Fatima Mousa Mohammed, her class's 2023 representative for the City University of New York (CUNY) law commencement ceremony, decided to use the opportunity to give an anti-Israel rant that has led to a backlash by Jewish and other groups against the university, according to Fox News. Mohammed took the podium to say, "I want to celebrate CUNY Law as one of the few, if not the only law school to make a public statement defending the rights of its students to organize and speak out against Israeli settler colonialism...That this is the law school that passed and endorsed BDS on a student and faculty level recognizing that…as Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshipers, murdering the old, the young, attacking even funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinian homes and businesses as it imprisons its children…that our silence is no longer acceptable."

The BDS or Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions movement promotes the global boycotting, divestment, and sanctioning of Israel over what it alleges is the oppression that Palestinians suffer from and over Jewish colonialism in the Land of Israel. The organization is noted by many scholars as being engaged in a barely veiled antisemitic campaign against Jews and for its distorted worldview toward Israel and counterproductive methods. As noted by an article in Forbes, the boycott Israel movement had done more damage against the benighted Palestinian community that they purport to be interested in than Israel. 

Ignoring these uncomfortable facts, Mohammed continued her address by saying, "We did all of this in spite of the racism, in spite of the selective activism the self-serving interests of CUNY central, an institution that continues to fail us, that continues to train and cooperate with the fascist NYPD, the military, that continues to train IDF soldiers to carry out that same violence globally." She linked in her address oppressive institutions in America with the Palestinian issue and called for a continuance of the war against "capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world." 

Former New York congressman and gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who is Jewish, said of the event, "Raging antisemitism has fully consumed the City University of New York. Until the administration is overhauled and all Jewish students and faculty are welcome again, taxpayer funding must be immediately halted." Congressman Mike Lawler took notice of Zeldin's comment and wrote "This is exactly why I am finalizing legislation to strip universities of their funding if they engage in and promote anti-semitism...CUNY should be ashamed of itself — and should lose any federal funds it currently receives."

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The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York similarly denounced the event. The group wrote, "This particular commencement speech cast aside the principle of seeking truth in a shameless attempt to vilify CUNY’s constructive engagement with Israel and the New York Jewish community and to denigrate Israel’s supporters on campus while trading in antisemitic tropes...We strongly encourage CUNY to revise its guidelines surrounding commencement speeches." The organization also noted that last year's commencement speaker was also involved in the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine group. 

How exactly Jews can be imperialist settlers of a foreign land when their historic memories revolve around a land that previously had independent Jewish polities ruling over it and when their modern return to the land was done for their own national movement rather than for a far-distant foreign home country remains a mystery. The issue may be that the modern return of Jews to the Land of Israel is problematic because they came from foreign lands. However, this view becomes a problem as one former Hamas minister (a Palestinian terror organization) admitted back in 2012, "Allah be praised, we all have Arab roots, and every Palestinian, in Gaza and throughout Palestine, can prove his Arab roots - whether from Saudi Arabia, from Yemen, or anywhere. We have blood ties. So where is your affection and mercy?"

He added that "Personally, half my family is Egyptian. We are all like that. More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri ["Egyptian"]. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are a part of you."