 "Lila Abassi wrote a series of posts, mentioning, “Long Live Hamas and Hezbollah,” according to the report. Facebook")
A New York doctor reportedly lost her job after she shared a controversial post earlier this month on social media.
Lila Abassi was a medical assistant professor at the Upper East Side hospital of Mount Sinai.
She was sacked due to her support of Hamas’s atrocities and her hailing of the group as “noble resistance and freedom fighters,” according to a New York Post report.
Let’s take a closer look.
The controversial post
Lila Abassi wrote a series of posts, mentioning, “Long Live Hamas and Hezbollah,” according to the report.
Hamas is a Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, while Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militant group based in Lebanon. The United States, Israel, and others have designated both as terrorist organisations.
The 46-year-old doctor allegedly hailed Hamas as “noble resistance and freedom fighters,” called the Israeli army a “plague,” accused Israel of “slaughtering babies,” and dismissed reports of sexual violence during the October 7, 2023 attack that left 1,200 Israelis dead and thousands injured.
“Please show me actual rape video,” Abassi wrote in a Facebook doctors group, using the pseudonym “Kluver Bucy,” the name for a rare brain disorder that affects memory and behaviour and may cause eating disorders, hypersexuality, seizures and dementia.
Furthermore, she claimed that Israel was accountable for “massacr(ing) more people on 10/7 than (were) killed by Hamas.”
Abassi graduated from St. George’s University School of Medicine in 2011 and went on to SUNY Downstate to do her residency, as per NY Post.
Also read: Why Indian student, who self-deported from US, says Columbia ‘betrayed’ her
Expulsion and criticism
Abassi was fired following weeks of pressure from Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn), a councilwoman in New York City, who claimed that removing her social media accounts was insufficient because it would not reduce her support for terrorists or increase the safety of her Jewish patients.
“Our most basic expectation of doctors is that they will perform their duties in an unbiased manner - especially a doctor serving a city as ethnically and religiously diverse as ours,” Vernikov told The Post.
According to a Mt. Sinai spokesperson, the hospital launched a probe that ultimately led to her dismissal.
In the medical community, Abassi’s opinions were already well known.
“She’s known as one of the more outspoken and egregiously antisemitic physicians in the community,” a fellow Mount Sinai doctor told The NY Post.
Physicians Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group that exposed Abassi’s posts, said, “No longer will any Jewish patient feel confident that they will receive safe care from that individual, and by extension, at the facility that employs them.”
Students asked to self-deport
Moreover, a single like, share, or comment on a social media post can also trigger deportation.
That is the unpleasant reality for hundreds of overseas students in America, especially Indians, who are receiving emails from the State Department abruptly repealing their visas.
According to immigration lawyers cited in a Times of India report, students are being singled out for harassment for participating in online activities as well as on-campus demonstrations.
This effort is part of the Catch and Revoke initiative, which is led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and uses AI to require social media assessments of both new and current visa applications.
If officers discover any “potentially derogatory information,” they are to take screenshots and mark it as grounds for ineligibility. Even if they find nothing, they still have to document that a review was conducted.
The initiative, which was first reported by Axios, is to revoke the visas of foreign nationals who are thought to be supporting Hamas or other terrorist organisations that have been labelled as such.
More than 300 student visas have already been cancelled in three weeks.
According to the most recent Open Doors report, there are now about 1.5 million international students studying in the US, with over 331,000 coming from India.
“Your F-1 visa… was revoked in accordance with Section 221(i) of the United States Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended." “Remaining in the United States without a lawful immigration status can result in fines, detention, and/or deportation… Deportation can take place at a time that does not allow the person being deported to secure possessions or conclude affairs.”
According to the TOI report, the email also reminds students to use the CBP Home App to show that they intend to leave and cautions them against trying to re-enter until they have been granted a new visa.
In most cases, foreign students on F-1 and J-1 visas are accepted for the “duration of status,” which allows them to stay in the US for as long as they continue to fulfil the requirements of their visa. Previously, they wouldn’t start accruing unlawful presence until immigration authorities made a formal determination.
But, according to a January update posted on the USCIS website, if a student remains in the country after their status expires, their unlawful presence begins the day after that.
‘Gave you visa to study, not become social activist’
Rubio strongly defended the Catch and Revoke strategy at a press conference in Guyana, while he was responding to a query concerning a Turkish student who was being held at Tufts University.
He said, “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses… Once your visa is revoked, you’re illegally in the country, and you have to leave. Why would any country in the world allow people to come and disrupt? I don’t care what movement you’re involved in… If we’ve given you a visa and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away.”
With inputs from agencies