Speakers described counterterrorism as a ‘racist gravy train’ and celebrated the assassination of Brian Thompson
On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the University of California, Los Angeles, will host a symposium with speakers who have described counterterrorism as “racist,” called for Israel to be attacked, and glorified the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The symposium, “25 Years After 9/11: Reimagining Freedom, Justice, and Security,” will also include multiple professors who have called for abolishing the police and a defense attorney for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
“Counterterrorism serves as a kind of racist gravy train,” one panelist, Yale Law School’s Aslı Ü. Bâli, argued in a 2020 essay. “Without addressing the revenue streams tied to counterterrorism at home and abroad, there can be no meaningful way to defund the police.”
Beginning on Sept. 10, the two-day event will feature avowed supporters of political violence on a day meant to commemorate the victims of it. The opening panel, which invites “participants to imagine futures beyond … militarization,” will include the executive director of California’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hussam Ayloush, who in November 2023 said that “Israel should be attacked” and compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany. Another panel will include the University of Minnesota’s Amna Akbar, who described Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson as a “spectacular act of protest.”
“Calls to ‘Free Luigi’ on the streets and inside jails express solidarity not just with one man, but against the catastrophic realities of capitalism, where necessities like health care, food, and housing are financialized commodities that few can truly afford,” Akbar wrote in a January 2025 essay. “This is the system UnitedHealthcare stands for and profits from. This is the system that Mangione (allegedly) took aim at.”
Another speaker, UC Irvine’s Melanie Partow, serves on the defense team for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The symposium does not feature any current or former prosecutor of the Guantanamo Bay detainees who planned and perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.
Sponsored by UCLA law school’s Critical Race Studies program, which describes itself as the “premier setting for studying the intersection of race and the law,” the symposium will also address “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” and the war on terror’s roots in “White Christian nationalism,” according to an event description on the law school’s website. It comes as UCLA is fending off a lawsuit from the Justice Department, which alleges that the university created a hostile environment for Jewish students.
A UCLA spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that the law school “has a longstanding commitment to academic freedom and to fostering a wide range of scholarly inquiry.”
“Events organized by an individual UCLA Law program, centers, or institutes – and the views expressed – do not imply endorsement by UCLA Law, and neither the language of this symposium nor the views of its speakers should be understood as representing the school as a whole,” the spokesman said. “UCLA Law does not review or approve these choices, nor does the school withdraw invitations because a speaker or viewpoint is sensitive or controversial.”
Though the symposium will discuss the Bush administration’s approach to executive power, it does not feature any of the prominent legal scholars who devised or defended that approach, either. (The most conspicuous omission, John Yoo, a former deputy in the Bush Office of Legal Counsel, teaches a short flight away at UC Berkeley.)
Instead, UCLA has assembled a rogues’ gallery of left-wing activists and academics. They include Richard Abel, a UCLA law professor who has argued that the election of Donald Trump was a greater threat to the United States than 9/11; Sahar Aziz, who teaches courses on “Islamophobia” and “critical race theory” at Rutgers Law School, where she serves as the Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar; and Silky Shah, the executive director of Detention Watch Network, who has argued that “it’s past time for the immigrant justice movement to embrace … calls for prison abolition and defunding the police.”
In a July interview with Truthout, Shah also referred to the “lie” that “immigration is about national security and public safety.” She will appear on a panel on “borders, migration, and national security,” which will “discuss how the fight against terrorism has been weaponized in the immigration context.”
This is not the first time UCLA has invited anti-American speakers who endorse political violence. In 2024, the university’s medical school forced first-year students to sit through a lecture by Lisa Gray-Garcia, an “activist in residence,” who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as “justice” and described Israel as “amerikkklan.”
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