UCSF Med School Professor Claims Med Students are Triggered by Israeli Student

“Dr. Rupa Marya is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice,” Dr. Marya’s official UCSF bio says.

The first red flag is that “climate, health and racial justice” probably should not be listed together in a sentence in a biography for a health sciences clinical professor who teaches internal medicine to future doctors.

But that isn’t Dr. Rupa Marya’s only controversy – she recently posted to X/Twitter claiming her students had concerns about an Israeli classmate who may have “participated in the genocide of Palestinians,” Campus Reform reported.

“Med students at UCSF are concerned that a first year student from Israel is in their class,” UCSF Professor Rupa Marya appeared to have posted to her X account, in a post that has since been deleted. “They’re asking if he participated in the genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating into medical school in CA. How do we address this in our professional ranks?”

The State of Israel requires every Israeli citizen over the age of 18 who is Jewish, Druze or Circassian to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, with some exceptions.

This isn’t her first anti-semitic rodeo. Dr. Marya heatedly ranted against Israel, while wearing a keffiyeh and an official UCSF Medicine lab coat, embroidered with her name, wrote Globe contributor Richie Greenberg in January. Greenberg said the rant at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took place at a contentious Gaza/Israel resolution hearing.

Campus Reform continues:

This is not the first time that Marya has caused controversy due to her anti-Israel criticisms. In January, she described Zionism as a “structural impediment to health equity.”

“The presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity,” Marya wrote. “Zionism is a supremacist, racist ideology and we see Zionist doctors justifying the genocide of Palestinians.”

Campus Reform has several of her other antisemitic X/Twitter rants:

Dr Rupa Marya has now deleted her X account.  

She has also been placed on paid leave while UCSF investigates “pervasive acts of antisemitic harassment and intimidation.”

The Israeli Consulate in San Francisco responded to Marya’s latest anti-Israel post in a statement on X, saying that she had “regularly engaged in deceitful anti-Israel propaganda” in the past and was now “harassing and potentially inciting against a first year medical student,” the Jewish News of Northern California reported.

State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, a Jewish progressive who has been an outspoken critic of extreme forms of anti-Israel activism and the demonization of Zionists particularly since Oct. 7, also sharply criticized Marya’s post, JWeekly said. “The same UCSF professor who promoted the ‘doctors’ plot’ — an age old antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish doctors are harming patients — is now targeting a 1st year med student for harassment b/c he’s Israeli,” Wiener wrote, referring to a Soviet-era conspiracy theory that Jewish doctors plotted against Soviet leadership. “This professor is creating a toxic, hostile environment at UCSF.”

The University of California, San Francisco is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the taxpayer-funded University of California system.

In 2022, the University of California Global Health Initiative reported:

Dr. Marya now works as a hospitalist and Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF, an activist, and the front woman for her international touring band whose music focuses on liberation, justice, resistance, and activism. These are the multitudes represents which are seamlessly interconnected with one another.

Activism is the primary way Dr. Marya engages with students at UCSF, specifically through the Do No Harm Coalition.

The article reports that she co-authored a book with agro-economist, Raj Patel, called Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Justice, claiming “the hierarchies created through capitalism (male supremacy, white supremacy, supremacy over nature), the harmful actions that results from those hierarchies (e.g., removing Native people from their land and extraction of nature for the purpose of human consumption), corresponding climate collapse, and how these realities have cumulatively damaged our bodies and prospects for living healthy lives.”

A public university or public college is owned by the state or receives significant funding from a government by its taxpayers.

The warning signs were there but nothing was done about this publicly funded teacher of future physicians until her rhetoric became potentially dangerous enough to incite violence, as we’ve seen on many other university campuses following the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of 1,400 Israeli citizens, most of them civilians, including babies, small children, the elderly, disabled, and more than 200 were taken hostage.