CU Denver Puts Its Pro-Hamas Hate on Full Display

By Ahnaf Kalam | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Every so often, a university event accidentally tells the truth about the institution hosting it. The recent panel on November 19,  “Gaza: Two Years On” at the University of Colorado Denver – my alma mater – was one such moment: a rare occasion when the carefully maintained façade of academic neutrality collapsed, revealing the fetid ideological machinery underneath.

It was presented as an open conversation, a balanced intellectual exchange. In practice, it was a ceremony—an orchestrated display of political piety in which the outcome was preordained, the narrative sealed in advance. Even the panel composition made this clear: three anti-Israel speakers and a lone Israeli Jewish professor, the only person on stage with firsthand experience of the “intifada” that American activists treat as a Che Guevara-style fashion accessory.

That Israeli panelist, a professor of U.S. National Security and Foreign Policy, attempted to present images and videos of the October 7 massacre—horrific evidence of what actually happens when the slogans “Intifada” and “From the river to the sea” are allowed to manifest in blood and steel. 

For his trouble, he was heckled, scoffed at, and mocked, not only by students but by faculty and fellow panelists. At one point he quoted John Spencer, arguably the world’s foremost authority on urban warfare, and the room responded not with interest but with snickering—an academically sanctioned sneer. 

One student dismissed Spencer as simply “some guy who deployed to Iraq,” while ignoring his credentials as the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point whose career as a military officer spans decades.

In any properly functioning university, the eyewitness account from a survivor of the intifada would be the center of the conversation. At CU Denver, it was treated as an inconvenience.

Bassem Hassan spent a lengthy opening monologue condemning Israel for “war crimes” and accusing it of “genocide.” When he turned to Israel’s precision strike on Hezbollah pagers—perhaps the most targeted, discriminate military operation ever conducted—he simply repeated the point: also a war crime. 

One might conclude that, for him, the alleged criminality lies not in the nature of the strike but in the identity of the striker.

Then came Dale Stahl, who dutifully recited the fiction that Hamas was “elected” in “free and fair elections,” and drawing parallels to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that the West must therefore remain silent, as it’s not our place to involve ourselves in the self-determination of Muslims in the Middle East. 

That Hamas responded to those elections by shooting Fatah fighters, torturing rivals, and throwing opponents off rooftops seems not to trouble him enough to include in his presentation. It is a peculiarity of certain academics that they cling to democratic language while championing armed movements that detest democracy altogether.

Carole Woodall of UCCS spoke next, adopting the tone of someone narrating a documentary about 1960s peace movements. She described the pro-Hamas campus encampments—including the one on the Auraria campus—as though they were scenes of kumbaya unity, moments of gentle resistance, spaces of communal dreaming.

What she did not describe were the sanitation realities. Nor the economics. Nor the human urine that saturated the grass until the university was forced to spend more than $670,000 on repairs, replanting, and remediation. $670,000 of these students’ own tuition money, mind you.

The glowing rhetoric vanished the moment the tents were removed, leaving behind a stench and a bill. Yet the myth of utopian resistance persists unbothered by its own footprints.

One of the most revealing features of the event came before a single word was spoken: recording was prohibited. Repeatedly. Aggressively. Almost comically. Before, and during the event, this was painstakingly reiterated.

A public event, at a public university, in a single-party-consent state—and yet one was told that recording was forbidden. Only institutions that fear their own discourse behave like this.

And perhaps they have reason to fear. CU Denver’s relationship with Qatar is well-documented, lucrative, and ideologically convenient. Countless dollars flow from a state that sponsors Hamas and Islamist ideological projects into an American university that prefers not to discuss the relationship at all. Qatar understands that Western universities are soft power dressed up as scholarship. CU Denver seems determined to prove them correct.

Then came the Q&A, or what passes for one in such settings. One third-rate professional activist and agitator, Sky Roosevelt-Morris, seized the microphone not to ask a question but to launch into a personal attack—accusing me of involvement with a “professor watchlist” and linking me to activities I have never undertaken. 

The accusations were entirely fabricated, yet delivered confidently, knowing the entire room had been preemptively stripped of any capacity to produce evidence of what was said. She then went on to claim—falsely—that the Nazis got their idea to commit genocide from the United States – yes, the country actively firebombing the Nazis into oblivion for half a decade.

When I corrected her and mentioned that it was actually the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who gleefully shared his genocidal ambitions and fantasies with his close friend Adolf Hitler, I was told not to interrupt Roosevelt-Morris by a moderator, who allowed her to continue peddling her historical fabrications and her targeted slander of me. Her hot air-filled remarks were an exercise in masochism being offered to the audience by a true sadist.

This was not an isolated incident. Defamation of character is practically a departmental pastime at CU Denver. Years prior, the Political Science department falsely accused me of “directly inciting violence and death threats” against a professor after I wrote an article questioning the pedagogy of one of their courses. The claim was demonstrably false. Not partially, not debatably—entirely invented.

The statement remained on the department’s website for six years until I finally sent a cease-and-desist letter. Only then did the department quietly remove the libel. Not with an apology. Not with a clarification. Just a silent scrubbing, as though six years of false public defamation could be undone by deleting a paragraph.

This is the academic culture from which the night’s slander emerged: Lies are permissible so long as they flow in the correct ideological direction.

At the end, like clockwork, a young woman in a hijab proclaimed: “Long live the Intifada!”– AFTER the Israeli panelist gave clear, lived examples of what that word really means.

The Muslim girl’s tone suggested triumph; her understanding suggested otherwise. These are slogans for the eradication of a nation, for the violent expulsion or killing of civilians, for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

At CU Denver, calling for the genocide of Israelis is perfectly acceptable political discourse. Being Israeli and defending the world’s only Jewish state from Islamist barbarity, however, is tantamount to high thought crime.

The final irony came when the girl in the hijab sarcastically asked whether she needed my “permission” to speak as I corrected her. In a country where she is free to wear her hijab (ironically, a symbol of chauvinistic religious oppression in itself), speak, and live however she chooses, she found it appropriate to perform the role of the oppressed while calling for violence. One wonders how her self-styled revolutionary pose might fare under the very actors she champions.

What did this panel teach us about Gaza? Nothing. What did it teach us about CU Denver? Quite a bit. 

It is allergic to intellectual diversity. It is frightened of its own words being recorded. It is comfortable platforming falsehoods but not challenges. It is funded by a state that supports Hamas while claiming neutrality. It tolerates—indeed, facilitates—defamation when the target is ideologically disfavored. It sneers at firsthand testimony while embracing romanticized violence.

This was not a discussion. It was a performance. This was not a university event. It was a ritual.
And like all rituals, its purpose was not to discover truth but to enforce belief.

Modern universities insist they are forums of open inquiry. But at events like this, one sees them clearly for what they have become:

Not places where ideas compete—
but places where ideas are curated.
Not places where debate unfolds—
but where conclusions are announced.
Not academies—
but theaters.

And the script, sadly, is always the same.

Ahnaf Kalam is a journalist and counter-extremism analyst in Denver. His writing has appeared in The Gazette, The Rocky Mountain Voice, The American Spectator, and other national publications. He holds a degree in international studies and political science from the University of Colorado, Denver, with a focus on counter-terrorism and Middle East security.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.