At Georgetown Law School, academics are encouraged to post their intellectual function to the college’s” Scholarly Commons”, an online site that serves as a “repository” for journal articles and other substances. This week’s submissions include extended papers on privacy legislation, liability liability, and First Amendment disputes.
In recent months, but, one Georgetown Law doctor, Lama Abu- Odeh, has submitted “working documents” to the site that stand out from the rest. They do n’t mention precedent or legal arguments, and they do n’t make any academic references. Rather, they consist of Abu- Odeh’s musings on the “genocide in Gaza” —ramblings that in some cases summon era- old anti- Celtic tropes.
In one report titled,” Gaza Shoah: Zionism’s Beneficial Role as Ideological Supplement in the US”, Abu- Odeh describes Israel as an “apartheid state”, lauds “resistance to the Zionist project”, and argues that Hamas terrorists did no assault Israelis on Oct. 7. She even accuses Jews of funding Israel through paid black folks.
” It is true that the British social class, Democrats and Republicans everywhere, is on AIPAC’s dole”, Abu- Odeh writes. It’s also correct that Zionist Jews dominate the old press.
” Some boomer negroes, faced with Israel vs Palestinians would part with the original given a sense of commitment to the combined struggle”, she continues. It occasionally seemed like the less difficult choice because some black people’s upward mobility depended on the Jewish money on offer in the different institutions where they worked.
The working report was published by Abu-Odeh on January 3. About two months later, she posted a follow- off titled,” Gaza Shoah 11: The Frankenstein State of Israel”, which paints Israel as” Frankenstein’s dragon” because it “has a curiosity with arms” and is bent on “dismantling Palestine into divergent territories”.
In response to Hamas ‘ attack on the Jewish state, Abu- Odeh’s papers reflect the rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses. According to her academic bio, Abu- Odeh first joined Georgetown in 1999 after working for Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School. She teaches two seminars at Georgetown: Conservative Legal and Political Thought and Human Rights and its Discontents. She also serves as a South African UN election observer, and she is a member of Georgetown’s” Gender Justice Initiative.” In 2021, she criticized Georgetown’s diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy for targeting a fellow law professor who was deemed to have made a racist comment about black students.
In many cases, that anti- Semitism has come from faculty members. At Georgetown, for example, administrators placed faculty member Aneesa Johnson on administrative leave over social media posts that referred to Jews as” Zio bitches”, “dogs”, and devils.
Abu- Odeh stated to the Washington Free Beacon that her papers are still being worked on and will eventually include references. She also defended her claim that Hamas terrorists did not commit rape on October 7, citing Max Blumenthal, an author opposed to Israel who has accused the” Israel lobby” of hacking Israeli senator John Fetterman ( D., Pennsylvania )’s brains.
According to Abu- Odeh,” the piece will include citations when it is ready for submission to a publication” in an email. Reporters like Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate from the Grayzone, Ali Abu Neimeh from Electronic Intifada, and Briahna Joy Gray from Rising refute the charge that Hamas committed rapes in valiantly.
” And lastly f— off”, she said.
Abu- Odeh’s intentions are still unknown. The papers were taken out of Georgetown Law’s” Scholarly Commons” after her email exchange with the Free Beacon. Both articles can be viewed here and here, which The Free Beacon obtained.
Abu- Odeh’s posts “look like something a sophomore would write at two in the morning after drinking a little too much,” according to Ilya Shapiro, a former Georgetown Law administrator and current Manhattan Institute senior fellow.
” It’s bad scholarship, there are no citations, and the footnotes do n’t provide any sources”, Shapiro told the Free Beacon. This is in fact a screed against Semitism that is absolutely nothing. … There’s even typos. This is not scholarship. I would n’t take a class from her”.
A request for comment on whether it was aware of Abu- Odeh’s posts and how the school intends to respond to them was not returned.
The university has a history of pursuing political speech investigation faculty; in 2022, it launched a month-long investigation into Shapiro over social media posts criticizing President Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court.
” If there was a screed like this from the right, I mean, that person would be strung up and investigated to death”, Shapiro said of Abu- Odeh.
In addition to her anti- Semitic rhetoric on Jewish control over media and financial institutions, Abu- Odeh said conservatives are” stuck” on Oct. 7, accusing them of harboring a “fetishistic focus on’ Jewish injury.'” She specifically mentioned SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly as an example of a” stuck” conservative, though she misspelled Kelly’s name and called her a” shiksa”, a term of Yiddish origin that refers to a non- Jewish woman.
” She is stuck on October 7th, a fetishistic focus on’ Jewish injury’ that apparently justifies everything that happened afterwards”, Abu- Odeh’s January paper states. Kelly has a nostalgia for an incinerating imperial machine that can waste all those brown people, just like Kelly has a nostalgia for September 11 and the war on terror.
In her March follow- up paper, meanwhile, Abu- Odeh refers to Israel as an “inorganic monstrosity that is overwhelmed with envy and rage at every thing ]sic ] that is real”.
” Whether formed of a psychotic delusion or confused about the love or hate of its creator, or constantly directing its rage against the innocent, the Frankenstein monster of Israel roams the land confused, hated, and angry”, she writes. The precious bond between a mother and a child in Gaza is particularly enraged because it repeatedly savagely violates one or both of its bonds by killing one or both of them.
It has moved beyond ripping the relationship of Palestinians to their own land to ripping their own existence.
