An instructor at Stanford University has been suspended as the school investigates allegations he targeted students based on their “identities and backgrounds” during two classes in which he gave impromptu lectures on the Israel-Hamas conflict. In one of the classes, the lecturer began by blaming the war on Zionists before asking “Jewish students to raise their hands,” Nourya Cohen, a Jewish student leader, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust,” Cohen said, adding that when someone replied six million, “he said, ‘Yes. Only six million.’” A rabbi who said he spoke to three students in the class told the Jewish news outlet Forward that the lecturer continued, “Colonizers killed more than six million. Israel is a colonizer.” Cohen and another student leader alleged that the teacher then went around separating students in the classes out as either a “colonizer” or “colonized,” depending on where they said they were from. On Wednesday, Stanford’s president and provost released a statement saying the instructor “is not currently teaching while the university works to ascertain the facts of the situation.”
