Exclusive | UCLA spent millions of taxpayer dollars on DEI, has professors who compared Israel to Nazis: watchdog

As the Trump administration pushes for the University of California, Los Angeles, to pony up $1 billion to settle discrimination claims, a sweeping new report has highlighted professors who compared Israeli rhetoric to that of the Nazis and accused the Zionist movement of white supremacy.

The watchdog also zinged UCLA for spending at least $3 million in taxpayer money on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

“We support free expression and viewpoint diversity, but faddish, divisive concepts like anticolonialism and antiracism don’t need taxpayer funds sustaining them,” said Jon Hart, CEO of report author Open the Books.

“On campuses like UCLA, the rhetoric has caught up with reality with damaging consequences.”

One professor named and shamed in the report is Khaled Abou El Fadl, who teaches at UCLA’s law school and has been described as a leading expert on Sharia, Islamic law and Islam.

El Fadl was filmed in late 2023 drawing parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany. His inflammatory remarks followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against the Jewish state.

“The Germans blamed the Jews for their own slaughter. The Germans insisted that what they did in the countries they occupied wasn’t their fault,” he said at the time.

“It was always the fault of the occupied. The rhetoric of the Germans is indistinguishable from the rhetoric that Israel uses about Palestinians.”

Later in the same video, El Fadl vented that Palestinians “are considered like animals. Exactly like the Nazis looked at Jews.”

“Something subhuman, something less than human, exactly like the narrative and the language of the Nazis,” he went on.

Open the Books also knocked UCLA history professor Robin Kelley, an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the US ally.

“The way that Zionism has emerged in Israel has basically taken up the mantle of white supremacy,” Kelley said during a 2017 University of Toronto lecture, “that is, domination by the peoples, through colonial domination.”

In 2021, in a lecture at York University, Kelley also suggested a direct link between Israel and Nazi Germany.

“I was thinking about what it meant when Germany… gave $58 billion to Israel to help start a nation in the name of reparations,” he said at the time. “In the name of reparations for the Holocaust, it literally provided start-up capital for new settler-colonial state.”

Shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, two professors convened an “Emergency Teach-In On The Crisis in Palestine,” calling Israel a “settler colonial” society. One of those professors later told The Post that Israel is “a power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology.”

Those two professors were listed on a grant application for the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) initiative. UCLA has raked in some $6.1 million worth of FLAS grants from taxpayers since 2020.

UCLA touts its antisemitism crackdown

In response to questions about the Open the Books report, a spokesperson for UCLA stressed that the school’s “partnership with the federal government advances life-saving care, research, and economic innovation in California and across the nation.”

“Americans depend on the research pioneered at UCLA,” Mary Osako, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications, told The Post. “We have been abundantly clear that antisemitism has no place on our campus.”

“We have taken concrete steps to extinguish hate by taking decisive action against groups for violating our longstanding policies and launching our Initiative to Combat Antisemitism earlier this year.”

The school also highlighted some of its efforts to curtail antisemitism, such as its interim suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine back in February following the vandalization of Jewish regent Jay Sures’ home.

The school has also tightened its rules for protests and has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department to investigate those who violate campus policies.

Showdown with Trump

Since the start of this month, the Trump administration has frozen some $584 million in federal funding, according to UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk.

The Trump administration has accused the university of civil rights infractions for failing to protect Jewish students during pro-Palestinian demonstrations that erupted on campus following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

UCLA was infamously the site of a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” in which protesters blocked parts of campus to community members who did not have a certain wristband.

Last month, the university agreed to pay $6 million to settle discrimination complaints brought by Jewish faculty and students in connection with the demonstrations.

DEI grants

Open the Books also highlighted about $3 million worth of DEI-related grants that UCLA received over recent years.

This includes about $1 million since 2021 to research “equity and antiracist learning in computer science,” according to data found from USA Spending.

UCLA also raked in at least $216,000 “to increase participation of underrepresented groups in the mathematical sciences” and $1.6 million since 2020 for a “workshop on mathematics on racial justice.”

Overall, UCLA has taken in at least $4.3 billion from the taxpayers between 2021 and June 2025.