CUNY Law School Will Host Lecture Praising Hamas Terror Tunnels
In a grotesque moral inversion, taxpayer-funded CUNY Law School is set to host a "teach-in" on March 4 that rebrands Hamas’s sadistic terror tunnels as "social organization" and "decolonial land use."
New York City’s taxpayer-funded CUNY School of Law is set to host an event next month that portrays Hamas’s vast underground tunnel network in Gaza as a form of “social organization in resistance to colonization.”
The March 4 gathering, titled “The Underground in Gaza,” is organized by the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter. It features a lecture by Columbia University anthropologist Dr. Hadeel Assali on “decolonial land use in Gaza” and “the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization.”
Promotional materials describe it as an “anthropologic investigation,” with Assali, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia’s Center for Science and Society, scheduled to discuss the tunnels as evading “colonial capture.”
Assali has previously written in her 2024 essay “Notes on the Underground in Gaza” that “underground war has been an essential form of resistance in Palestine,” calling the subterranean network a “space that evades colonial capture” and a part of Palestinians’ “relationship between indigenous people and the land.”
The event has sparked outrage, with critics arguing it whitewashes the tunnels’ role in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, atrocities.
The network, built using materials diverted from civilian infrastructurem was used to:
Hamas explicitly barred Gaza civilians from using the tunnels as shelters.
The event is open to the public with RSVP required for non-affiliates.
Does CUNY not realize that by framing a 300-mile labyrinth of terror as a triumph of "indigenous land use," it isn't just failing its students, it’s dancing on the graves of October 7th’s victims. When a public law school provides a lectern to those who sanitize the very tunnels where hostages were bound, raped, and murdered, it has ceased to be an institution of higher learning and has become a factory for the normalization of atrocity.