Anti-Semitism, Self-Immolation, Intersectionality, and DEI: What Do These Have in Common at UCLA Medical School?

Medical schools are supposed to train people to be doctors, good doctors, hopefully.

But at the UCLA Medical School, the students are being trained not only to be doctors but are being indoctrinated into the current devastating cultural fads of diversity, intersectionality, and the “right kind” of activism. You know, the kind of activism that is on display right now at other schools like Columbia University.

About three weeks ago, a pair of UCLA psychiatric residents – Dr. Alaf Moustafa and Ragda Izar – gave a lunch time “ethics” Zoom presentation on why self-immolation as a form of protests is seen in a different light in the different parts of the world.

Marginalized communities, the doctors said, have more of an understanding for the need and propriety of  committing an act of “revolutionary suicide.”

“Psychiatry pathologizes non-pathological … reactions to a pathological environment or pathological society,” Moustafa said during the presentation.  “It’s considered illness to choose to die in protest of the violence of war but perfectly sane to choose to die in service of the violence of war.”

Despite numerous emails and voice mails, the medical school did not even respond to a request for comment; the Globe left a voice mail of Izar which was also not responded to.

The entire ”depathologizing resistance” talk can be heard here.   (Note – the audio is a bit sketchy and it may help to slow it down as well.)

Throughout the presentation, the doctors dropped hot button woke terms –occupied Palestine and centered on the suffering of one group of people were just some of the buzzwords used.  It must also be noted that “revolutionary suicide” could easily be a way to describe what suicide bombers do, so the presentation could be interpreted as supporting and/or justifying and/or encouraging terrorism.

Also encouraged was the idea of “solidarity as a therapeutic model” for care, with the “Call to Action” slide stating that it is important that “collective, inclusive, and culturally sensitive” safe spaces be created as part of the treatment environment and that doctors should “embed your practice with an anti-colonial-lens” and “recognize that mental health is intimately tied to liberation.”

The talk was not a required class as it were, but what is a required class for first year students is a class on “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” also known as SHRE class.  Here are the topics for the next three:

History and Legacies of  Immigration and Imperialism

Anti-Settler Colonialism/Indigenous Health

Disability Justice at the Intersections:  Carceral Ableism, Medicine, and Racial Capitalism

In one recent such class, “Activist in Residence” – yes, that is a thing, they get paid, and UCLA has them   –  Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia called on the medical students to pray to “mama earth,” called medicine “white science,” and led students in ‘Free Palestine” chants. By the way, Gray-Garcia is a “formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher, single mama of Tiburcio, daughter of a houseless, disabled, indigenous mama Dee.”  And, fun fact, she’s white, though she tends to wear masks a lot. Wonder why.

The ”class” prompted anger from the school’s Jewish community, including students, teachers, and other doctors  ,who have been actively trying to rein in the antisemitism on campus, which has grown since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Faculty members have formed their own organization, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG), and taken to confronting school administrators and the Board of Regents about the issue.  

As to the SHRE concept, Dr. Nir Hoftman, an anesthesiologist active in JFRG (he is not a medical school teacher), said “it is not inherently bad to teach about disparities in health care.”

But SHRE doesn’t leave it that.  “Instead of medicine, they teach propaganda,” Hoftman said.

In October, 2022, a Jewish student filed a complaint with the dean of the school, saying she was made to feel unsafe during one lecture:

“During a lecture on the Color Wheel of Power and Privilege, our professor, Dr. Lindsay Wells, unnecessarily singled out American Jews by stating, ‘Jews are white.’ This is untrue and at best reflects a complete lack of understanding of antisemitism. Indeed, the six million Jews murdered in Europe did not benefit from being “white,” and there are many Jews in this country who are not ‘white,’” the letter reads.

SHRE classes as part of the school’s “HEALS” curriculum, a concept instituted a few years to make the learning experience more holistic.  Whether or not that is true is unclear, but what is true, Hoftman said he was informed by reliable sources, is that since its institution a few years ago “there has been a dramatic drop in student performance” and that “fail rates at board exams” have increased.

It must also be noted that the school does divide students by race – it’s called “racial caucusing” and is used  to teach anti-racism. Also, much like the erstwhile Harvard President Claudine Gay, the school’s top DEI administrator  has been accused of blatant plagiarism  – another sign of the dumbthink grifty nature of the whole concept.

And this is where “intersectionality” comes into play.  Intersectionality, since it’s not really real, has a number of definitions, though they do follow the same general path.  Here are three of them:

Intersectionality is a sociological analytical framework for understanding how groups’ and individuals’ social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege.

Intersectionality is the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression and we must consider everything and anything that can marginalise people – gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.

The study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination.

What intersectionality leaves out is the concept of history, using only exactly current circumstances to pass judgement on and/or make demands of the “oppressor class,” which is white, western, capitalist, and male.

Of course, even if you buy into the concept at all, that hasn’t always been true, has never been true globally, and maybe isn’t necessarily true now (see China.)

But it is from that lie – based on a purging of history from the educational process – that ties the explosion of DEI programs, projects, plans, and personnel to the marked increase in antisemitism on campuses across the country.

If a person only sees what things are like now for Israel and Jews (well, actually before October 7 to be exact,) then it is possible for someone not terribly bright to use an intersectional/DEI “wheel of privilege” to decide that Jews are oppressors and, since nothing existed before you were born, always were and always will be.

Jews are labelled by the progressives as white, rich, capitalists who are doing terrible things to the oppressed Palestinians and therefore they must be opposed and even destroyed.

Without a sense of history and access to facts such as 3,000 years of being oppressed and subjugated themselves, the diaspora, the Holocaust, and the simple fact that, if you want to play the unconscionable and childish “they were there first” game so popular with progressives, when it comes to “Palestine” the Jews have been there pretty much as long as anyone else.

Rome conquered Judea, not Palestine.

So with no mooring to the reality of history, students and progressives and wokerati are perfectly able to apprise the current situation through a “lens of oppression.”

And since that lens is the DEI lens and DEI can never be racist itself, let alone wrong, that line of thinking continues and continues to grow typically unchallenged by other people, lest they themselves be labelled racist and, therefore, a social pariah.

Therefore, the sadly predictable result of intersectionality and DEI and progressive and woke and contextualism and relativist thinking – unleavened by any other meaningful education – is the antisemitism the nation sees today on campuses and elsewhere.

And that is astonishingly awful.

Note:  the “revolutionary suicide”  presentation was given April 2 and was noticed by the press – mostly starting with the Washington Free Beacon – on April 13.  Max Azzarello self-immolated outside the current trial of Donald Trump April 19.  It is not known if he was aware of and/or influenced by the positions promoted by Izar and Moustafa.