Radical Academic Who Celebrated Oct 7 as Breach of 'Prison Walls' Slated To Appear at UNC's Global Education Center

A radical anti-Israel academic who celebrated Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack as a breach of "prison walls" is slated to appear at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's FedEx Global Education Center, according to an invitation posted online.

Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism founder Emmaia Gelman's talk on her new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, is scheduled for Wednesday evening, according to an invitation posted to Instagram by the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Duke University, where Gelman will speak the following night. The book, according to her website, is "a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League as a Cold War neoconservative institution" that "presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL's outsize [sic] role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire."

Gelman has gone far beyond criticizing the ADL. Just a day after Oct. 7, she posted photos of Hamas bulldozers tearing down the fence on the border between Gaza and Israel with a caption celebrating the attack. "Solidarity with those who break prison walls," she wrote. "Excited for millions of Americans who have nodded along with land acknowledgements to get behind this, and resist cries that actual decolonization (but not Israeli ethnic cleansing) is somehow 'too much.'"

When a follower pointed out that Hamas "murdered 250 kids at a music festival," Gelman responded, "There are very few deaths that I'd celebrate, but many uprisings against terrible, impossible conditions that resulted in deaths, including unjust deaths. We mostly celebrate those uprisings in hindsight, when it's easier. At 49, and now trained in political history, I've seen enough to feel it's wrong to wait until the dust settles."

It is unclear who at UNC was responsible for organizing the event. The university's website lists the FedEx Global Education Center under its Global Affairs department, which is led by Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Chief Global Officer Barbara Stephenson, who served as U.S. ambassador to Panama under President Barack Obama. Neither the department's calendar nor any other publicly available calendar, however, lists Gelman's talk.

A UNC spokesman said the school "is committed to protecting free expression" and "follows a policy of institutional neutrality." The spokesman did not answer the Washington Free Beacon's questions on details surrounding the event.

The event is the latest in a series of anti-Israel controversies at UNC. Earlier this year, the university gave its Edward Kidder Graham Award for "the most outstanding contribution to the university" to a student, Christina Huang, for her work leading a group called TransparUNCy. According to the university's website, TransparUNCy promoted a September 2024 anti-Israel walkout event that became destructive. Students spray-painted slogans like "BURN RIOT RESIST," "BURN IT ALL," and "ISRAEL BOMBS USA PAYS" on university property.

A number of UNC departments, meanwhile, held an event on Nov. 28, 2023, titled "No Peace Without Justice: A Round-Table Talk about Social Justice in Palestine," which featured left-wing activist Rania Masri as a speaker. According to Masri, "Oct. 7 for many of us from the region was a beautiful day. It was the day in which we saw that, we saw our brothers, we saw our fathers, we saw men break out of a concentration camp."

"So for many of us, the question is, 'how did they learn that?'" she continued. "How did they develop those paratroopers? Where did they get those skills? How, how, after a hundred years of having a military boot on your neck, could you still develop the technique and the resilience to literally fly? That is what Oct. 7 means to many of us. And I just want to be very frank about it and not be in the least bit apologetic of the violence of the oppressed or the occupied."

Several years before Oct. 7, in 2019, the university held a "Conflict Over Gaza" conference with a performance from Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar. Nafar prefaced his song by telling his audience to "Think of Mel Gibson" and "go that antisemitic."

The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether UNC had failed to respond to alleged antisemitic harassment in late 2023. In March 2025, UNC was one of 60 institutions that received enforcement-warning letters from the Trump administration over what the administration deemed an insufficient response to antisemitism.

Gelman's Hamas photos were not her only Instagram post on October 8. She also posted photos from the infamous pro-Hamas rally in Times Square at which an attendee was captured holding up a picture of a swastika on her phone.

"Thousands of people in the streets of NYC today, to support Palestinians breaking Israeli control on Gaza," Gelman wrote. "Yesterday at the #CampKinderland [a left-wing anti-Zionist Jewish summer camp founded by Communists] 100th anniversary celebration, so many people were moved by this resistance, worried about the backlash that will come for Palestinians, and agonized that this will be portrayed as an attack on Jews rather than a colonizing state. I saw some of them at this rally … This was a pretty early dedicated crowd that responded quickly to Palestinian calls, so I imagine that the rallies coming up will be much, much bigger."

Gelman has argued that words like "terrorist" and "hate" are "Zionist terms," created "to make resistance to Zionism and imperialism look antisemitic, irrational, and backward—specifically Palestinian resistance." She has also stated that people should not refer to "October 7th" and disputes the recent rise of antisemitism.

"When we use the date 'October 7th' as shorthand for political events, we're mostly describing empire's militarized moment of shock," she wrote. "But consider what you mean: are you trying to name the beginning of the recent genocide, or the onset of the Student Intifada, or its repression? Say that. Use terms that foreground Palestinian agency and resistance. Alternatives can include: 'Al Aqsa Flood'/'Toufaan al-Aqsa,' 'the Al Aqsa Flood military/guerrilla operation,' 'since the start/escalation of the genocide in Palestine/Gaza,' 'during the McCarthyist antisemitism scare,' etc."

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