Sen. Ted Cruz blasts UT Austin for employing attorney who hosts podcast with 'radical group' that celebrated Oct. 7 attack: 'Deeply disturbing'
Sen. Ted Cruz blasted the University of Texas at Austin for employing an attorney who hosts a podcast with a group that praised the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) blasted the University of Texas at Austin for employing an attorney who hosts a podcast with a group that praised the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Rhiannon Hamam, supervising attorney at the UT-Austin School of Law Ginni Mithoff Program was one of 57 people who were arrested during anti-Israel protests at the University of Texas at Austin in late April. All charges were dropped by the Travis County attorney’s office, according to the Texas Tribune. All protesters were initially charged with criminal trespass.
Hamam is still listed as an employee of the Ginni Mithoff Program. The Ginni Mithoff Program exists to help students “engage in pro bono work to increase access to justice, build their lawyering skills, and develop a lifetime commitment to providing legal services to those in need.”
Hamam co-hosts the Popular Cradle Podcast, which is made in partnership with the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Booking picture for Rhiannon Hamam.
As documented by NGO Monitor, the Palestinian Youth Movement has a history of promoting terrorism.
After the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the Palestinian Youth Movement proudly took to Facebook and wrote “PALESTINE LIVES! THE RESISTANCE LIVES!”
”In the past several hours, the resistance in Gaza stormed the illegitimate border fence, reentering 1948 Palestine for the first time in many of our lives,” the group wrote. “With these developments come new equations in the Palestinian struggle, and a shifting of the ground beneath our feet, the reverberations of which we can only begin to imagine. Gaza, the cradle of our resistance and the lifeblood of our struggle, is pushing us closer to the hour of liberation than ever before.”
Sen. Ted Cruz told Campus Reform it’s “deeply disturbing” that UT Austin employs Hamam.
“It is deeply disturbing to see that the University of Texas, a renowned academic institution, employs an attorney who participated in the openly antisemitic campus protests at UT, was arrested for criminal conduct, and participates in a podcast alongside a radical group that openly celebrated the cowardly October 7th attack on Israel,” Cruz said. “Jewish students across the nation are being subjected to violence and fear for their safety while they attend class, and Texas should be leading by example by removing such employees.”
Roz Rothstein, co-founder of StandWithUs, an international nonpartisan education organization that supports Israel and combats antisemitism, told Campus Reform that UT Austin should “unequivocally reject this hate.”
”The UT Austin Center for Public Interest Law claims to teach its students to promote justice and serve the public, yet it employs someone with close ties to a hate group that openly celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre, the deadliest day for Jews since the end of the Holocaust. By calling campus encampments a “student intifada,” Hamam’s podcast glorifies massive waves of brutal violence against Israeli civilians,” Rothstein said. “Extremists who promote illegal harassment and intimidation of Jewish and Israeli students around the country should not be supervising or influencing anyone on campus. UT Austin must unequivocally reject this hate and ensure that its legal trainees are not being indoctrinated to support terrorism or antisemitism.”
Following Hamam’s arrest, she wrote on X: “I was in jail with some baddies. Free them all. Free Palestine.”
[RELATED: UT-Austin lawyer co-hosts podcast made in partnership with group that promotes terrorism and praised Oct. 7 attack]
On Oct. 11, just days after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel, Hamam wrote on X: “We advance our struggle.”
”The oppressed and colonized are always maligned, always made out to be savages, always erased, dehumanized, never enjoy support from powerful or wealthy or colonial interests. It is part of being colonized. Palestine lives regardless and in spite of. We advance our struggle,” Hamam wrote.
”There is absolutely no playbook for how to deal with witnessing this. I feel completely at a loss - but then I remember act act act move move move speak speak speak - it’s going to take so much - and it’ll be so worth it. Imagine Palestine after liberation!” Hamam wrote on Oct. 27, 2023.
On Nov. 16, 2023, Hamam also posted to X “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Hamam also wrote “Glory to our martyrs” on Dec. 7, 2023.
Glory to our martyrs. Nothing in my life has made me yearn for the existence of heavenly paradise and an unceasingly painful hell like the past two months.
— Rhiannon (@AywaRhiannon) December 7, 2023
Campus Reform reached out to UT Austin for comment.
