In the videotaped lectures, Ahmed didn’t address the region’s historical complexities. The lack of historical perspective in a class where Gaza and Israel aren’t the subject amounted to political indoctrination, some students and faculty said.
“He puts the idea into everyone’s head that the Jews stole the land and it should belong to the indigenous people,” said Marc Nock, a graduate student who took the class.
In an email, Ahmed wrote that he “fundamentally disagrees” that settler colonialism is “a loaded term since it has been used by the UN Special Rapporteur in relation to Israel.”
Students critical of his teaching “are a handful of privileged, white students, who have probably never been confronted by a framework that challenges them to think critically about the benefits they der…
In the videotaped lectures, Ahmed didn’t address the region’s historical complexities. The lack of historical perspective in a class where Gaza and Israel aren’t the subject amounted to political indoctrination, some students and faculty said.
“He puts the idea into everyone’s head that the Jews stole the land and it should belong to the indigenous people,” said Marc Nock, a graduate student who took the class.
In an email, Ahmed wrote that he “fundamentally disagrees” that settler colonialism is “a loaded term since it has been used by the UN Special Rapporteur in relation to Israel.”
Students critical of his teaching “are a handful of privileged, white students, who have probably never been confronted by a framework that challenges them to think critically about the benefits they derived from the system of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism,” he wrote. “I, on the other hand, am an untenured, Black, South African, Muslim man who spent the first 18 years of my life living under a system of apartheid. If anyone should feel ‘unsafe and unwelcome’ at Columbia, it should be me.”