A British university has fired a lecturer of Palestinian Arab background who described terrorist Leila Khaled as a “beautiful fighter.”
Sheffield Hallam University terminated the employment of lecturer Shahd Abusalama after an internal university inquiry cleared her in February and she was given a new associate lecturer contract, the Jewish Chroniclereported.
At the time, Abusalama responded on social media, writing that she had been “wholly exonerated of the false charges of antisemitism, brought under the not-fit-for-purpose IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Association] definition.”
But not long after, she was cited in a new complaint by a Jewish student and the university opened a second investigation led by a human rights lawyer.
Abusalama, who was born in Gaza and whose father was a terrorist who was jailed for 15 years by Israel for planting bombs for the PFLP, has a history of making inflammatory statements on social media related to terrorists, and also recently blamed the “Israel lobby coup” for the removal of National Union of Students president Shaima Dallali over antisemitic social media posts.
According to the news outlet, Abusalama described PFLP hijacker Khaled as “a symbol of the Palestinian revolution in her glory, hijacking airplanes and shaking the Zionist entity and the world”.
Sheffield Hallam deputy vice chancellor Richard Calvert told the Chronicle that the school was “committed to creating a safe and welcoming environment for all our students.”