Unhinged Rutgers prof says it’s ‘homophobic’ to note that Hamas brutalizes LGBT people

A Rutgers University professor said it is “homophobic” to point out that LGBT-identifying people face persecution in the Gaza Strip. 

At Rutgers University in New Jersey on March 20, Maya Mikdashi, an associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers joined University of Illinois professor Nadine Naber for a discussion titled “Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle,” according to the Daily Mail. 

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During the event, Mikdashi commented: “So I’ve been at protests where I’m then told ‘don’t you know what Hamas would do to you, if you were in Palestine’. . . . We have to start naming this as homophobic. You cannot rehearse violence to queer people. It’s violent,” wrote the Daily Mail. 

Naber claimed: “We’re going to need our organizing to center queer and trans people not only because they are especially vulnerable to colonial violence and the racism and the doxxing, but they also embody exceptionally nuanced wisdom about Zionism because they are living it in all its complexity,” the Daily Mail continued. 

Naber also claimed Israelis have been guilty of raping Palestinian women since the founding of the Jewish State: “[I]ndeed the practices of rape and sexual assault that have been well-documented during the founding of Israel and continued today are not an exception or a secondary impact of colonial violence. . . [They] are part of the settler, colonial white supremacist logics and practices of Israel that conflate colonized women with the land and nature and assume that therefore to dominate the land necessitates dominating Palestinian women’s bodies and their reproductive capacities from 1948 until today,” reported the Daily Mail. 

Naber has previously argued that Israel “pinkwashes” itself to improve its image, claiming in a 2021 Truthout op-ed: “Pinkwashing is a . . . strategy that Israel deploys to distract attention away from its oppression of Palestinians in the face of a growing international Palestinian solidarity movement. AlQaws activists, centering the experiences of queer Palestinians, describe pinkwashing as an international propaganda effort that aims to rebrand Israel as a liberated ‘modern’ and therefore ‘gay-friendly’ state compared with what it portrays as hyper-homophobic ‘Palestinian-Arab-Muslim culture.’”

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The Daily Mail related that “Queers for Palestine” protests have risen in frequency in the U.S. since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians, and that some critics have pointed out the apparent inconsistency in LGBT support for a Palestinian government that is not seen as friendly to LGBT issues. 

LGBT-identifying people face great hardship and discrimination in Palestinian-controlled territories, and a great number of LGBT-identifying Palestinians go to Israel to find safety from persecution by other Palestinians, Reason Magazine reported. 

Campus Reform has reached out to Rutgers University, Maya Mikdashi, and Nadine Naber for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.