Pro-Palestinian Valedictorian Continues to Speak Out After USC Canceled Her Graduation Speech
“I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship,” Asna Tabassum said after USC said they were concerned about "maintaining campus safety."
Screenshot: ABC7 Politics
On Monday, the University of Southern California announced that this year’s May 10 commencement ceremony would go without its usual three to five-minute valedictorian speech in the name of “maintaining campus safety and security.” Except, there doesn’t seem to be any reported or specific safety threats to the ceremony or the campus—it was seemingly called off because their valedictorian is vocal about the fact that she doesn’t support genocide.
Asna Tabassum, the valedictorian of USC’s spring graduating class, told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that she was informed she couldn’t address her peers due to recent online attacks that claim she’s antisemitic. Tabassum, a South Asian-American Muslim biomedical engineering major who was chosen as Valedictorian by a committee from almost 100 applicants, has a link in her Instagram bio to a website called “Free Palestine Carrd.” However, Tabassum didn’t write the post and, according to the Guardian, the link has been in her bio for the last five years.
According to the Times, a number of pro-Israel groups pointed to the site as evidence she was anti-semitic and demanded the university forbid her from making the speech. Among these groups is Trojans for Israel, who said the website’s rhetoric “must be denounced as antisemitic bigotry.” The site is basically just a number of links you can click to “learn about what’s happening in Palestine.” But people specifically seem upset about a slide on the site that calls for the abolition of the state of Israel.
“The abolishment of the state of Israel, I’d like to clarify, is the abolishment of an apartheid system,” Tabassum told CNN’s Abby D. Phillip when asked about that specific sentence. “It inherently is a system that subjugates Palestinians as dehumanized and it subjugates Palestinian life as not worth the same as other human life.” She added that simply answering yes or no would be “an injustice to the issue” and that the issues are all “worth discussion.”