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Claremont Student Group Plans Oct. 7 “Al Aqsa Flood Anniversary Talk” with Pro-Hamas Scholar
On October 7, the People’s Fund—an organization funded and operated by Claremont Colleges students—plans to host Mohamed Abdou, a self-described “Muslim anarchist” and Hamas proponent as part of his “Death to the Akademy” tour.
The planned talk, titled “Re-igniting Student Organizing against Settler-Colonial Amerika on the 3rd Anniversary of Al Aqsa Flood” would discuss “Gaza’s warrior mujahideen as the tip of the spear” and offer “strategies for student organizers who seek to confront the liberal Akademy and topple Euro-Amerikan empire where they are.”
“Be proud of your hate for America,” Abdou said on one of his previous tour stops. “You love Islam, and you should be loving Islam more than this barbarous colony. It’s a plague upon the earth. And yeah, in that sense, you need to be a threat. We all need to be a threat.”
The People’s Fund claims that Abdou will speak at an undisclosed location at the Claremont Colleges on October 7, the third anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel.
A spokesperson for the Claremont Colleges contested this in a press release, saying the event “is not sponsored, approved, or hosted by The Claremont Colleges, and no space has been reserved for it.” The press release called the event’s promotional material “abhorrent,” and said the Claremont Colleges’ Campus Safety was “monitor[ing] the situation” while “in contact with local law enforcement and is prepared to respond to any violation of policy.” The statement does not explicitly say whether the colleges would intervene to stop the event if it were booked in accordance with school policies.
The spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up inquiry from the Independent regarding what policies the event could violate, and whether previous People’s Funds events held on campus were in violation of college policy.
The event was originally promoted in a collaborative Instagram post by Abdou, UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, and the People’s Fund, which has since been taken down by Instagram for "symbols, glorification, or support of people and organizations [Instagram] define[s] as dangerous.” Abdou’s account was suspended.
The two student groups and Abdou have since posted on Instagram announcing “The talks are still on!” Abdou is scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley on October 6.
The People’s Fund also collaborated on an Instagram post with Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine to announce a “week of action” from Oct. 5 to Oct. 9, calling for a “Strike for Gaza” on Oct. 7 along with eight other student clubs, six of which are registered and school-funded. Claremont SJP also reposted an advertisement of Abdou’s talk and has previously collaborated with the People’s Fund.
“This discussion will dive into organizing lessons from Gaza’s Mujahideen,” advertises a flyer promoting Abdou’s Claremont event, referring to Hamas fighters. It would also explore “the successes and failures of the Al-Aqsa Flood student solidarity movement, connections between tuetle [sic] island and Palestine’s freeing, and where we go from here amidst the crescendo US-Zionist violence across west Asia and the spiritual and racial-religious war our peoples have been fighting since 1492.” 1492 marks both the end of the Reconquista by Christians from Muslims and the expulsion of Jews from Iberia.
The flyers for the Oct. 7 event include drawings of Hamas militants brandishing assault rifles and wearing keffiyehs, credited to Jordanian-Palestinian artist Mohammed Afefa. His work includes depictions of Israeli soldiers and tanks aiming their guns at Jesus. The title of the talks overlays a large red triangle, a symbol used by Hamas to designate targets in propaganda videos.
The People’s Fund is a student-run organization founded in 2024 at the height of the pro-Palestine protest movement in Claremont. It promotes itself as a fundraising and “mutual-aid” organization that supports “comrades building power on the ground” in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Palestine.
Though it is not a registered club, the People’s Fund regularly collaborates with registered and college-funded clubs and organizations. It frequently hosts “The People’s Fund Market” at Scripps College’s Motley Cafe, where student vendors can sell merchandise, with proceeds purportedly going towards the fund's mutual aid efforts. According to the People’s Fund’s fundraising page, (which has since been taken down) the group has raised over $78,000 since 2024. There is no way of tracking where the money has gone as the People’s Fund has no public oversight mechanism.
Born in Egypt, Abdou was raised in Canada. Since completing his doctoral thesis, “Islam & Queer Muslims Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary,” Abdou has held various short-term positions at universities in Canada, Egypt, and the US.
Abdou rose to prominence in 2024 when his activism as a visiting assistant professor at Columbia University was cited during a House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing. A Facebook post from Oct. 11, 2023 in which Abdou stated, “I'm with Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad” was put to then-Columbia President Nemat Shafik, who disavowed the statement and promised Abdou would “never work at Columbia again.” Abdou’s public curriculum vitae lists his current mailing address as the Einaudi Center at Cornell University.
In addition to his statements in support of Hamas and “martyrdom,” Abdou has praised the murderer of two Israeli embassy staffers in the 2025 Capital Jewish Museum shooting. “God bless him. He took action. He took action,” Abdou told the audience in a zoom call hosted by the Union Theological Seminary in March. “Take action. Not only that kind of action, just to be very clear, because there’s also building. We need to destroy. We need to create alternatives.”
The planned talk would continue a string of controversies at the colleges on or around Oct. 7. One day after the attacks in 2023, Claremont’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter released a statement condoning the attacks, which was co-signed by dozens of clubs and affinity groups. A year later, students took over and occupied Pomona College’s Carnegie Hall to demand divestment, resulting in a dozen suspensions and dozens of Claremont Colleges students being banned from Pomona’s campus.
Last year, masked protesters disrupted a vigil hosted by Claremont Hillel and Haverim that featured an Oct. 7 survivor as a speaker. An anonymous statement released by the disruptors referred to the speaker as “Satan” and Zionism as a “death cult.” Pomona has not been able to identify all the students involved in the disruption.
The announcement of Abdou’s talk comes on the heels of a 322-page report released by Amnesty International USA and the ACLU accusing Pomona and Scripps of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech in the wake of campus protests.
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