Professor's pro-Hamas tweet aligns with academic focus on Israel criticism, terrorist 'rights'

University of California, Santa Barbara professor Lisa Hajjar recently tweeted an image that suggested support for attacks on Israel.

The image, posted to Hajjar’s now private X account, is an artist’s depiction of a bulldozer plowing through a border fence waving a Palestinian flag.

Lisa Hajjar is your Professor and Department Chair @ucsantabarbara - are you ok with her celebrating Hamas’ devastating actions of October 7th that included the beheading of babies, raping of teenagers, and kidnapping of Holocaust survivors? pic.twitter.com/dNFpxS7TjZ

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) October 21, 2023

Hajjar is currently co-authoring a book titled Genealogies of Human Rights in the Arab World. Her previous publications largely focus on criticisms of military torture of terrorists by both the U.S. and Israel, as well as assertions that Israel frequently commits human rights abuses against the ‘occupied’ state of Palestine.

Consider this excerpt from a 2019 article by Hajjar:

If the 9/11 attacks were an act of war, then the terrorists who perpetrated them, as this reasoning went, were not civilians because civilians can’t make “war” and you can’t declare war on civilians. If they weren’t soldiers either, you wouldn’t have to treat those who were captured like prisoners of war. The purpose of inventing this new category of people who were neither soldiers nor civilians was to generate a legalistic basis for depriving them of any rights.

According to Hajjar’s university bio, “her current research focuses primarily on the US ‘war on terror,’ particularly around the issues of torture, targeted killing, and Guantanamo.”