Rutgers disinvites graduation speaker who claimed Israel ‘trains dogs to sexually assault prisoners’

New Jersey’s flagship state school specifically cites ‘inflammatory claim’ about K9 ‘dungeons’ by Rami Elghandour, who has also accused Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘terrorism’

Administrators at Rutgers University have canceled a commencement speaker scheduled for next week, citing an “inflammatory claim” he tweeted about Israel.

Rami Elghandour, a Rutgers alumnus and a producer of an Oscar-nominated docudrama about a Palestinian girl who died in Gaza, was set to deliver the speech at the university’s School of Engineering on May 15. But the university, New Jersey’s public flagship, rescinded the invitation on Wednesday.

The Associated Press was the first to report that Elghandour’s invitation had been rescinded and that the university said social media posts about Israel were the cause.

To the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a university representative specifically cited an April 20 tweet by Elghandour that accuses Israel of genocide and says the Israelis are “running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners.”

The tweet was a response to a post from California Democratic Representative Ro Khanna advocating for cutting US aid to Israel, which was itself a response to a post by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has become a bogeyman in US politics. The unsubstantiated claim that Israel trains dogs to assault prisoners has circulated widely in recent weeks among some pro-Palestinian activists.

“The Rutgers School of Engineering was recently informed that some graduating students would not attend their graduation ceremony due to concerns about the invited speaker’s social media posts, including one that shared an inflammatory claim,” Dory Devlin, a representative for Rutgers University, told JTA in an email. “After discussing these concerns with the speaker, the School of Engineering has rescinded the convocation speaker invitation to Rami Elghandour.”

Elghandour, who owns a biotech company and was an executive producer for the award-winning documentary “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” declined through a spokesperson to respond to a JTA request for comment. The spokesperson pointed to his statement on social media, where he disparaged the school’s decision.

“After a ‘few’ students complained about my selection as speaker because of my social media advocacy for Palestine, Rutgers has canceled my speech,” Elghandour wrote. “They decided that the feelings of a handful of students who said that my social media posts ‘opposed their beliefs’, were more important than the experience of the entire graduating class, the reputation of the school, the dignity and belonging of Arab and Muslim students, and the First Amendment.”

Elghandour, a frequent social media user, has also accused Israel of carrying out “apartheid and genocide in the name of ethnic supremacy” along with “land theft, terrorism and ethnic cleansing.” In December 2023, two months after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on southern Israel, Elghandour equated Israel to the terror group, writing that “both parties engage in atrocities.”

In addition to executive-producing “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Elghandour was also a producer on the film “American Doctor,” about three physicians — including a Palestinian and a Jew — who traveled to Gaza to aid civilians there.

Rutgers University Hillel, the campus Jewish group that also engages students around Israel, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rutgers settled a federal civil rights investigation into its handling of antisemitism in January 2025. It agreed to update its anti-discrimination policies as investigators were poised to find that the school did not protect Jewish students from antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 massacres, which sparked the subsequent war in Gaza.

The incident adds to a string of dustups over Israel at commencements this year and in the past. The University of Michigan’s president apologized after faculty senate chair Derek Peterson praised pro-Palestinian student protesters during his speech on Saturday; Elghandour shared several posts in defense of Peterson’s speech.