Northwestern Professor Uses Biomedicine Class to Claim Israel Deliberately Killed Its Own Citizens on Oct 7, Lecture Slides Show
A Northwestern University professor turned her biomedicine course into an anti-Israel lecture accusing the Jewish state of killing its own people on Oct. 7, 2023, excusing Hamas terrorism, and arguing that Israel does not have the right to self-defense, according to lecture slides obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Associate professor Helen Tilley, who teaches a “Biomedicine and World History” course, held a class session titled, “Discussion on Palestine and Israel: Past and Present,” which the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern (CAAN) watchdog group described as “hostile to Jewish and Israeli students” in a complaint filed with the university late last week and first reported by the Free Beacon.
The Nov. 17 lecture featured two anti-Israel activists, medical professor Peter Sporn and medical student Ramzy Issa, as its only guest speakers. Tilley, Sporn, and Issa all signed the 2024 “Northwestern People’s Resolution,” which accused Israel of “genocide” and called for a boycott of the Jewish state.
Slides from the presentation broadcast extremist anti-Israel falsehoods, including the idea that, on Oct. 7, “Representatives of Hamas left the occupied territory of Gaza and entered the sovereign space of Israel” before “the Israeli military made a snap decision to enact its ‘Hannibal directive,’ meaning its officers deliberately fired on and killed some of its own citizens rather than risk having them taken hostage.”
The lecture also included the notion that, while Palestinians “have rights of self-defense”—justifying Oct. 7—Israel does not.
A section on the history of Israel’s founding leaves out the fact that the Jewish state accepted the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan for the British Mandate but its Arab neighbors rejected the framework and launched a joint invasion.
A reading list provided in the lecture slides includes books by notorious terror supporters like Rashid Khalidi and Noura Erakat.
Khalidi, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, once served as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) spokesman and blamed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israeli “settler colonialism” and “apartheid.” Khalidi was slated to teach a class at Columbia this fall before backing out after the university agreed to a settlement with the Trump administration. Khalidi’s course, which he moved to the far-left nonprofit People’s Forum, features teachings from a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist.
Erakat, a Rutgers University professor, said on Oct. 7, 2023, that “any condemnation of violence is vapid if it does not begin & end with a condemnation of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and occupation.” In 2020, she appeared on a panel with Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, the New York Post reported. Even before Oct. 7, Erakat had a history of comparing Zionism to Nazism.
The complaint, which CAAN sent to interim university president Henry Bienen, came just days after the group raised similar civil rights concerns about a film studies course that taught students that Israel was committing “genocide in Palestine” as an academic fact, the group wrote. The university has been in hot water with the Trump administration over anti-Israel radicalism and anti-Semitism for some time, with the Daily Northwestern reporting last week that the administration has terminated or frozen more than $1.06 billion in federal grant money since January.
Northwestern implemented a mandatory anti-Semitism training video for students earlier this year, but the school has been locked in a legal battle against activists who refused to watch the 17-minute clip. A federal judge last month threw out the activists’ request for a temporary restraining order, the Free Beacon reported.
For CAAN—which said it submitted the complaint “on behalf of impacted Jewish and Israeli students, several of whom report being fearful of coming forward due to the climate in their departments and retaliation risks”—the lecture inappropriately pushed “political indoctrination” that was unrelated to the subject matter of the course.
“Professor Helen Tilley introduced a politically charged, ideologically slanted, and academically unsound lecture into a course that has no disciplinary connection to Middle Eastern studies, foreign policy, geopolitics, or the Israel-Hamas conflict,” the organization wrote in its complaint.
According to the course description page, the class “uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine” with the goal of understanding “diseases as active agents in human history.”
Northwestern did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
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