UC Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian: Israel Wants to Conquer Mecca, Might Charge Admission Fee for Egypt’s Pyramids

A professor at the University of California, Berkeley who has also established himself as one of America’s most influential Islamist activists promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory in a lecture earlier this month at a California mosque, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer at UC Berkeley, co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that has become notorious for intimidating Jews on university campuses, as well as American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a nonprofit he now chairs which has sponsored a series of anti-Israel protests following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described AMP as being “at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.”

On Aug. 15, Bazian expressed the antisemitic conspiracism which has undergirded the Islamist movement since the 1928 founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia, Egypt by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, with a stated goal of implementing Islamic law around the world.

“He [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] wants to make Gaza the Riviera, with Mr. Trump – he’s not satisfied with that. He’s not satisfied with annexing the West Bank, which Trump and the US administration is already giving on. He’s not satisfied with the Golan Heights. He’s not satisfied that he has already taken the Sharm El-Sheikh area,” Bazian stated during a lecture at the Muslim Community of Folsom, California.

“Netanyahu says: ‘I want Jordan.’ He wants Greater Israel, he wants Jordan, he wants Lebanon, and he wants Egypt – the Pyramids – because he wants maybe, if tourists are coming, maybe he will charge people to go up to the Pyramids,” Bazian continued in remarks flagged by MEMRI.

Bazian claimed that Netanyahu “wants Egypt and he wants Saudi Arabia, because the Mecca and Medina area – he says it is part of Greater Israel. He said this on the news, in an interview.” The UC Berkeley professor then added, “Now, all of the Arabs who are committed to the Abraham Accords, who do tawaf in the White House – they were just like saying: ‘We thought we were partners.’ They didn’t know that they were on the menu.”

The Abraham Accords were a series of US-brokered peace agreements that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

The United Arab Emirates, a leading driver in the Abraham Accords, regards the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, designating it as such in November 2014, and named the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) as components within its global influence network.

The longtime organizer of anti-Israel activism also accused Jews of exploiting antisemitism to make money.

“The whole monetization and weaponization of antisemitism is no longer working,” Bazian said. “I do believe that Zionism no longer has a standing globally. Now, between the end of Zionism as an ideology and as a genocidal policy versus the liberation of Palestine – it might take a number of years.”

According to MEMRI, in a YouTube video published on May 9, 2024, Bazian expressed his belief that Israel is a colonial project.

“We are not the one that have committed pogroms against Jews. History of Muslim, Arab, Christian relations in the East with Jewish population is not European history. Is not the Balfour history. Is not the French history. Is not the German history,” Bazian said. “Zionism was born in Europe because Europe is racist, was racist, continues to be racist, and has not recovered from its racism.”

Bazian described how the Islamists’ battle “for a free Palestine” is at its core “a fight against racism, against Islamophobia, against antisemitism as it has been articulated, and not according to ADL, Netanyahu, Biden, European racism, or anything of that history. So, our change is a change of a different future, a different world. What [inaudible] said, end of colonialism, a dying colonialism. What we are seeing today is a dying colonialism.”

Bazian has previously made comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany and defended Hamas. In 2015, he wrote that Gaza was “an epistemic Warsaw Ghetto but only different Semites are locked up this time around” and that “the Europeans who fought Nazism with arms were labeled ‘terrorist’ by Hitler. Hamas is fighting against the occupation of Palestinian lands and is labeled ‘terrorist.’”

Despite Bazian’s prominent academic stature at UC Berkeley, his activist network has come under legal scrutiny.

On May 9, a circuit judge in Virgnia ordered that AMP disclose its funding sources, following investigative efforts by Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares who said he “has a legal obligation to ensure that charitable organizations operating in Virginia are following the law.”

A second suit from earlier this year alleged that AMP constituted a rebranding of Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which had previously been found liable for $156 million due to its support for Hamas.

The suit stated that AMP comprised “largely the same core leadership as IAP/AMS” and that it “serves the same function and purpose; it holds nearly identical conventions and events with many of the same roster of speakers; it operates a similar ‘chapter’ structure in similar geographic locations; it continues to espouse Hamas’s ideology and political positions; and it continues to facilitate fundraising for groups that funnel money to Hamas.”