EDITORS' CORNER
Event speaker defended terrorist who killed professor’s son
University of California Los Angeles Chancellor Julio Frenk and a professor have condemned the law school’s 9/11 symposium, which featured terror sympathizers and an attorney who represented a 9/11 terrorist.
In a Sept. 11 news release, Chancellor Frenk said the school rejects “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.”
“Nothing about this event at the UCLA School of Law, which we do not endorse, changes or qualifies those commitments,” he said.
He added that “Academic freedom does not require us to be neutral about antisemitism or terrorism.”
Frenk also honored UCLA computer science Professor Judea Pearl, whose son was killed in Pakistan in 2002 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the same terrorist one of the symposium speakers defended in court.
“The brutal murder of Daniel Pearl was an act of unspeakable evil, and I support Judea and his family,” the chancellor wrote.
Pearl also condemned the event in a post on X, saying he is “ashamed of [his] university and, especially, the five centers within the UCLA School of Law sponsoring this disturbing symposium.”
“September 11 and October 7 are two painful events that should be used to commemorate the victims of those attacks — Americans and Israelis,” he wrote.
He also rebuked the “distasteful, if not despicable” decision to platform the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has “been sympathetic to the attackers.”
Pearl urged his colleagues to “find different dates to engage us with your political sophistry.”
“Let us spend these two days in serene prayers with our dear ones — find yourselves different dates,” he wrote.
On the other hand, law school professors Ahilan Arulanantham and LaToya Baldwin Clark said they are “enormously proud of the symposium” they hosted, “and UCLA should be too,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
“Had any of the critics actually attended, they would have heard moving memorials to the victims of the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath — including opening remarks from Professor Ahilan Arulanantham, who was present in Manhattan on 9/11, and from Jasleen Kohli, Executive Director of the Critical Race Studies program, whose mother nearly boarded one of the flights that was hijacked,” they said.
The event, hosted by UCLA law school’s Critical Race Studies program, aimed to examine the “sweeping expansions of state power” in the post-9/11 era, according to the event description.
The symposium’s lineup included panelist Melanie Partow, the attorney who represented Mohammed. The 9/11 Commission report identified Mohammed as the “principal architect” of the attacks, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Partow’s panel was titled, “Torture, Rendition, and Detention: The Erosion of the Rights Regime Post-9/11.”
Another panelist, Aslı Ü. Bâli, argued in a 2020 essay that counterterrorism is “racist,” The College Fix previously reported.
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