A New York City college has been walloped by what witnesses described as a portentous verbal fatwa which disrupted an interfaith event school officials hoped would unite students around traditional American values of pluralism, tolerance, and equality.

What most surprised the audience and the panelists who were headlining the event was that the heckler at the City College of New York (CCNY) in Manhattan last Thursday was himself a panelist, a local imam and graduate student, Abdullah Mady, who is enrolled in the Master’s in Translational Medicine (MTM) program. When called on to speak, Mady became irate and opened up a prolonged rant in which he called for imposing sharia law on Americans, defended amputating the limbs of misdemeanor level criminals and the wealthy, and denigrated a Jewish co-panelist, Baruch College professor Ilya Bratman.

CCNY and Baruch College are both part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system.

“I came here to this event not knowing that I would be sitting next to a Zionist, and this is something I’m not going to accept. My people are being killed right now in Gaza,” Mady bellowed before challenging the religious bonafides of Muslim students in the audience. “If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately.”

Mady uttered other pronouncements drawn from the jihadist tradition of radical Islam, in which extremism is offered as a solution to soluble political problems.

“I’m talking about the elite, the filthy rich, the ones that continue to steal from people as we speak today. Those are the ones that deserve their tips to be cut off,” Mady said. “Sharia … stands against the oppressor. When sharia is implemented, pornography — gone. Alcohol industry — gone. Gambling system — gone. Interest is gone, which is what they use to enslave you.”

Ilya Bratman, executive director of the Hillel at Baruch College, told The Algemeiner in an interview on Wednesday that he is no victim but warned that Mady’s ideology is infectious in an age when political actors amass a following by trampling on norms which protect the American system against demagoguery.

“Who are the victims? The students, because they are being indoctrinated, bamboozled, and radicalized,” he said. “The Muslim students are the victims in this story because in this environment they are forced to choose between being supportive of this point of view or disassociated with by their community. That’s very sad, I think. We need education, not indoctrination.”

Bratman noted that just feet away from the panel, a Holocaust survivor was delivering a lecture in another room on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous Nazi-led pogroms in November 1938 that devastated the German Jewish community. That event aimed to teach students how to identify and fight fascism, which Bratman says is fitting given that it took form in Mady’s invective, which promised that Americans could achieve utopia if only they adopt theocratic, anti-capitalist, and antisemitic beliefs.

“It was juxtaposed with another story just downstairs, where an element of fascism was coming through on an American campus,” Bratman explained. “He promoted isolationism, exclusion, superiority, intimidation, hostility, all targeting a very specific type of group, the Jewish people.”

Bratman added that CCNY is not responsible for what transpired, as school officials selected Mady as a panelist based on its belief that he was an average student and New Yorker. However, he noted that Mady’s power to direct masses of students poses a threat to safety and would have led to tragedy had he used his platform to incite violence.

“In this situation, the administration was not trying to do something negative but something amazingly positive,” Bratman explained. “But I think if this person stood up and said, ‘If you are a good Muslim, attack this Zionist.’ And I believe this strongly not because I think they are bad people, but because they have been so bamboozled, so radicalized by ideology. We are at a dangerous moment, a moment of escalation that is a symptom of our society today.”

On Wednesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul denounced Mady’s conduct as antisemitic.

“This is antisemitism, plain and simple,” Hochul said on the X social media platform, responding to the incident. “No one should be singled out, targeted, or shamed because they are Jewish. I expect to act swiftly to ensure accountability and protect every student’s safety.”

CUNY’s campuses have been lambasted by critics as some of the most antisemitic institutions of higher education in the country.

Last year, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) resolved half a dozen investigations of antisemitism on CUNY campuses, a consortium of undergraduate colleges located throughout New York City’s five boroughs. The inquiries, which reviewed incidents that happened as far back as 2020, were aimed at determining whether school officials neglected to prevent and respond to antisemitic discrimination, bullying, and harassment.

Hunter College and CUNY Law combined for three resolutions in total, representing half of all the antisemitism cases settled by OCR. Baruch College, Brooklyn College, and CUNY’s Central Office were the subjects of three other investigations.

One of the cases which OCR resolved, involving Brooklyn College, prompted widespread concern when it was announced in 2022. According to witness testimony provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — which filed the complaint prompting the investigation — Jewish students enrolled in the college’s Mental Health Counseling (MCH) program were repeatedly pressured into saying that Jews are white people who should be excluded from discussions about social justice.

The badgering of Jewish students, the students said at the time, became so severe that one said in a WhatsApp group chat that she wanted to “strangle” a Jewish classmate.

“Some of the harassment on CUNY campuses has become so commonplace as to almost be normalized,” the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) alleged in July 2022. “Attacking, denigrating, and threatening ‘Zionists’ has become the norm, with the crystal-clear understanding that ‘Zionist’ is now merely an epithet for ‘Jew’ the same way ‘banker,’ ‘cabal,’ ‘globalist,’ ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘Christ killer,’ and numerous other such dog-whistles have been used over the centuries to target, demonize, and incite against Jews.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.