The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is hosting a talk by Emmaia Gelman, an academic who celebrated the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack as a breach of "prison walls", the latest in a pattern of anti-Israel events at the publicly funded university.
Gelman, founder of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, is scheduled to appear Wednesday evening at UNC's FedEx Global Education Center to discuss her book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State. The Duke University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted an Instagram invitation announcing the talk and a second appearance by Gelman at Duke the following night. No one at UNC has publicly claimed responsibility for organizing the event, and the university's Global Affairs department calendar does not list it, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
A UNC spokesman said the university "is committed to protecting free expression" and "follows a policy of institutional neutrality." He declined to answer further questions about the event's details or who arranged it.
Gelman's public record makes the invitation difficult to separate from its context. On October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas attacked Israel, killing civilians at a music festival and in surrounding communities, Gelman posted photos on Instagram of Hamas bulldozers tearing down the fence on the Gaza-Israel border. Her caption read:
"Solidarity with those who break prison walls. 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 confronted her, claiming Hamas had "murdered 250 kids at a music festival," Gelman did not condemn the violence. She 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."
That same day, Gelman posted photos from a rally in Times Square that the Free Beacon described as pro-Hamas. One attendee was reportedly captured holding up a picture of a swastika on her phone. Gelman wrote that "thousands of people in the streets of NYC today" were there "to support Palestinians breaking Israeli control on Gaza." She referenced the prior day's celebration at Camp Kinderland, a left-wing anti-Zionist Jewish summer camp, and predicted the rallies "will be much, much bigger."
Gelman has also argued that words like "terrorist" and "hate" are "Zionist terms" and that people should stop using "October 7th" as shorthand for the attack. In her view, the phrase describes "empire's militarized moment of shock." She proposed alternatives including "Al Aqsa Flood" and "the Al Aqsa Flood military/guerrilla operation."
Gelman's scheduled appearance fits a pattern at Chapel Hill. In 2019, UNC hosted a "Conflict Over Gaza" conference featuring Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar, who prefaced a song by telling the audience to "Think of Mel Gibson" and "go that antisemitic."
On November 28, 2023, weeks after the Hamas attack, UNC departments held an event titled "No Peace Without Justice: A Round-Table Talk about Social Justice in Palestine." One of the speakers, left-wing activist Rania Masri, told the audience:
"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."
Masri went further, framing the attack as an act of resistance rather than terrorism:
"So for many of us, the question is, 'how did they learn that?' 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."
In September 2024, the student group TransparUNCy promoted an anti-Israel walkout at UNC that turned destructive. Students spray-painted slogans on university property, including "BURN RIOT RESIST," "BURN IT ALL," and "ISRAEL BOMBS USA PAYS." UNC later gave its Edward Kidder Graham Award, described as recognizing "the most outstanding contribution to the university", to Christina Huang, a student who led TransparUNCy.
The university's handling of antisemitism on campus has drawn federal scrutiny. In late 2023, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, the federal office that enforces anti-discrimination law in schools, opened an investigation into whether UNC had failed to respond to alleged antisemitic harassment. The current status of that investigation is unclear.
In March 2025, UNC was among 60 institutions that received enforcement-warning letters from the Trump administration over what it deemed an insufficient response to antisemitism on campus. The letter put UNC on notice alongside dozens of other colleges and universities across the country.
Against that backdrop, UNC is now preparing to host an academic who posted images of Hamas bulldozers the day after the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust and wrote "solidarity with those who break prison walls." Her book describes the Anti-Defamation League as "a Cold War neoconservative institution" and presents its history "through its conflicts with social justice movements," framing the ADL's work as having "underwritten US empire."
The university's one-line response, that it supports free expression and follows institutional neutrality, sidesteps the central question. No one has explained who at UNC organized the event, why it does not appear on the Global Affairs calendar, or how it squares with the federal scrutiny the school already faces over antisemitism. The FedEx Global Education Center falls under UNC's Global Affairs department, which is led by Vice Provost Barbara Stephenson, a former U.S. Ambassador to Panama under President Barack Obama.
Free expression is a principle worth defending. But a public university that has already been investigated by federal civil-rights officials and warned by the administration over its antisemitism record is not exercising neutrality when it opens its doors to a speaker who called the Oct. 7 massacre an act of "decolonization." It is making a choice, and hiding behind boilerplate when asked to explain it.
Taxpayers fund the building. Parents trust the institution. Students deserve a campus where "institutional neutrality" means something more than a press statement issued after the controversy has already been scheduled.
