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Editor’s note: American campuses are awash in a crisis of Jew hatred. Ineffectual college administrators have taken tentative steps to try and rein in the proponents of terror on their campuses, but they have yet to confront the most obvious source of this poisonous Jew hatred—their own radical faculty who have not only called for an end to Israel but have outright celebrated the barbaric bloodshed of the terror group Hamas.
The Freedom Center is exposing these radical, pro-terror faculty as the Top Ten Hamas Loyalist Professors. We will be publishing one school per day as a series on Frontpage. Steven Thrasher, an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University, is #7 on our list.
#7: Steven Thrasher, Northwestern University
Northwestern University Professor Steven Thrasher is a staunch ally to the pro-Hamas campus left at Northwestern who has engaged in illegal occupations of the Chicago campus and declared himself a “comrade” to the son of a Yemeni Houthi youth minister who shares his pro-Hamas sentiments openly on social media.
According to his biography on Northwestern’s website, Thrasher has the honor of being “the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting (with an emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ community) and an assistant professor of journalism.”
When an illegal encampment—the so-called “Gaza solidarity encampment”— was created on Northwestern’s campus last spring, Thrasher was front and center in defending the occupied campus zone against police and Zionist detractors.
“At Northwestern, he helped physically block police officers from entering the so-called encampment that the university said violated campus policy,” reports The College Fix. Thrasher gloated about his role defending the encampment and subduing law enforcement on X, stating, “We were successful. We locked arms and kept the police at bay. They retreated.”
During a speech given at that encampment, which he referred to as the “liberated zone,” Thrasher glibly shared a message from his “comrade” and twitter mutual Ahmed Hassan, the son of a Houthi youth minister (who was assassinated in 2020) who openly praises Hamas and the Iranian regime on social media.
Describing himself as “a young Yemeni man who lost his father due to his opposition to the Zionist regime” Hassan urged students to continue with their illegal campus riot. “You are the frontline defenders of humanity, not just in Gaza!” he said, in the message repeated to students by Professor Thrasher. “Gaza is just the beginning… Push the rock uphill… Swim against the current… If necessary, be the current itself! Be the rock… Be the mountain… But beware of retreat and surrender!”
While Hassan’s message to Northwestern students may not have mentioned Hamas directly, his social media is much more explicit. “May God be satisfied with Hamas,” he posted in Arabic recently, adding, “Hamas is winning.”
On April 6 Hassan posted, “Israel is losing. Soon enough, it will ask all the citizens to join the army[.] Hamas will end them all[.]”
Hassan has also posted in support of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, adorning his post with a heart emoji, and has shared images of the terror group’s flag.
This is the man that Professor Thrasher claims as a “comrade” and whose message he proudly shared with Northwestern’s student body.
After delivering Hassan’s message, Thrasher continued in his speech to praise the illegal occupation of Northwestern’s campus and to bash law enforcement.
“A colonial war of occupation is playing out on this lawn,” he told students, describing how he and other faculty members had “locked arms with you to keep the cops out.”
“Police officers do violence work on behalf of a ruling class that does not want you thinking internationally,” he continued, going on to praise the crowd for being “united against what bell hooks called ‘white supremacist capitalist, imperialist patriarchy.’”
Nor was Thrasher’s activism on behalf of Hamas limited to Northwestern’s campus. He described visiting “Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and his pride at the illegal actions of students at NYU, his alma mater, where he rejoiced that “Students have taken over Gould Plaza for a second time, turning it into NYU’s liberation zone” and “tore down a wall to do it.”
Thrasher has a long history of making statements and claims that appear to justify Hamas’s terrorism. “White supremacy and settler colonialism can NOT kill, maim and steal for decades (or even centuries) via genocidal violence and then expect patience and peace — ESPECIALLY when peaceful protest is met with economic, spiritual and literal death,” he posted on X on Oct. 9, 2023, just two days after Hamas’s brutal massacre of innocent Israeli civilians.
The professor has repeatedly compared Israel to Hitler’s Nazi regime, a classic anti-Semitic trope. “This is a genocide of the disabled people, too, who will suffocate on smoke,” he posted on X. “Who ARE suffocating to death right now. You know who else suffocated the disabled? The Nazis.”
Thrasher again invoked the Nazi’s in a blog post in which he compared Gaza to a Nazi concentration camp, stating, “we can feel compassion towards a desperate people stuck inside a Nazi concentration camp.” He claimed that if the Jews had been able to escape from Hitler’s concentration camps, they would have killed “anyone they found partying” –apparently a justification of Hamas’s October 7th massacre and hostage-taking at the Nova Music Festival.
In an article published in Mondoweiss, Thrasher repeated these sentiments, reflecting on a film about the Holocaust, and claiming:
If the Jews being shot and shoveled into ovens could just break through that wall, of course, they would kill anyone they found partying right on the other side of it! And, of course, they would take women and children hostage and drag them back into their hell inside if doing so would give them leverage to free their fellow Jews from torture and death!
This thought, of course, set in motion an obvious but taboo moral question in my mind about one of the most pressing matters of our time: Is it understandable why people in Gaza, similarly trapped behind a wall in a concentration camp and experiencing genocide, would kill or take hostage people they found partying on the other side of the wall holding them in?
For his unabashed defense of Hamas and the terror group’s massacre of innocent Israelis and his unrepentant anti-Semitism, Professor Steven Thrasher belongs on the list of Hamas-loyalist professors.