London university lecturer used Hamas propaganda material to ‘indoctrinate’ students

A King’s College London academic used a Hamas propaganda document to encourage her students to sympathise with the terror group, the JC can reveal.

Dr Rana Baker, a lecturer on Middle Eastern history,  led a seminar earlier this year in which she handed out the Hamas text titled “Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” and suggested students think about the terrorist organisation as a “liberation” movement.

She also remarked on the “collaboration between Zionists and Nazis” and the “deployment of the Holocaust as a justification to build an exclusive Jewish state”.

In March, as part of a seminar on the 1948 war and “Palestinian Arab identity-formation”, Baker distributed to students excerpts from a Hamas tract that justified the October 7 attack.

Originally published by the Hamas Media Office in January, the 18-page document claims that October 7 was a “necessary step” and a “normal response” to Israel’s actions, and that any civilian casualties “happened accidently” and in the course of the “confrontation” with Israeli forces.

In preparation for the seminar, Baker also prepared a hand-out with various sources from the 1948 war, which finished with an extract from “A Reminder to the World, Who is Hamas?”, the fourth section of Hamas’s 2024 document.

Given to students ahead of the class, the selected passages falsely presented Hamas as peaceful. They claimed that Hamas’s conflict was with the “Zionist project”, not with “the Jews because of their religion”, and that the terror group “rejects the persecution of any human being”.

The passage followed other texts about the 1948 war which referred to Israel’s military tactics of “destroying villages”, population transfer and instances of Palestinian “resistance”.

One of Baker’s shocked students recorded the seminar and handed the tape to university authorities, which launched an investigation.

The student, who did not want to be named, described the classes as “hostile” and examples of “indoctrination”, adding that at least one other person on the module felt pressured to present Israel in a damaging light in order to achieve high marks.

In the recording, heard by the JC, Baker says: “We have this tract from Hamas that we looked at. It says that it’s an Islamic national liberation resistance movement… it says they’re fighting against Zionists, not Jews, and they say that antisemitism is a European problem.” She goes on to ask the class: “So what do we make of it [given the fact that] Hamas is recognised as a terrorist organisation by all the major countries, the major powers?”

Inviting discussion, she asks students if the found Hamas’s tract “surprising”, or something they “did not expect”.

In response to Baker, a student says: “Really it’s a struggle based on land, like religion does have a role in it, but at the end of the day it’s about land.” They go on: “And I think that it makes that point quite well. Hamas isn’t about a persecution of the Jewish people, they seek to liberate their land. That’s what Hamas is about.”

The Jewish student present in the seminar, who asked to remain anonymous, said the classes were creating “incredibly indoctrinated students”, and that in this seminar in particular, Baker was “almost overtly pro-Hamas”.

The student described the classes as being dominated by a “predominant culture of anti-Israelism”.

Describing the selection of passages on the handout leading up to the Hamas document, he said that “all of the other excerpts beforehand paint a picture of Israel as being born in original sin, through the pillage and murder and possibly rape of Palestinian people, and their transfer”.

He went on: “It felt as though the entire handout was setting you up to sympathise with Hamas.

“All of the content of the handout was being curated so that you can build a textual narrative in which you get to the end of the handout and you find yourself identifying with Hamas and their mission and their goals.”

In the same class, another student spoke about how the “Holocaust is used to kind of justify the actions of Israel [...] oh, the Holocaust, look what they did to us, blah blah blah… The Holocaust was used to kind of justify Israel’s existence now, but also to Nazify other people that don’t agree with Israel.”

Baker replied: “Yes, absolutely. The deployment of the Holocaust as a justification to build an exclusive Jewish state... but also using it as a way of criticising any criticism of Israel. If you look at the IHRA definition of antisemitism, it does say that criticising Israel can amount to antisemitism.”

However, the IHRA definition of antisemitism clearly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”.

Baker could also be heard telling students about how “the collaboration between Zionism, Zionists, and Zionist prophecies and the Nazis is one well documented fact in history”.

The Jewish student described Baker’s classes as presenting a continually hostile atmosphere for him, and speculated it was because of his faith and his politics regarding Israel.

“I always felt that perhaps because of the ongoing war and because people in the seminar also knew who I was, that maybe there was this miasma of hostility towards me,” he said. “When I shared a thought, it wasn’t really ever on-boarded by the class, even if I substantiated it.”

Before the seminar, a further text, “On Suicide Bombing”, was recommended to students via email, in which the author, Talal Asad, claimed: “If there is no such thing as justified terrorism there is no such thing as just war.”

At the end of the seminar, Baker played a video during which feminist scholar Judith Butler argued that October 7 was not a terrorist or antisemitic attack but an act of “armed resistance”. Dr Baker says: “She’s also Jewish… So one cannot accuse her of being antisemitic”.

In an article from 2014, Baker wrote about the “radical potential of Palestinian rockets” as a way of combatting the “system of privilege which Israeli Jews enjoy at the expense of colonised and displaced Palestinians”.

In the article, entitled “Rejecting victimhood: the case for Palestinian resistance”, Baker wrote that the rockets were a “radical declaration of existence”, adding, “to be clear, Palestinians fire rockets into what belongs to them in the first place”.

Baker has also posted a catalogue of incendiary tweets.

In 2014, she appeared to rejoice after the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, tweeting: “Wonderful wonderful news that three settlers have been kidnapped.”

In January 2024, she wished for the end of Israel: “I am not disappointed because I already knew. Did anyone really expect otherwise? Only the bravest of us i.e. our fighters will put a stop not to Israeli hostilies only, but to Israel itself.”

One Jewish student said that they achieved a 75 per cent mark in their end of year exams because they simply repeated the anti-Israel “language and rhetoric” their professor had used in classes.

“In the exam, I argued that Israel could be viewed by some as an imperialist colonialist state,” they said, which felt “almost dirty”.

The university told the JC it had “concluded” its own investigation but did not provide further details. It added: “The suggestion… that students are pressured to express anti-Israel politics in their exams in order to be successful is untrue. Like all history modules, students are free to make whatever claims they can argue well, which can be supported with evidence; and a diversity of viewpoint is encouraged.​”​

The seminar led by Baker – who has previously written that rockets fired by Palestinians were a “radical declaration of existence” and celebrated the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers – prompted deep concern among education experts.

Former universities minister Robert Halfon told the JC: “These allegations are incredibly alarming and distressing, and sadly all too prevalent across our universities.

​“We have to knock alleged extremism out of our universities, against Jewish students, once and for all.”

Jonathan Turner, a lawyer at campaign group UK Lawyers for Israel, said: “This is a serious but not unusual case of a university lecturer justifying actions of Hamas and demonising Israelis. We understand that freedom of speech at universities must be protected, but why is it always about how great Hamas is and how terrible the Israelis are? Even taking into account freedom of speech, I think Dr Baker overstepped the mark.”

It comes as other Jewish students have told the JC about a culture of hostility on the KCL campus.

Tali Smus, a first-year English student there, was accused of being “brainwashed” after defending Israel in a WhatsApp group. She said she was then ostracised in class and fellow students refused to sit with her at lectures.

Smus consulted a welfare adviser, who told the student: “Maybe you should try and think about why they would act this way.”

Another Jewish student told the JC that their professor, Dr Tania de St Croix, had encouraged students to walk out of her own lecture to protest the anniversary of October 7. Baker was approached for comment.