Professor Muhammad Abdou, who until recently taught students at Columbia University, appeared online this week to spread calls for religious-based violence and glorify the murder of Jews. He did so as part of an event at the Union Theological Seminary, an institution associated with Columbia. While the university recently ended Abdou’s teaching, it is important to remember that this unhinged fanatic was previously chosen by Columbia faculty and administrators to teach their students. Those individuals remain at Columbia, and Abdou is just the latest example of the radical chic of higher education.
The Islamic studies scholar called on students to “be a threat” as part of the event titled “Death to the Akademy: How to be a thorn in their throat amidst snakes in the grass.” Teachers in higher education are often called “the academy.”
According to a video on X from Manhattan Institute investigative analyst Stu Smith, the talk involved deeply disturbing and hateful comments.
Abdou told the students: “Let us engage in jihad, and there are rules for jihad, and Muslims know that Allah has commanded rules. We don’t engage in wanton violence, but we don’t accept the negative peace either.”
One of the most chilling moments came when he praised Elias Rodriguez, the man facing multiple charges for the murder of a young Jewish couple. In what Abdou called the “assassination of two Zionists,” Rodriguez is accused of murdering Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, the two Israeli employees in 2025 in Washington.
Abdou does not discuss how this young couple dreamed of a life together or sought to bridge religious divides. They are just a couple of “Zionists” in his eyes. He then reportedly praised their accused killer: “God bless him. He took action. … Take action. Not only that kind of action, just to be very clear, because there’s also building. We need to destroy. We need to create alternatives.”
The seminary stopped his in-person appearance, which led to condemnations from student groups. In an Instagram post, Queer Muslims NYC accused the seminary of “flagrant Islamophobia and utter disregard for Muslim students.” However, they claimed that the union continued to support the event with a virtual component.
This video is reminiscent of the speech of other radical faculty like Cornell Professor Russell Rickford, who celebrated the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7th. Their extremism was not a barrier to being hired. It was likely an enhancement.
They are examples of why faculty members are unlikely to change the overwhelmingly liberal appointments. Conservatives and libertarians have been largely purged from most departments. While even a moderately conservative faculty candidate will often face organized opposition, radicals like Abdou and Rickford find an eager audience on faculties.
I encourage you to watch this video. This is the man who was interviewed and selected by faculty and administrators, not just at Columbia but at Cornell University and the University of Toronto. He was appointed as the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Middle-Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) Program at the Middle-East Institute. He was also a Postdoctoral Fellow/Visiting Scholar at Cornell.
According to his bio, “he is a self-identifying Muslim anarchist and diasporic settler of color.” His credentials include “his organizing towards BIPOC and Palestinian liberation and involvement with post-anti-Globalization Seattle 1999 movements.”
That appears to be the perfect resume for someone who wants to teach at leading universities. Those faculty and administrators are still at these institutions, and so is the radical culture that has taken hold of higher education in the United States.
What is most striking about this video is how Abdou offers just pure hate. There is no discernible intellectual content or insight. Just rage masquerading as scholarship.
Professor Muhammad Abdou enjoys the absolute and unqualified freedom of speech.
The 1st and 14th Amendments prohibit Congress and states, respectively, from abridging the freedom of speech.
That is:
The Speech
The Whole Speech and
Nothing But The Speech
[Incorrect and corrupt adjudication notwithstanding]
So help you God.
I’m sure this is just a coincidence, but the Professor Muhammad Abdou, the shooter at Old Dominion University and the driver who rammed his truck into a Jewish Synagogue in an attempt to kill Jewish children, are all named Mohammed.
The shooter at ODU shouted “Allahu Akbar” before murdering people, and as I noted yesterday, that Arabic phrase means, “I’m going to murder you because you’re not a Muslim.”
Please bring this to Marco Rubio’s attention, so whatever visa held by this monster with Canadian citizenship, is revoked.
Higher education and colleges are cults. Young people are being programmed by these cults. De-programming may not be possible.
Do not send young people into these programming cult institutions. Young people don’t have personal histories to call on as old people do have. This creates deprogramming more difficult if not impossible. Iranian Islam is a cult, not a religion. Some use ideology in place of the word cult. Techniques used as programming tools are known.
Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult. Shrouded women is an example of Stockholm Syndrome. There is no deprogramming. It’s an ill little religion with the horse stables of the Harem for stallion. WAKE UP. They once slopped the female hogs and used eunuchs to do it.
File your universities and colleges under Bizarre.
It’s not just oil that is being held up in the Strait of Hormuz.
One third of the world’s fertilizer supply comes in ships transiting Hormuz. Prices for fertilizer have skyrocketed just as American farmers are preparing for spring planting.
The American Farm Bureau just sent a letter to Trump warning of major disruption to the American food supply resulting from reduced crop yields due to lack of fertilizer, and subsequent huge increases in prices.
https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF-Letter-to-POTUS-Fertilizer.pdf
Another thing they didn’t see coming.
Famine and pestilence are on their way.
The only intelligence in this administration is artificial
Well, this is what happens when MAGA idiots in this country fall for Russian propaganda tactics.
Trump was installed by Putin to destabilize this country and he is doing a great job.
When does the MAGA mob just admit that Trump hates America?
OT, but legal: a spa in Washington State for women and girls to bathe without men present, was forced by the state government to admit naked grown men into a bathing area with nude women and girls as young as 13. They sought relief from the federal courts, but the majority of an en banc panel of the court said: “No, you have no constitutional protection against a state mandate that you must let nude biological men in a bathing area with nude women and girls as young as 13.” Is that a sane legal opinion by the 9th Circuit? (And does that question answer itself?) One of the judges in the dissent thought the majority view was not sane, and said so in a judicial opinion in some pretty graphic language.
https://reason.com/volokh/2026/03/12/judge-vandyke-this-is-a-case-about-swinging-dicks/
OldManFromKS,
Okay, this is a case of the absurd. And stupid.
