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On 10/25/23, Asaf Ferber publicly harassed students, faculty, and community members of the University of California, Irvine, who were chanting in solidarity with Palestinians during the 2023 genocide of Gaza by Israel. He repeatedly yelled racist, crude statements at students.
Asaf Ferber is a Mathematics professor at the University of California, Irvine.
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During the Students for Justice in Palestine at UCI walkout on October 25th, as hundreds of those from the UCI community (professors, faculty, undergraduates, graduate students, community members, and staff) chanted in solidarity with Palestinians experiencing genocide at the hands of Israel, protestors were verbally harassed by two Zionist counter-protestors. One of the counter-protestors was Asaf Ferber, an Associate Professor in Mathematics in the School of Physical Sciences at UC Irvine. Ferber repeatedly yelled crude and racist statements at those protesting, such as, "terrorists", "fck you", "fck you Palestine", "cowards", and "nobody gives a sh*t". The other counter-protestor was his friend, Kamran Kalaei, who joined in on the verbal abuse, yelling "Go back to Gaza where you will be raped".
At the beginning of the harassment incident, during the very first chant at 12:32 PM, Ferber began walking very quickly toward the protestors, visibly angry, while chanting these racist statements. The safety team on duty approached Ferber to block him from attacking the protestors. A safety member saw that Ferber was on a phone call, then when he saw Kalaei approaching, he ended his call and waved Kalaei over to join and support him in disrupting the protest and harassing the students. Students for Justice in Palestine documented the incident on video, which is available on the Instagram account @sjp.uci .
As Ferber got very close to the students on the safety team, he took out his phone to start recording the protestors. When a member of the safety team took out a scarf to block the phone from video recording, Ferber grabbed the top of the student's scarf and aggressively began shoving it down. He then started to walk along the edge of the circle of protestors, reaching his arm over the safety team members to further record the protestors. At one point, Kalaei aggressively walked quickly toward one member of the safety team with his arm held up at them.
As previously mentioned, Ferber aggressively called protestors "terrorists", generalizing Palestinians and other Arab students, as well as Muslim students, with racist rhetoric. In addition, the use of this comment labels all protestors, not just Arabs or Muslims, as terrorists, simply for showing support for Palestine.
On his public Facebook page, Ferber posted a video of the incident, clearly showcasing his acts of harassment, and mentioned his presence at the walkout with pride.
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