Hadeel Assali, who is teaching an active course on ‘race, climate, and environmental justice,’ has endorsed terrorism against Israel and called for its ‘abolition’
A Columbia University “environmental justice” lecturer called Charlie Kirk a “dead nazi” in a social media post that criticized the Ivy League school for lowering its flags to half-mast in compliance with a federal directive honoring the slain conservative commentator.
The lecturer, Hadeel Assali, shared a photo from a self-described “queer, trans, black, indigenous, and person of color” graffiti artist showing a wall in Los Angeles defaced with the message, “2 black men were lynched & the media is mourning a dead Nazi.” Assali added her own message: “And Columbia university has flags at half mast for the dead nazi.”
Assali’s post is but one example of how far-left faculty members—especially in the School of Arts and Sciences, where Assali lectures—encourage radical activism at Columbia. Assali teaches a seminar on “Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice” that focuses on “anti-colonial approaches to doing science,” according to a course description for her active fall 2025 class, which consists of nine students.
Democrats have been accused of stoking the flames that led to Kirk’s assassination by consistently branding conservatives as Nazis and fascists. Kirk’s killer, Tyler Robinson, engraved “Hey fascist! Catch!” on a bullet found in the suspected murder weapon.
Columbia, meanwhile, did not lower its flags to half-mast out of its own volition but rather to comply with guidance from the Trump administration. A Columbia spokesman said the school “follows federal, state and local guidance on the lowering of our flags” but does not “comment on tasteless social media posts.” The spokesman did not answer questions on whether Assali would face discipline for the post.
In the week following the assassination, more than a hundred individuals have been fired for publicly celebrating or justifying Kirk’s murder, according to a tally compiled by Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer. Among them are MSNBC political contributor Matthew Dowd, who was canned after blaming the murder on Kirk’s “hate speech,” and Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, whose posts on Bluesky falsely claimed Kirk said all black women “do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.”
Assali’s comments come at a difficult time for Columbia, as the university is already under the Trump administration’s microscope. In July, the school agreed to a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration to restore some $400 million in grants and contracts that the White House’s anti-Semitism task force froze in March. The agreement included a commitment to reforms such as “renewed efforts to foster an inclusive and respectful learning environment” and the “application of consistent, rigorous, and effective disciplinary actions for violations of University Rules.”
Assali’s radical rhetoric doesn’t stop with Kirk. On Sunday, she posted on Instagram, “May we see the abolition of Israel and Zionism within our lifetime.”
“Why are we allowing our institutions to be policed and controlled by Zionists?” she added. “How will we root out this and all forms of white colonial supremacy?”
Assali has also repeatedly used her account, which has nearly 3,500 followers, to fundraise for Palestinians in Gaza.
“Organize mobilize resist and pay your reparations to Gaza, whether to our mutual aid or others – it is the BARE MINIMUM considering our tax dollars are funding genocide,” she wrote in her Sunday post. “But dont stop there – wake up and resist.”
This isn’t the first time Assali has called for Israel’s end. She also endorsed Palestinian “resistance in ALL its forms” shortly after the Oct. 7 terror attack and last year published an essay describing Hamas’s underground tunnels as “an essential form of resistance,” the Washington Free Beacon reported in April.
The tunnels, she wrote, serve as “sovereign zones that have shifted the power balance between the colonizer and the colonized.”
Earlier this year, Assali, alongside Columbia University Apartheid Divest—the school’s most notorious anti-Semitic student group—signed a letter committing to a boycott of Columbia pushing the university to reinstate the violent, radical students who stormed campus buildings and to reject the Trump administration’s demands.
Assali’s disdain for Kirk should come as no surprise, given that the conservative activist was an outspoken supporter of Israel.
“The war started because 1,300 Jews were killed and 200 were taken hostage,” he said of Israel’s war on Hamas at a Cambridge University debate this summer. “When you declare war on Israel, expect a firestorm in reaction.”
“The IDF, when they do something right, they get no credit. When they do life-saving surgeries of a Gazan child, they get no credit,” he continued. “But when they happen to bomb a place where they are operating their military from—which we now know from third-party verified sources, hundreds of Hamas military operations are in mosques, schools, and hospitals—I’m sorry. … Hamas started the war.”
Last month, he condemned anti-Semitism, posting on X, “Jew hate has no place in civil society. It rots the brain, reject it.”
Assali did not respond to a request for comment.
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