First-year UCLA medical students were forced to sit through a bizarre lecture by a pro-Hamas activist who made them pray to ‘mama Earth’ on their knees.
Lisa Gray-Garcia gave the two-hour presentation at Geffen Hall, on the university’s downtown Los Angeles Campus on March 27.
The lecture was a mandatory part of the Structural Racism and Health Equity class that all future doctors must take, administered by pediatrician Lindsay Wells.
Gray-Garcia calls herself a ‘poverty skola’, keeps her face covered with a keffiyeh except in a few interviews, and called Hamas‘ October 7 attack ‘justified’.
Students were instructed to touch the floor with their fists while she made a ‘non-secular’ prayer to ‘mama Earth’ and our ‘ancestors’, a complaint stated.
Lisa Gray-Garcia gave the two-hour presentation at Geffen Hall, on the university’s downtown Los Angeles Campus on March 27
Footage of the lecture, in which Gray-Garcia kept her face covered
‘Mama earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played,’ Gray-Garcia said during the prayer, part of which was recorded by a student.
She claimed private property was a ‘crapitalist lie’ that killed ‘black, brown, and houseless’ people who were forced to live on the streets.
Gray-Garcia, who grew up homeless with her single mother from the age of 11, railed against anti-homeless campaigns during another part of the lecture.
‘Not only are our bodies considered unclean in public, not only are out lives criminalized for being outside without access to a roof, but politricksters use us for their campaigns,’ she said.
‘$30 million was spent on removal of our houseless bodies… for turning human being into trash.
She asked the students to think of how many homes could be built with that money ‘even in these inflated, ridiculous prices of the commodified Mama Earth’.
Gray-Garcia’s lecture was titled ‘Housing (In)justice in LA: Addressing Unhousing and Practicing Solidarity’ but also veered into the crisis in Gaza.
At one point she led students in chanting ‘Free, Free Palestine’, as UCLA faculty including Dr Wells looked on in silence.
The lecture was a mandatory part of the Structural Racism and Health Equity class that all future doctors must take, administered by pediatrician Lindsay Wells (pictured)
Gray-Garcia just hours after Hamas killed 1,200 people on October 7 expressed support for Palestine, but none for the murdered Israelis.
‘As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine &all of MamaEarth in prayer & love we need to make the connections,’ she wrote on Twitter.
‘For us Houseless, indigenous, swept/evicted people -we r not separate from this struggle – we suffer from the same settler colonial terror.’
Then on November 1 she wrote: ‘When u resist after decades of relentless poLicing, killing& terrorizing that’s not ‘terrorism’ that’s justice.’
Gray-Garcia has also previously called Israel ‘amerikkklan’, in reference to the KKK.
Later in the lecture she called modern medicine ‘white science’ and referred to North America as occupied ‘Turtle Island’ and said they were in ‘what the settlers call LA’.
She frequently calls cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco by their Native American names and calls them ‘occupied’.
Gray Garcia at a pro-Palestine event wearing the face covering she always gas in public
Towards the end of the lecture, Gray-Garcia told students to stand for a second prayer, which all but a few did.
‘Of those gathered, a handful of students who were visibly uncomfortable declined to participate, remaining seated throughout,’ UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group wrote in a complaint
‘At this point, a UCLA staff member inquired as to the identity of a medical student who had remained sitting down, potentially singling them out for disciplinary treatment.
‘The net effect was that UCLA staff intimidated first-year medical students into participating in a religious service in derogation of their own personal beliefs.’