Rana Baker was exposed by the JC in November for disseminating Hamas-published material to her students and encouraging them to think of the proscribed group as a ‘liberation movement’
February 14, 2025 16:34
Pro and anti-Israel groups held clashing demonstrations outside the entrance to King’s College London (KCL) this week over the university’s continued employment of a controversial academic.
In November, the JC revealed that Dr Rana Baker, a lecturer on Middle Eastern history, distributed a Hamas propaganda document during a seminar to encourage her students to view the terror group as a “liberation movement”.
The document, called “Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, published by Hamas itself, justified the October 7 massacres in southern Israel.
Baker was also accused of suggesting to her pupils that they view Hamas, which slaughtered some 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages in the worst targeted attack against Jewish people since the Holocaust, as a “liberation” movement.
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Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK and expressing support for it is a violation of counter-terror legislation.
Jewish KCL students described Baker’s classes as “hostile”, dominated by a “culture of anti-Israelism” and examples of “indoctrination”, while Baker herself was said to be “almost overtly pro-Hamas”.
However, a KCL investigation in December found that she had committed “no wrongdoing” and dismissed the complaint against her.
Thursday’s demonstration, organised by Stop the Hate, a grassroots Israel advocacy organisation, was to intended protest the “indoctrination of students with Hamas propaganda” and to demand the Baker’s dismissal.
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A Stop the Hate organiser told the JC: “Jewish and non-Jewish students are here with us today wanting to voice their concern that they don’t feel safe when a lecturer employed by KCL can disseminate Hamas’s own narrative about October 7 to students, and we’re here to support them.”
He added: “It should be beyond dispute that regardless of what you think of the Israel-Palestine conflict, you know, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation. You can support Palestine and a two-state solution without supporting Hamas. The fact that there is a group across from us demonstrating against us shows what they really think.”
One KCL student who is half-Palestinian and was among the pro-Israel group, said: “It’s nice to come with an open mind, hear both sides and be peaceful about it.”
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The demonstrators waved Israeli and UK flags, danced and chanted “sorry you don’t like the war you started” and “bring them home”.
Separated by police presence, the pro-Palestinian counterdemonstration directly outside the entrance to KCL, chanted, “Rana, Rana, Rana” in support of the lecturer, “Zionism, shut it down”, and “there is only one state: Palestine ‘48” [in reference to the borders in the region as they were in 1948 before the establishment of Israel].
They also demanded that KCL “divest” from Israel and “pick a side”.
A KCL student and an organiser of the anti-Israel group, did not want to discuss the specifics of Baker’s case but claimed she is being “targeted” and that her “academic freedom is being stifled.”
He told the JC: “This is not about Jews, or about students on campus, this is specifically about the university’s complicity in what’s going on right now [after] 500 days of genocide.”
KCL, he said, “needs to play its part in not only condemning, but helping with the active rebuilding of the education sector in Gaza”.
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He added that the pro-Palestinian delegation demanded that KCL condemn “Israeli war crimes the same way it condemned Hamas after October 7, and the same way it condemned Russia after it invaded Ukraine”, while also divesting from Israel in “the same way this university divested from Russian companies and Russian academic institutions”.
An anti-Israel counter demonstration chanted "Rana, Rana, Rana" in support of the lecturer, who was under investigation by KCL. They also chanted "there is only one state: Palestine '48", and demanded KCL divest from Israel and "pick a side" pic.twitter.com/hxpnol8nAL
— Daniel Ben-David (@DannyBenDavid) February 13, 2025
Expanding on the equating of Israel with Russia, another organiser and speaker in the anti-Israel group said it is “ahistorical” to think of the conflict as having begun on October 7, but instead “in 1948 with the annexation of Palestine”.
He went on: “The people of Gaza have been kept in the world’s largest concentration camp since 2006 when the Israelis closed off the border and prevented anything from entering.
“That situation creates violence. If any of us were in a situation like that, desperate to get out, we can’t blame them for that. What’s why Israel and Russia are one in the same in this instance.”
The JC has approached KCL for comment.