Yale slammed for hosting ‘anti-Semite’ during Passover

Yale University is being blasted for hosting a French academic accused of horrific anti-Semitism during Passover – defying Jewish groups who pleaded with the college to call off the lecture.

The Ivy League college invited French-Algerian Houria Bouteldja to speak on April 6, the night of the second seder of Passover, despite calls to disinvite her over a record of alleged anti-Semitism and homophobia.

Bouteldja has been accused of being a serial anti-Semite and homophobe, after posing with a sign demanding Zionists are sent to gulags, saying she identified with a terrorist who carried out a mass shooting at a Jewish school and calling same-sex marriage “part of homonationalism.”

She also said people “must support” Palestinian “resistance” including the terrorist group Hamas.

Bouteldja was invited as part of a “Decolonizing Europe” lecture series organized by Fatima El-Tayeb, Yale’s professor of ethnicity, race and migration, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies – who described attempts to question Bouteldja on her record as “a waste of time.”

El-Tayeb declined to respond to requests for comment from The Post.

Yale ignored demands from campaign group StopAntisemitism not to host Bouteldja during one of Judaism’s holiest seasons, when it would be impossible for observant students to debate her.

Liora Rez, executive director of StopAntisemitism, slammed Bouteldja as a “vicious antisemitic and homophobic bigot” unworthy of being hosted at any institution.

“StopAntisemitism is horrified Yale provided this known racist a platform to spread her poisonous ideas,” Rez told The Post. “Furthermore, we are extremely disappointed that Yale President Peter Salovey ignored requests from students, alumni and StopAntisemitism for dialogue surrounding the Bouteldja event.”

Other critics of Bouteldja’s visit, including actor and Jewish advocate Jonah Platt, said they were dismayed by the timing of her lecture, which occurred on the second night of Passover.

“You cannot have free and open debate if you’re purposefully or ignorantly planning this discussion for a time when the other side of this supposed free and open debate is very obviously not able to attend,” Platt told The Post. “That’s a mistake.”

Platt accused Yale of being apathetic or intentionally harmful by allowing Bouteldja’s appearance during Passover.

“It feels underhanded, like there’s a sinister agenda at work,” Platt continued. “I certainly empathize with the students who feel they were not being taken care of or seen or heard by their university.”

Bouteldja, who could not be reached for comment, did not address accusations of being homophobic, antisemitic and anti-white during her April 6 appearance at Yale, The Yale Daily News reported.

When one student tried to ask for an unequivocal statement that she supported LGBT rights and condemned an anti-Semitic mass murderer, El-Tayeb called the question a waste of time, The Yale News said.

“Whether this event was scheduled for the second day of Passover deliberately or by oversight, the net effect was that many students who otherwise would have wished to make their voices heard were not able to do so,” Uri Cohen, executive director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, told The Post, adding it disenfranchised many potential protesters.

“Hate against Jews is one of the oldest and most nefarious ills of human history, and we’re seeing it increasing dramatically world-wide right now, including here in New Haven. The world needs less hate — not more, and I hope that the campus community will do better in this vein going forward.”

Bouteldja has long been one of France’s most controversial academic and political figures.

Her book “Whites, Jews and Us,” which has a foreword by the firebrand former Harvard and Princeton professor Cornel West, claims that the existence of Israel is a plot by white Europeans to uphold white supremacy.

In 2012, she publicly aligned herself with Mohammed Merah, an Islamic jihadist who murdered a rabbi and three children in a mass shooting at a Jewish day school and killed two off-duty soldiers during a series of attacks in Toulouse, France.

She blamed “white supremacy” for the attack, which French authorities said at the time were clearly anti-Semitic.

“On the 21st of March 2012, I went to bed as myself, and woke up as Mohamed Merah,” Bouteldja said, claiming that the mass murder had endured an “incredible Islamophobic political and media campaign” in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

“Just like me, he knows he would be accused of anti-Semitism if he supports the colonised Palestinians, and of religious fundamentalism if he supports the right to wear a headscarf,” Bouteldja said. “Mohamed Merah is me, and I am him.”

She also dismissed the 9/11 attacks as “towers are struck by airliners and collapse like a house of cards,” and described the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London of 2005, when four UK-born suicide attackers killed 56 innocent commuters as “bombs explode in the subway.”

Bouteldja, who moved to France as a child from its former colony of Algeria, has accused French Jews of being part of “white supremacy” by themselves oppressing the country’s Muslim population.

A Yale spokeswoman declined to provide additional details about Bouteldja’s lecture when reached by The Post.

Yale’s assistant vice president for university life, Pilar Montalvo, told protesting students that the lecture would not moved to another date due to its stance on free speech, the student newspaper reported.

“Antisemitism has no place at this university,” Montalvo told students. “There is a great deal of work underway to support the Jewish community on campus.”