Fired over Gaza? Dr. Rupa Marya Sues UCSF, Says She Was Targeted for Speaking Up for Palestine

[Uncle Joe]

We speak with Dr. Rupa Marya, a physician, activist, author and composer, who this week filed two free speech complaints against her former employer, the University of California, San Francisco. The school fired her last month after a lengthy suspension over her criticism of Israel's war on Gaza and its impact on healthcare in the Palestinian territory. "I didn't expect that my career-ending move would be to say 'stop bombing hospitals,' for expressing support for Palestinian liberation and for criticizing the U.S.-backed genocide," says Marya. She was named one of the top 20 most influential women in biomedicine by Nature and served on multiple national advisory boards. Since her firing, over 1,000 healthcare workers and students have signed open letters demanding her reinstatement and denouncing UCSF’s suppression of political expression.

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[Goddessartist]

1. She's wonderful!

Criticizing Israel is forbidden. Telling the truth about the ongoing genocide is forbidden.

[Archae]

2. There is no "ongoing genocide."

Israel is continuing to wage war against Hamas and thier supporters, and just as I figured, looking up this woman I found she is a vicious anti-Israel activist.

Marya was suspended by UCSF from her roles after she made a post described by the university as "targeting" students on social media.[14] Marya tweeted that medical students at USCF were concerned about the presence of a first-year Israeli medical student on campus on the basis that they may have been a member of the IDF and therefore could be involved in Israeli war crimes.[15][16][17] Due to conscription in Israel, every Israeli citizen over the age of 18 who is Jewish, Druze or Circassian must serve in the Israel Defense Forces, with some exceptions.[12]

Senator Scott Wiener and UCSF publicly labeled these posts as antisemitic, and UCSF suspended Marya due to "the targeting of students on social media based on their national origin".[14] Marya said her suspension because of her "support for the liberation of Palestinians who are suffering genocide", and maintained she was the victim of a targeted harassment campaign by pro-Israel groups.[18] Marya has previously faced backlash for criticizing the impact of Zionism on health care, having described it as an "impediment to health equity" and a "supremacist, racist ideology".[11][10]

The university later reinstated her clinical care responsibilities while maintaining her ban from campus and the hospital.[19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupa_Marya

[stopdiggin]

3. bit more to it

Marya had made a habit of targeting Jewish colleagues (and moving on to students?) in online posts.

In September 2024, Marya announced that she had been suspended from her faculty position. The news came after she had raised concerns about an Israeli student attending the medical school. Students are “asking if he participated in the genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating into medical school in CA,” she wrote. “How do we address this in our professional ranks?” She was fired in May, nine months after her suspension.

this following an earlier public rebuke for this posting:

Marya also published a thread on X arguing that Zionism should not be present in medicine, calling it a “structural impediment to health equity.”

“There are so many Jewish doctors who don’t espouse an ideology of supremacism and justification of land theft, apartheid and genocide. They are not the issue here,” she wrote in January 2024. “The issue is Zionist doctors who will sit in an ‘antiracism task force’ meeting” — a clear reference to the doctor she later named in her blog — “and try to stop brown doctors who want to issue a Ceasefire statement by saying that a ceasefire would be a bad thing (read: let’s keep killing brown people in Gaza).”

This post from Marya earned a rebuke by the university — UCSF posted on social media soon after about a “tired and familiar racist conspiracy theory … stating that ‘Zionist’ doctors are a threat to Arab, Palestinian, South Asian, Muslim and Black patients, as well as the U.S. health system.” The university called it a “sweeping, baseless and racist generalization” that “must be condemned,” and identified the trope as antisemitism.

still may fall under 'suppression of speech' rights ... I guess that will have to be hashed out. But there is some greater context to Marya's speech and actions leading up ...