UCLA disgraces itself by hosting terrorist lawyer on 9/11

UCLA disgraced itself this week by hosting a symposium on terrorism on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 that featured radical critics of US counterterror policy, and a lawyer for al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

In addition to allegedly planning the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Mohammed is the terrorist who decapitated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.

Pearl’s father, Judea Pearl, teaches engineering at UCLA. That only underlines how shocking and insensitive the symposium, hosted by UCLA School of Law, was.

It was so shocking that UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk condemned the event in exclusive remarks to The California Post, saying “We reject antisemitism and terrorism in all their forms, and we believe our campus must be a place where the dignity of every member of our community is respected.”

If UCLA hosted any 9/11 event at all, it should have been to honor victims of terror.

UCLA is already on the hot seat for allowing antisemitism to run wild on campus, especially during the so-called “encampment” in 2024.

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The administration allowed anti-Israel and pro-Hamas students to occupy a public area on campus and to build barricades.

The radicals stopped Jewish students from going to classes or even to their dormitories unless they disavowed their “Zionism” and denounced Israel.

The activists also assaulted journalists who tried to film the encampment, and excluded members of the public and the university who simply wanted to walk through the center of campus at a publicly funded institution.

You would think, with federal lawsuits and civil rights complaints looming, that UCLA would not go out of its way to insult the nation on 9/11.

But that gives too much credit to academia, which has lost the plot.

Many of America’s universities have turned against the nation that nurtured them, and the public that still funds them.

Extremists with tenure, who are almost impossible to fire, exploit their power to indoctrinate students and disseminate anti-American propaganda.

While universities enjoy generous exemptions from the taxes that the rest of us have to pay, their faculty attack capitalism and demand economic redistribution.

They claim that they allow radicalism in the name of “academic freedom.” But academic freedom evidently only applies to the left, because conservative professors are scarce and conservative speakers have to be surrounded with security or are simply disinvited.

You can have whatever debate you want about American foreign policy, and the tactics of the war on terror. You might even find that Americans are willing to listen to criticism.

But don’t host an event with a terrorist’s lawyer on the anniversary of 9/11. You’re just reinforcing the well-deserved contempt with which ordinary Americans regard our colleges and universities.