Since the fall of 2015, Rutgers University has employed a man named Mazen Adi. His employment appears to have remained under the radar until early November when Shiri Moshe of The Algemeiner reported that prior to his teaching gig at Rutgers, Adi was a representative for the Bashar al-Assad regime at the United Nations:
… between January 2007 and July 2014, Adi served as a diplomat and legal adviser at the Permanent Mission of Syria to the United Nations in New York. He represented the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as it met pro-democracy protesters with lethal force in 2011, sparking a conflict that has left an estimated 465,000 people dead or missing.
You read that correctly. Adi was a United Nations diplomat for Syria under Bashar al-Assad. Now he works at Rutgers.
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In addition to defending Syria in general and the vile actions of Bashar al-Assad specifically, Adi has made numerous sickening and shocking remarks. In 2012, during a speech condemning Israel, Adi said: “Indeed, international gangs led by some Israeli officials are now trafficking children’s organs.”
According to an anonymous student who spoke with Moshe, Adi has “defended Palestinian terrorism in class” as a means of resisting alleged occupation by Israel.
One might not know these things were they to read Adi’s glowing bio on the Rutgers website:
Dr. Mazen Adi worked as a career diplomat and legal advisor for 16 years’ experience both in bilateral and multilateral relations. Since September 2015, he started teaching at Rutgers University MA Program in Political Science-United Nations and Global Policy Studies, he teaches courses in International Criminal Law and Anti-Corruption; Extremism, Violence and Political Change; and Theories of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative law from Tor Vergata University (Roma 2) Italy, LL.M and MA from St. John ’s University.
Having repeatedly defended a man who presided over the deaths of more than 400,000 people, Adi is likely very familiar with international criminal law, as well as terrorism, extremism, and violence.
After Adi’s cover was blown, Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, condemned Rutgers, saying that it should be “a matter of profound concern that an American university would allow an apologist for the Syrian regime’s genocide to be a teacher.”
Neuer added that Adi should be fired, and that the United States needs to “investigate how a long-time agent of the Syrian regime” and an “apologist for mass murder” was even allowed to be hired by the university.
Rutgers is defiant, telling Moshe that Mazen Adi was hired because of “his expertise in international law and diplomacy,” and that “Rutgers will not defend the content of every opinion expressed by every member of our academic community, but the University will defend their rights to academic freedom and to speak freely.”
To sum up this wild story: Rutgers, a taxpayer-funded university, may not agree with a man who defended Bashar al-Assad, and who claimed Israeli officials trafficked the organs of children, but free speech and stuff.
The Daily Wire reached out to Mazen Adi via his Rutgers email address. As of publication, he has not responded.