BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — Auburn beat Creighton in the second round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament Saturday. Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl started the postgame press conference by calling attention to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

“Edan Alexander is still held hostage in Gaza right now,” Pearl said. “An American held hostage, and not enough people in this country that know his name.”

When asked why he brought it up, Pearl responded:

“It starts with my faith, and it starts with us answering the question ‘Why has God blessed Auburn and this basketball team the way he has all season long?’ and honestly, it’s I think to put us on a platform,” Pearl said. “This Jewish American loves his country more than anything else. At the same time over in Israel, that’s our ancestral homeland for the Jewish people, and it’s under attack.”

That war has become widely debated across the U.S., with many public figures letting their opinions be known. Some professors from the University of Alabama and Samford University said the conflict is complex and that an understanding of the region’s history is needed to better grasp what the current war is about.

“People get in their silos, and they get in their own social media world, and it’s hard to get good accounts,” said Fred Shepherd, a political science professor at Samford.

Shepherd said on one hand, it’s good for Pearl to take stances on issues he’s passionate about, like the Israel-Gaza conflict, and be a model for his players about standing up for what you believe in. Shepherd said, however, some of Pearl’s comments over the years have painted him as a partisan figure.

“While I credit him for broadening his world and talking about these issues, the fact that just about the same time, he posted something about the two-state solution of Palestine and Israel being dead, and he’s closely identified with a president that is empowering extremists in Israel,” Shepherd said. “I would be even more pleased if coach Pearl would speak up on behalf of the many, many Palestinians who have lost their lives as well.”

Daniel Levine is the Aaron Aronov Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Alabama. As a teacher of the Israel-Gaza conflict, he said students can often have inherited beliefs of the war that are antisemitic or Islamophobic, even though the students themselves may not be.

“We live in a society that does not know how to talk about these things very well, and we are products of that society. So part of our job is to become more aware of those things, and that’s difficult to do,” Levine said. “The fact that your beliefs may not be the same as someone else’s, that’s just a fact politically, right? So you will see people who love Israel or people who love Palestine or people who love both or people who love neither decompensate over all sorts of things happening around this conflict, and that will tell you something about where their sensitivities are or where your sensitivities are. In those sensitivities, you are part of the conflict.”

Levine said one of the reasons the Israel-Gaza conflict is such a politicized topic in the U.S. is because of the parallels it holds to some of our own conflicts.