NYU instructor suspended after denying Oct. 7 atrocities at SJP event
New York University. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By Louis Keene January 25, 2024
New York University has suspended an adjunct faculty member after video of him denying Hamas atrocities including rape and beheading during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and describing New York as “a Zionist city” was publicized Thursday by The Free Press.
An NYU spokesperson said Thursday that the adjunct instructor, Amin Husain, had been suspended and was not currently teaching any classes at the school. Husain’s profile on the school website, which listed him as a part-time faculty member, was taken down Thursday.
The article in The Free Press, an online publication headed by Bari Weiss, was based on a two-minute video of Husain, a Palestinian American activist, speaking at a Dec. 5 “teach-in” organized by Students for Justice in Palestine. The event took place at The New School, a small college near NYU.
“These kinds of questions try to put you on the defensive,” Husain says in the video (it is not entirely clear what questions he is referring to). “They try to say, ‘OK, well, are you supporting — oh my God, you support rapists and people that behead babies,’ both of which, whatever, we know it’s not true. But the president keeps repeating them.”
Human rights organizations, the U.S. State Department, and independent news outlets including The New York Times have all corroborated reports of rape by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks that killed more than 1,100 people, most of them civilians. The Israel Defense Forces and ZAKA, Israel’s volunteer emergency-responder network, have also presented evidence of babies being beheaded and brutalized during the attack.
Husain is one of the leaders of Decolonize This Place, a nonprofit that organizes around Palestinian rights. An NYU alumnus created an online petition in October calling for him to be fired for “promoting hate speech”; it has garnered more than 5,000 signatures.
He did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
In the video, he brags about having been called antisemitic, and says that his bio on the website of Canary Mission, a pro-Israel group that doxxes Palestinian activists, was “one of the best biographies I have, and everything they say is true,” eliciting laughter from the audience at the teach-in.
“I have a petition going around, right, because I’m antisemitic,” he boasted. “I won the honors of ‘antisemitic’ multiple times.”
He said the only reason the Hamas attacks received attention in New York was because it was a “Zionist city.”
Both NYU and The New School distanced themselves from Husain Thursday.
“All members of our community must adhere to the university’s discrimination and anti-harassment policies,” NYU’s spokesperson said in a statement. “We investigate all complaints we receive and take appropriate action, which may include taking measures such as suspension.”
The New School told the New York Post that Husain had not been a faculty member there since 2019, but had been invited back to speak on campus by SJP on more than one occasion.
“The remarks made by Husain at these events are outrageous and offensive,” the school told the Post. “Antisemitism has no place on our campus or anywhere else.”
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