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Pro-Hamas Scholar Addresses Claremont Students Virtually on Oct. 7
Pro-Hamas scholar Mohamed Abdou addressed Claremont Colleges students virtually on Wednesday, Oct. 7, as part of his “Death to the Akademy Tour.” The talk was hosted by the People’s Fund, an organization also operated by Claremont Colleges students, which met at an unknown location to project the event live.
“This is the third blessed anniversary, a day that will live forever… and will continue to be, etched in the hearts of colonized people, of dispossessed people, because this is what [Al-Aqsa Flood] was about,” said Abdou on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, lecturing an audience of more than 40 attendees.
During the rambling two-and-a-half hour talk, Abdou praised Hamas and Jihad, argued that current events were tied to a “racial-religious war” that began in 1492 and exhorted students to continue fighting by “tak[ing] the war to heaven.”
“I believe in Islam that hates America. Islam is antithetical to American values, ”Abdou said, reiterating his public position on Islam’s incompatibility with the US.
He also repeatedly criticized liberal ideology. “Let’s have a disagreement, especially if you’re proclaiming so-called free speech, which is a liberal ideal,” Abdou said during the talk. “Liberalism is more dangerous than KKK conservatism, by the way.”
He instead encouraged students to embrace a religious perspective: “This isn’t just a racial war against colonial powers. This is a religious war and needs to be taken seriously on those terms. So the Mujahideen do not sit down and quote Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao. You know they don’t. They speak the language of the Quran. We need to deal with this war on these terms if we really respect them.”
On the morning of Oct. 7, the People’s Fund posted on Instagram, denouncing attempts by the Claremont Colleges and outside organizations to prevent the talk from being held on campus. “These attacks illustrate how violently zionist, anti-Muslim, racist, & xenophobic the Claremont Colleges are,” People’s Fund’s statement says. “Our donation site has been completely shut down, the [Claremont Colleges have] ramped up surveillance of every student space on campus, and Dr. Abdou’s personal Instagram has been taken down.”
“Today, the Peoples Fund will triumphantly continue to host our event on the Claremont College’s campus,” the post ends.
Previously, the People’s Fund collaborated on an Instagram post with Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine to announce a “week of action” from Oct. 5 to Oct. 9. Events included a vigil for Palestine and Lebanon, poetry reading, film screening, “teach-in,” and an Oct. 7 “Strike for Gaza” class walkout.
Also on Oct. 7, Claremont Hillel hosted a survivor of the Nova music festival attack to speak at a memorial event. Security measures were high after last year’s Oct. 7 commemoration was disrupted by protesters.
An email sent to registered attendees of Abdou’s talk an hour before its 7 pm start gave the event’s location as the Ponderosa Classroom, a bookable room in the Honnold-Mudd Library. A few students, most of them journalists, gathered around the room before the event was set to start and were eventually joined by a representative of the Claremont Colleges.
Arriving at their weekly meeting, members of Pomona College’s student investment fund, Sagehen Capital Management, were caught off guard by the Claremont Colleges representative, who repeatedly asked them who they were and why they had booked the room, before accepting they were not the People’s Fund and had no plans to host Abdou.
Earlier in the week, Scripps College was alerted by a group of Jewish faculty that “PF” had booked a room in the Scripps Student Union. In response, Scripps restricted access to its internal booking platform. Students who went to the ostensibly booked Scripps room told the Independent that the event was not there either.
The Motley Coffeehouse, which has hosted several People’s Fund events, also didn’t host the talk, though they hung a Palestinian flag inside the cafe in defiance of Scripps’s administration.
Ultimately, the event took place virtually through Jitsi—an open-source alternative to video-conference platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams—with only a small group of People’s Fund organizers meeting in-person on campus.
An anonymous speaker from the People’s Fund introduced Abdou, telling the audience he was joining the call from Cairo. Raised in Canada, Abdou was born in Egypt and is a citizen of both countries.
Abdou began with a reflection on Moses and Genesis before moving on to Claremont’s relationship with Indigenous people, and American responsibility for the destruction of Gaza, calling former-President Joe Biden “Genocide Joe.”
Abdou repeatedly praised the students who organized the event for their “resistance” against the Claremont Colleges’ administrations. “Organizing requires secrecy. It requires deception. It requires being quiet, going underground, knowing your adversary, surprising them, and taking this battle of hearts and minds and spirits to them, of standing our ground.”
“Think about what it took to organize this event: the secrecy, the deception, the underground,” Abdou said of the People’s Fund talk before explaining in detail the preparations Hamas took to plan the Oct. 7 attacks and train its paragliders and fighters.
Abdou also claimed that “Euro-America has made a manufacturing plant of terrorism, insofar as Muslims are concerned. Who else created ISIS? Who else created Al-Qaeda? Who else has funded, if you will, these projects in so many different ways?”
After concluding his lecture, the call opened up to audience questions, beginning with one from the People’s Fund on how mutual-aid, which requires money—“a colonial tool of power”—could be compatible with the destruction of colonial structures.
In his 30 minute answer, Abdou distinguished money from other resources like food, while acknowledging the difficulties of resisting the system one lives in. “I’m an anarchist. I don’t like capitalism. But look, I still got a mug that I bought from somewhere,” Abdou admitted. “I’m talking to you from a MacBook. I have an iPhone. I’m not pure. None of us are pure.” Toward the end of his answer, Abdou turned to the importance of land and organizing militias.
The Q&A’s second question was about connections between Indigenous and Palestinian organizing and how to make “solidarity across these struggles meaningful in practice” while avoiding “obscuring their distinct histories and goals.”
Abdou again took nearly half an hour to answer the question, during which roughly half the audience left the call. He touched on his own experiences organizing with Indigenous groups in Canada while acknowledging his own status as a “settler,” telling the audience, “I don’t have the same privilege in the way, but that doesn’t mean I’m not complicit in Indigenous dispossession and Black genocide. I have a choice: do I choose to pledge allegiance to the American, to the Canadian flag, or to Allah?”
Abdou then returned to his framing of 1492 as a date that links Indigenous and Palestinian struggles into the ongoing “racial-religious war.” He directly addressed Muslims living in the US, emphasizing the necessity of choosing between the comforts of America or the true liberation of “Turtle Island.”
“So the Palestinian diaspora, the Arab and Muslim diaspora, need to decide: Do they want to be the new brown face of empire, like Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, Drone President, Wall Street President, the Promise and Hope President, with a good set of speechwriters and a winning style, or do they want to take war to the heaven?” Adbou asked at the end of his remarks.
“Are they willing to wage war on behalf of justice against injustice, which is what America stands for, to deal with great Satan to deliver a blow and death to America for something better for an actual dream, not this false prize? This is an important part of the equation,” said Abdou. “Until we confront that, we have no say in freeing Palestine.”
“Thank you so much, Dr. Abdou. All of your wisdom and courage will be engraved into all of our hearts,” the introductory speaker concluded. “We hope all political organizers on this campus and potentially outside of the Claremont Colleges are inspired by your words, and we move on from simply posting free Palestine on our [social media] stories, and move to destabilize not just the Zionist entity but the entire empire.”
Applause could be heard in the background as the People’s Fund organizer spoke. “We can't wait to have you back soon. Very soon.”
Olivia Rosenthal contributed reporting.
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