UC Merced Professor Laid Off for Posting Anti-’Israel’ Tweets

By Staff, Agencies

Abbas Ghassemi, a professor at Univesity of California Merced will not be teaching during the spring semester, according to a university administrator.

No further details were released about Ghassemi’s future employment with the university. As of January 19, the UC Merced website still listed him as a teaching professor of civil and environmental engineering.

The pretext of laying Ghassemi off was that he posted tweets against the 'Israeli' occupation entity. The first report on Ghassemi’s tweets was on December 21. He deactivated his account shortly after.

The development comes after the university announced in late December that it would launch an inquiry into Ghassemi’s conduct following the discovery of the Twitter account.

Chancellor Juan Sanchez Munoz announced that UC Merced would develop programming around free speech and hate speech, as well as make policy updates to social media use.

Several of Ghassemi’s tweets were about Zionists and the ‘Israeli’ occupation regime’s controlling components of the US government, media and banking systems. One tweet featured a photo of a “Zionist brain” with labels such as “frontal money lobe” and “world domination lobe.”

Ghassemi has retained the legal counsel of Michael J. DeNiro, a lawyer who specializes in First Amendment cases in academia, according to a person directly familiar with the matter.