A prominent UCLA professor is sharply criticizing the university after it included, in programming tied to this week’s 9/11 commemorations, an attorney who represented the terrorist responsible for murdering his son.
Judea Pearl, 90, said UCLA’s decision to give a platform to Melanie T. Partow left him “ashamed of my university,” accusing the school of “weaponizing” the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Pearl’s son, Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was killed in Pakistan in 2002 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of 9/11, after being drawn to a meeting under the pretense of interviewing an Islamic scholar.
A disturbing video of the killing was released afterward, showing Daniel Pearl identifying himself as a Californian and saying his family was Jewish before he was beheaded.
The California Post reported Wednesday that UCLA was hosting Partow alongside a controversial Yale professor who has described post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts as “racist.”
The event drew immediate backlash, including from 9/11 survivors and first responders, who accused the university of effectively “pointing fingers at the victims.”
Pearl, a faculty member at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering, told The Post: “Colleagues inform me that, sadly, UCLA Law School is guilty of such practice: Weaponizing the painful days of 9/11 and 10/7 to promote hateful ideologies.”
He continued: “Having lost a son to such an ideology, I stand ashamed of my university.”
The UCLA symposium, titled, “25 Years After 9/11: Reimagining Freedom, Justice, and Security,” will feature Partow during the two-day open event on Thursday and Friday.
Partow is one of the defense lawyers for Mohammed, a terrorist who previously boasted about beheading Daniel Pearl following the kidnapping at a restaurant in Karachi in early 2002.
He believed he was interviewing an Islamic scholar.
According to a transcript released by the Pentagon in 2007, Mohammed said: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl.”
He added: “For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”
Partow is a civil rights and international human rights litigator, according to her lecturer biography at the UC Irvine School of Law.
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She clerked at the International Criminal Court and recently made headlines for issuing an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Partow has represented Mohammed since February 2020 and is a “qualified member of the Military Commissions Defense Organization Civilian Attorney Pool for the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.”
She is scheduled to speak on a panel titled “Torture, Rendition, and Detention: The Erosion of the Rights Regime post 9/11,” which will focus on the “increased counterterrorism authority” the US and other countries have shown following the terror attacks.
Partow is representing Mohammed among several other defense attorneys as he faces charges in a United States military tribunal of aiding the men who perpetrated the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The case remains in the pretrial phase.
Judea Pearl spoke about his son’s execution last month.
“In his last words, he said the town of Brockton is where there’s a street named after my great grandfather, who was one of the founders of the town,” he told NewsNation.
“For us, it was surprising because we haven’t mentioned his grandfather very frequently in our family but it became a statement of Jewish identity, of Jewish pride, of Zionist accomplishment, building towns,” he said.
“It was surprising to me in the last minutes of his life, under the threat of being killed, he hung on to that.”
The UCLA School of Law is set to open the event on Thursday before concluding it on the anniversary of the attack that killed more than 3,000 people.
The conversation will be led by a variety of controversial speakers, including Partow and Yale professor Aslı Ü. Bâli, who once referred to counterterrorism as a “racist gravy train.”
The tone-deaf event comes as UCLA has faced lawsuits from the Trump administration over allegedly failing to address antisemitism on campus or protect Jewish students and Israeli employees.
“It’s absolutely absurd,” Jim McCaffrey, an FDNY lieutenant at the time of the attacks who responded to the Twin Towers, told The Post.
“They’re pointing fingers at the victims. We’re the bad guys for being attacked. It’s mind-boggling. What’s going on in academia?”
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