ASU Students Overcome IHRA Roadblock to Mohammed El-Kurd Event

Screenshot from Mohammed El-Kurd’s website.

Students at Arizona State University (ASU) successfully hosted a talk by popular Palestinian poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd on April 10 after a month of delays and a push by fellow students to invoke a distorted definition of antisemitism to block their event.

Student organizers from the Palestine Cultural Club (PCC) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) invited El-Kurd—whose reporting from his neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah has drawn worldwide attention and who was named, along with his sister Muna El-Kurd, as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2021—to speak about RIFQA, his book of poetry.

When a student government committee attempted to condition approval of the event on El-Kurd refraining from criticizing Israel, Palestine Legal warned ASU that doing so was a violation of the First Amendment.

The student government approved the event the same day.

Roadblocks despite compliance with university policy

Organizers carefully complied with the requirements and deadlines for their budget request for the event, even scaling back the request to allow it to be reviewed in a more streamlined fashion. 

When weeks passed without a response to their February 28 submission, students began regularly checking in on the status of the request. Each time they reached out to the student government, they were either promised that a decision would be made soon or given more hurdles to overcome, such as resubmitting their forms and attending additional meetings.

On March 23, less than three weeks before the event, members of the student government appropriations committee demanded that organizers address new questions about the content of the talk. They also baselessly suggested that organizers—who planned to ask attendees to register in advance as part of their security protocols—had made the event private in order to exclude certain students from the event.

Painting poetry as hate speech

The next day, SJP and PCC met with members of the ASU student government appropriations committee to address their concerns. Members of the committee stated that student government bylaws required them to ensure that the event would not include hate speech. Organizers explained that the event would examine how art, poetry, and creativity can be the product of living through war and being displaced in diaspora and that El-Kurd’s poetry and personal accounts do not constitute hate speech.

During the meeting, members of the appropriations committee cited the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, falsely claiming that the university and the federal government had adopted IHRA and that they were required by law to adhere to the definition.

Asserting the right to criticize Israel

Members of student government attempted to tie this definition to language in El-Kurd's poetry book RIFQA, specifically reading from a foreword written by poet Aja Monet: "The state of Israel and the justification for its existence are crimes against all of humanity. The state is the worst of the human spirit manifested into a fully functioning government." 

The committee members demanded assurance that the event was not about criticizing the Israeli government. The organizers asserted their right—and that of El-Kurd—both to share the Palestinian narrative and to criticize the Israeli government, but explained that the purpose of their event was to discuss El-Kurd, his life, his identity, and his book.

Despite addressing the committee’s concerns, the organizers were told the next day that the committee did not want to approve their budget request and that the student senate would discuss the request on March 29.

The event—and the First Amendment—prevail

Photo Credit: PCC.ASU (Instagram)

Palestine Legal wrote to the university on March 28, explaining that denying student groups at a public university funding based on their viewpoint violates the First Amendment and that using the IHRA definition of antisemitism and similar definitions as a censorship tool violates the rights and freedoms of members of campus communities.

The budget request was approved that same day.

Though the delays meant that SJP and PCC had less than two weeks to publicize the event, it was a success, with approximately 200 students and community members attending to hear El-Kurd share his poems and his experiences.

Learn More:

Read about efforts to silence Palestine advocacy in Arizona here. And read about the ongoing attempts to silence Mohammed El-Kurd here.