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UCLA marks 9/11 by hosting attack mastermind’s activist lawyer and lefties who claim counterterrorism is ‘racist’
UCLA is facing fury from 9/11 survivors and victim’s families for hosting a 25th anniversary event featuring the lawyer for the terror attack’s mastermind and a Yale professor who labeled US counterterrorism efforts “racist.”
The UCLA School of Law School is set to open the event, “25 Years After 9/11: Reimagining Freedom, Justice, and Security,” on Thursday before concluding it on the anniversary of the attack that killed more than 3,000 people.
The conversation will be led by a variety of controversial speakers, including Melanie T. Partow, a defense attorney for the “principal architect” of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Yale professor Aslı Ü. Bâli, who once referred to counterterrorism as a “racist gravy train.”
The tone-deaf event comes as UCLA has faced lawsuits from the Trump administration over allegedly failing to address antisemitism on campus or protect Jewish students and Israeli employees.
“It’s absolutely absurd,” Jim McCaffrey, an FDNY lieutenant at the time of the attacks who responded to the Twin Towers, told the California Post. “They’re pointing fingers at the victims. We’re the bad guys for being attacked. It’s mind-boggling. What’s going on in academia?”
Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son, Christian, 28, died at Ground Zero, asked: “Can’t 9/11 families get a break?”
“Crazy people say crazy things,” she added, saying her blood boils that 9/11 perpetrators like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have not been brought to justice. “Let them say it another time.”
Partow is a civil rights and international human rights litigator, according to her lecturer biography at the UC Irvine School of Law. She clerked at the International Criminal Court and recently made headlines for issuing an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Partow has represented Mohammed since at least February 2020 and is a “qualified member of the Military Commissions Defense Organization Civilian Attorney Pool for the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.”
She is scheduled to speak on a panel titled “Torture, Rendition, and Detention: The Erosion of the Rights Regime post 9/11” that will focus on the “increased counterterrorism authority” the US and other countries have shown following the terror attacks.
No victims of the terror attack are listed among the speakers, and there is set to be little discussion about the actual tragedy or the first responders who died that day.
A 15-minute block, between 8:45 a.m. and 9a.m. Friday, is reserved for a moment of “remembrance” for the day’s victims. The day’s lunch break occupies a full hour.
UCLA Law describes the event as examining the “enduring legacies of 9/11; the ways the legal and political architecture of the post-9/11 era continues to shape contemporary debates about race, migration, surveillance, war, technology, policing, and international law; and think collectively about how to chart a better path forward.”
Bâli, a professor at Yale Law School, penned a 2020 essay questioning America’s approach to national security that claimed counterterrorism served little purpose other than to justify racism.
“Government agencies compete for funding and when they are able to style themselves as essential to national security, they access more revenue,” she wrote. “Law enforcement across the board has a direct funding incentive to characterize minority communities and dissidents as threat incubators. Counterterrorism serves as a kind of racist gravy train.”
Other speakers include Hussam Ayloush, director of the California Council on American-Islamic Relations, who once compared Israel to Nazi Germany and said it “should be attacked.”
“Israel should be attacked. If you continue to occupy people’s land, every means according to international law to defend and resist the occupation is [in] your hand,” he said just a month after the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.
Ayloush and Bâli will speak at a panel titled “From Crisis to Legacy: 25 Years of the War on Terror and the Struggle to Reimagine Freedom, Justice, and Security.”
University of Minnesota
Another speaker, University of Minnesota Law school professor Amna Akbar, once called Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson a “spectacular act of protest.”
“Calls to ‘Free Luigi’ on the streets and inside jails express solidarity not just with one man, but against the catastrophic realities of capitalism, where necessities like health care, food, and housing are financialized commodities that few can truly afford,” she wrote in a January 2025 essay. “This is the system UnitedHealthcare stands for and profits from. This is the system that Mangione (allegedly) took aim at.”
The symposium will also discuss “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” and “White Christian nationalism.”
The event marks the latest controversy surrounding UCLA, which was sued by the Trump administration in February over claims of vile antisemitic acts at the school — including death threats, swastikas scrawled on university buildings and a statue depicting a pig holding a Jewish star and a bag of money.
In May, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sued the university alleging the school allowed students to create “Jewish exclusion zones” and attack their Jewish classmates after the Oct. 7 attacks.
A month earlier, the UCLA student government condemned an appearance by Omer Shem Tov, an Israeli man taken hostage and tortured during 505 days in captivity.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the UCLA student association said of the event, held on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
UC Regent Jay Sures slammed the UCLA student government, saying he was “disgusted” and “appalled” by the group’s stance.
The university appeared to defend its 9/11 event, telling the Washington Free Beacon that the law school “has a longstanding commitment to academic freedom and to fostering a wide range of scholarly inquiry.”
“Events organized by an individual UCLA Law program, centers, or institutes — and the views expressed — do not imply endorsement by UCLA Law, and neither the language of this symposium nor the views of its speakers should be understood as representing the school as a whole,” the spokesman said. “UCLA Law does not review or approve these choices, nor does the school withdraw invitations because a speaker or viewpoint is sensitive or controversial.”
Professional lawyers can earn continuing legal education (CLE) credits by attending the event, according to UCLA. The credits are mandatory to keep actively practicing law in California.
The California Post contacted UCLA Law and Partow for comment.
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