A lecture required for University of Michigan art students featured a speaker who compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler. The Stamps School of Art & Design hosted speaker Emory Douglas, who displayed a slide showing pictures of Netanyahu and Hitler with the words “Guilty Of Genocide” across their faces. According to the school’s website, Douglas “worked as the resident Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1967 through the 1980s. … Douglas created powerful images to depict the reality of racial injustice in America and to promote the party’s ideologies. His distinctive style established the ‘militant-chic’ style decades before the aesthetic became popularized and sought to flip the cultural paradigm from one of African American victimhood to one of powerful outrage.”
University of Michigan student Alexa Smith, who is Jewish, wrote on Facebook, “Yesterday I was forced to sit through an overtly anti-Semitic lecture,” she wrote, adding: “In what world is it ok for a mandatory course to host a speaker who compares Adolf Hitler to the Prime Minister of Israel? … As a Jew who is proud of my people and my homeland, I sat through this lecture feeling targeted and smeared to be as evil as the man who perpetrated the Holocaust and systematically murdered six million Jews.”
Smith also noted that a previous Stamps lecture speaker, Joe Sacco, called Israel a terrorist state and stated that Israeli soldiers were unworthy of being represented as human beings in his artwork.
Last month, University of Michigan professor John Cheney-Lippold refused to recommend student Abigail Ingber for a semester abroad in Israel because he supports the BDS movement against the country.
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