US Professor, Who Once Threatened to 'Chop Up' a Reporter, Fired From Another Job

Shellyne Rodriguez, a US professor who was previously caught on camera holding a machete to a reporter’s neck, has now been fired from another job after her “anti-Israel rant.”

Earlier terminated from her position at a college in New York, Rodriguez was fired again from a role at Cooper Union in Manhattan. In May of last year, the 47-year-old Rodriguez was sacked by Hunter College after she threatened to ‘chop up’ a reporter outside her apartment, who questioned her about a viral video in which she attacked Pro-Life students on campus.

‘Don’t bite your tongue’

“Cooper Union has fired me because of a social media post I made about ‘Zionists’… effective immediately,” Rodriguez,  wrote in a January 23 email to students, according to The New York Post. “This is fascism. Ya’ll are learning about it in real-time,” Rodriguez wrote. “Stay strong, [stay] brave, stay defiant, don’t bite your tongue, and drink plenty of water! Pa-lante!”

“This firing represents an intense escalation of McCarthyist repression meant to intimidate and punish those in support of a Free Palestine and must be resisted to prevent its further normalisation and the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” Cooper Union Students for Justice in Palestine wrote.

Reason for termination

The reason for Rodriguez’s latest sacking was not initially clear but came after she participated in a virtual panel on Palestine last month in which she spoke about the possibility of a boycott movement involving Jewish landlords or landlords who support Israel, the Post said. Her remarks included Rodriguez explaining, “the idea that we could be a Trojan horse, that we are inside empire, and you’re here to upend it.” Of others supporting Israel, she told those on the panel, “You probably wait tables where they go to brunch. Find them, go to their offices, don’t let them sleep.”

This is one of many events linked to the war in Gaza, which began with Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel. Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped around 250 that day. Israel responded with an air and ground campaign that has so far killed over 27,000 Palestinians. Gazans have faced dire humanitarian conditions, and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on X that “there is very limited access to clean water and sanitation amid relentless bombardment”.

(With agency inputs)