for us to be able to talk about it."

Five on-campus academic departments were sponsoring the event, which had been titled "One Year Since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance," --- Wake Forest University's Humanities Institute, the department of history, the department of politics and international affairs, the Middle East South Asian studies program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza strip in the onslaught following the events of Oct. 7.