Fatima Mohammed’s speech at the City University of New York School of Law’s commencement ceremony on May 12 began with an acknowledgment of the challenges students faced during Covid and a shout-out to her mom. Her remarks then turned political, including a harsh critique of Israel — words that CUNY’s Board of Trustees called “hate speech” in a recently issued statement.
While the ceremony was held almost three weeks ago, the furor sparked by her speech has grown in recent days as a video circulated on social media. A New York Post headline described her speech as “hate-filled” and Fox News’s headline deemed it “vile.” U.S. Rep. Daniel Goldman, a Democrat who represents New York’s 10th district, condemned the law student’s “hateful and misleading rhetoric” in a tweet.
In her 12-minute speech, Mohammed stated that “Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshipers, murdering the old, the young” and said that the state encourages “lynch mobs.” She praised CUNY’s law school as “one of the few, if not the only, law school ... defending the right of its students to speak out against Israeli settler colonialism.” CUNY
bills itself as a “national leader in progressive legal education.”
She also called on the assembled law-school graduates to “recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world,” a line that was met with cheers. She criticized two high-profile Democrats, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, and Chuck Schumer, the U.S. Senate majority leader, asserting that “the murder of Black men like Jordan Neely is … dignified by politicians” like Adams and Schumer. Earlier in the ceremony, Schumer congratulated graduates via video, encouraging them to “go for it.”
Mohammed was one of two speakers selected by fellow students. When she finished her remarks, most of the professors and administrators on stage stood to applaud, and Mohammed blew kisses to the crowd.
While the criticism of Mohammed has been swift and vehement in some quarters, she has received support, including from the Jewish Law Students Association at CUNY. A statement, signed by the association along with 20 other organizations, said that Mohammed was being “targeted by a racist hate campaign” and praised her “courageous work and her inspiring message.” It echoed many of Mohammed’s views and argued that to “equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to erase the history of Jewish anti-Zionism.”
Meanwhile the statement from CUNY’s Board of Trustees and Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, its chancellor, said that while “free speech is precious” Mohammed’s remarks “were a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race, or political affiliation.” It went on to say that “we cannot and will not condone hateful rhetoric on our campuses.” CUNY’s law school has not mentioned the controversy on its website or Twitter account and the school didn’t reply to requests for comment. Social-media accounts that appeared to belong to Mohammed were taken down.
In June 2021, the law school issued a statement in support of a Palestinian student who had posted a short video in which she held a lighter near a man wearing an Israeli Defense Forces T-shirt and said “I hate your shirt. I’m going to set it on fire.” (Nothing was actually burned in the video.) At the time, the law school said it was committed to “robust community dialogue” and quoted a 2016 report from the CUNY Board of Trustees stating that “criticism of Israel is protected speech.”
