Why Are So Many Students Supporting Hamas Terrorism?

Tabia Lee, a founding member of Free Black Thought and a former director of the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza College, poses for a photo in Washington on July 6, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek speaks with Dr. Tabia Lee, a former DEI educator at De Anza College in California. She was fired after refusing to follow the college’s woke social justice orthodoxy. Today, she is trying to reform California’s mandatory ethnic studies high school curriculum, which she argues is infused with extremist ideology, including antisemitism.

Jan Jekielek: Since our last interview, you’ve been working on revitalizing ethnic study curriculums. Please tell me about that.

Dr. Tabia Lee: I’m working for the Coalition for Empowered Education, where I’m director of education. We’re building a nationwide network to help teachers learn about different approaches to ethnic studies and to counter the current approach, which is a liberated ethnic studies model.

Mr. Jekielek: What is this liberated approach?

Dr. Lee: It’s really a subversion of language. When you hear the word liberated, you think freedom. But what we’re seeing in this model is a critical social justice understanding of liberation, ethnic studies, and gender studies.

A critical social justice approach emphasizes privilege, oppression, and power in every interaction. It sees racism and race in every disparity or human interaction. It encourages us to focus on checkboxes of identity, like race or gender.

It’s this idea that because of who I am, you and I can never fully understand each other because my gender and race are impacting everything I’ve experienced. Therefore, I should be considered the authority on any issues relating to those race and gender checkboxes I occupy. It focuses on division. It flies in the face of a more classical social justice approach, which recognizes human agency, free will, and individual experience.

It’s a focus on group experience based on claims that America was founded by white supremacy culture. When I hear white supremacy, I usually think of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and people of that nature. But after being called a white supremacist when I was in my former DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] role at De Anza College, I discovered a whole framework of personality characteristics attributed to white culture.

It’s degrading and demoralizing, because supposedly, if you’re not white or supporting white supremacy, then you need to be the opposite of those characteristics. That means, for example, not being on time, not being objective, and not looking at the written word as important. These are the characteristics we’re told we should rail against in the critical social justice framework.

My work with the Coalition for Empowered Education involves raising people’s awareness that there are other ways to understand ethnic and gender studies. You don’t need to be anti-American. You don’t need to put people in checkboxes and focus on privilege and oppression. Other ways exist for studying and appreciating what different cultures and ethnicities have brought to this grand experiment. We can do it without destroying the very fabric of civilization.

Mr. Jekielek: Basically, you’re talking about real diversity and real inclusion.

Dr. Lee: From a classical perspective, equity is fairness, but not in the way that critical social justice proponents understand it. They see it as equality of outcomes in our schooling, our economic system, and in every way, instead of focusing on equality of opportunity.

Mr. Jekielek: While at De Anza, you essentially realized that antisemitism was baked into this ideology.

Dr. Lee: At De Anza, I came face-to-face with modern antisemitism. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are deeply connected. On university campuses, we can quibble about what antisemitism is and what definitions we use. But in some places, there are no definitions, which is intentional. People refuse to adopt the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition. They refuse to adopt any definition of antisemitism, even when students directly ask for it. De Anza was one of those places.

Mr. Jekielek: Are the protests we’re seeing right now happening at De Anza?

Dr. Lee: Yes, and throughout the Bay Area. Some faculty are offering students extra credit to join pro-Hamas rallies. The slogans are the same slogans I tried to get my dean to act on when the De Anza student government made their resolution condemning Israel. The Jewish students who brought up a resolution attempting to define antisemitism were shouted down and told, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Many of the students don’t even understand the geographical and political implications of what they’re saying.

I never thought I would see this in America—the support of terrorist groups and terrorist actions by students. Do these students understand they would be the first to be tamped down if Hamas had its way? Israel is the one place in the Middle East where you can be yourself. You can be an Arab Israeli citizen or a Mizrahi Jew, you can be an LGBTQ+ person. Yet we see these students holding up banners that say “Queers for Palestine.” Over there, they would be beheaded in an instant.

We’re even seeing this support in our medical professionals, teachers, and healthcare professionals proposing this toxic ideology, thinking of their patients and students as either victims or oppressors. What about the Jewish patient or any other patient who doesn’t fit this critical social justice narrative? Will they get a different kind of care? Some of the leadership in the American Psychological Association are even saying they want to classify the Zionist perspective as a psychosis.

This is a battle that involves global ideas and world civilization. They’re not going to stop with Israel. This will come here as well, and it saddens me to see our young people laying out the welcome mat for their own destruction, calling for the dismantling of American culture and society. After you destroy everything, what’s next?

I hope we don’t have to learn the answer to that question the hard way.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.