The US’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization has condemned the University of Southern California’s decision to prohibit the graduating class’s valedictorian from speaking at May’s commencement ceremony after she posted messages of support for Palestine on a social media account.
In a missive to the USC community, the university’s provost, Andrew Guzman, wrote that the Los Angeles university took the unprecedented step of canceling Asna Tabassum’s planned speech because the “alarming tenor” of reactions to her selection as valedictorian – along with “the intensity of feelings” surrounding Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Gaza – had created “substantial risks relating to security”.
Tabassum, in a statement released by the Council of American Islamic Relations (Cair), described herself as both “shocked … and profoundly disappointed” after being informed on Monday that she would be barred from addressing her fellow graduates at their 10 May commencement.
“The university is succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice,” Tabassum said in the statement.
Cair dismissed USC’s decision as “cowardly” and called on the university to reverse course – but Guzman maintained that “there was no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement”.
“While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety,” Guzman continued. “The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period.”
Since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel killed more than 1,100 mostly civilians as well as captured hostages, and the resulting assault on Gaza has killed more than 30,000 people – many of them children – while pushing the territory toward famine, US campuses have been roiled with debate over growing support for Palestine as well as dueling accusations of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism.
It was amid that climate that a USC committee selected Tabassum out of about 100 students with perfect, or nearly perfect, grade-point averages who applied to be valedictorian for a spring graduation ceremony honoring more than 19,000 graduates before an anticipated 65,000 spectators, according to Guzman.
NBC News described Tabassum as a first-generation south Asian American Muslim from Chino Hills – a city east of Los Angeles – in her fourth year as a biomedical engineering student. She has also been pursuing a minor in resistance to genocide.
At the top of Tabassum’s Instagram account, a link directs users to a slideshow encouraging readers “to learn about what’s happening in Palestine and how to help”. The presentation also advocates for “one Palestinian state”, saying that “would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel”.
Although Tabassum told NBC’s Los Angeles affiliate that she posted the link five years earlier and did not author the slideshow, pro-Israel and Jewish groups objected to USC’s selection of her as valedictorian based on her social media activity.
One group in particular, Trojans for Israel, said it “strongly supports the right to free expression – including informed criticism of the Israeli government. However, rhetoric that denies the right of the Jewish people to self-determination or calls for the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world must be denounced as antisemitic bigotry.”
The group added: “All … eligible valedictory candidates have valuable work ethic and accomplishments, but the university chose a candidate who publicly propagates antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric as the most esteemed representative of the class of 2024.”
Guzman’s message to the USC community said “social media presence” was not part of the criteria that the university used to evaluate its valedictorian candidates.
The leader of Cair’s Los Angeles chapter, Hussam Ayloush, on Monday said criticism of Tabassum had been “dishonest and defamatory … [and] nothing more than thinly veiled manifestations of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism which have been weaponized against college students across the country who speak up for human rights – and for Palestinian humanity”.
Ayloush also said: “USC cannot hide its cowardly decision behind a disingenuous concern for security.”