Judge Vandyke’s use of the line, “Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds.” is spot on and those who opposed the use of “collectively lost their minds,” his response is also spot on.
Pete Hegseth this morning: “The only thing prohibiting transit in Hormuz right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”
What a goddamn verified genius we have running the Pentagon, folks
In his defense, he was probably drunk.
Again.
Translation:
“Despite the ongoing armed robbery, the bank is open. If you’re too cowardly to walk in and make a withdrawal, that’s your fault.”
— The Secretary of Alcoholism
Groundbreaking insight from Hegseth and the Pentagon: the Strait of Hormuz would be open if ships were not getting shot at.
Someone alert the naval war colleges immediately.
Get Barron to escort oil tankers.
He would be good at that.
It’s in his DNA.
His mom was an escort.
He’s also very tall, so he will be able to see anything in the water from a good distance away
Melania still is an escort, really.
Just with more job security and healthcare now.
Let me polish that line a bit:
You trolls are dumber than a fireplug in a dog kennel. There, that’s better.
Yep. That pretty well covers it! Thanks
Diogenes,
Well said!!!
You trolls are like a fireplug in a dog kennel. But the fireplug has a higher IQ.
If there was any currency in the teachings of Islam, the fanatics have broken the bank. More than 10 centuries of the history of humankind dealing with the manifestations of a death wish cult doctrine, and the West’s “movers and shakers”, save for one, remain clueless. The current Iran encounter might shake them out of their doldrums.
Maybe I’m old fashioned but sounds like incitement to me.
“Death to the Akademy: How to be a thorn in their throat amidst snakes in the grass.” To borrow from Talleyrand, this is worse than a crime. It’s an embarrassment.
Yes! to ‘old fashioned’ and the behaviour it stands for! and on the negative side of that coin.. Yes! it is good ‘old fashioned’ Islamic Extemism which can’t let others live in peace.. especially in this Country and in Israel, and which believe in killing people who do not agree with their religion.
Hegseth is achieving levels of dipshittery in his press conferences that makes it more and more difficult for Colin Jost to parody.
At some point SNL will just play tapes of Hegseth’s actual pressers.
It almost seems like Hegseth is trying to play Colin Jost playing himself
If Colin Jost did one of the press conferences no one would see the difference at this point
In the future they’ll have a TV game show that plays Trump administration press briefings alongside SNL skits and ask if it is real life or parody.
Could be a good drinking game
Hegseth is on the brink of just coming out in press conferences and going “Kapow! Kaboooom! Hazingggggg! Smaaaaaash! Pow! Blaaaaam!……..”
Get a room, you two. S&M door is to the left–as always.
..to the dimwat known as ‘Anon.’ your comments have nothing to do with Prof. Turley’s analysis here… you are a parasite here because you are too cheap to go fund your own forum where you can make your comments on subjects of your choosing………..
eighteenthhole,
Great comment!!
Anon is such a dimwat, thinks he is being funny by replying to his own comments.
This Jihadi nutjob says “We don’t engage in wanton violence…”, then praises the nutjob who killed an innocent Jewish couple.
That tells you everything you need to know about these goat-banging Muslim terrorists, like Jihadi Mamdani, being embraced by Democrats, especially in education.
Also hilarious is the promotion of this religion by “Queer Muslims NYC” who are so ignorant, they don’t realize their heads would be slowly sawed off once those Muslims assumed any kind of power.
Thankfully, America is waking up to the presence of these POS murderers who Biden/Harris knowingly let into our country for 4 years with their open border.
“A rifle behind every blade of grass” wasn’t just the imagination of Yamamoto (allegedly).
More Americans than ever before are preparing for the inevitable, now that Democrats don’t even try to hide their support for these Jihadi terrorists anymore.
I just finished reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. I do not say this lightly, but there are clear analogies between Nazi ideology and that of the Islamic Fascists terrorists. In no way do I attribute this to all Muslims many of whom I now and have no interest in destroying the Jewish people. This is a small minority with a base in Iran and this ideology needs to be eliminated.
(as an aside, Abdou was raised and schooled in Canada.
When I was in school, a car full of us went up into Canada to buy several bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream for our graduation party (so much cheaper than in the U.S.)
I distinctly remember being surprised by the number of persons walking around in burkas, hijabs, the long thobes or jubbas (full length robe-like ) etc. (Maybe they were hiding some Bailey’s underneath to take home? just KIDDing!)
(as another aside, we were stopped by Customs on the way back, had to exit the vehicle and open the trunk; we were heavily fined; …not my most honorable memory…)
Prof. Turley…does the teaching of hate to young Americans qualify as protected free speech? Your position is that such indoctrination be only challenged through open criticism in the public square, but not legal action civil or criminal.
Of course, it matters WHO is the target of the hate speech, and who is spreading it. When American values of freedom and rule-of-law are being denounced in favor of a Sharia police state, there isn’t going to be a whole lot of “I’ll defend to the death their right….”. President Trump, when he was running in 2016, promised to use Immigration Law to weed out and deport fundamentalist Islamism. That process is finally being implemented.
That leaves the problem of Islamists who are US Citizens. All we have there is investigating if there was fraud in the Naturalization process (e.g., Ilhan Omar), as that can be grounds for revocation. Absent that, the next best is to deny positions of power and influence, starting with schools and universities.
RE: “That leaves the problem of Islamists who are US Citizens.” As I noted earlier in these pages, such is the manifestation of an ideology which forbids allegiance to any other authority than Allah and the teachings of The Prophet. They will seek retribution from any entity whose activities they deem sacrilegious to such.