On Friday, Oct. 18, UC San Diego’s Sixth College writing department hosted a public conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen as part of its yearly Culture, Art, and Technology Conversations series. Rather than speaking about how national identity and the media shaped his thoughts about war as a Vietnamese refugee — the topic he was actually invited to speak about — the Pulitzer Prize winner imposed his beliefs on what opinions are “acceptable” for Jewish people to hold and what constitutes antisemitism. Higher education institutions like UCSD must take responsibility to ensure that their students have access to facts that allow them to develop their own informed opinions, rather than influencing them to accept a hateful and biased narrative like the one-sided perspective presented by Nguyen.
By facilitating this event, UCSD gave a platform to this scholar who used it to spread biased and inaccurate information about the Middle East. UCSD has experienced an influx of Jew-hatred since the mass casualty terror attack by Hamas in October 2023, the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. This act is one of many by UCSD that blatantly displays its insincere attempts to address this increase in Jew-hatred.
It is difficult to believe that Sixth College was entirely unaware of the contents of Nguyen’s talk, given the title of the event, “Memory, History, Identity: From Viet Nam to Palestine” and Nguyen’s public support of organizations and statements related to the Palestinian cause. Though private conversations with the event organizers have made clear that they do not necessarily endorse the beliefs of any speakers hosted for CAT Conversations — nor was it their intention for Nguyen to speak this way — the department has taken no public action to represent opposing viewpoints. Without other perspectives, students do not have the adequate resources to form a comprehensive understanding of this issue.
Over a year after Oct. 7, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, and anti-American sentiment continues to pervade UCSD’s campus. Nguyen’s insensitive and untimely use of the Israel-Palestine conflict to virtue signal is both harmful to those being targeted by this biased misrepresentation and to the intellectual integrity of the academic institution.
In his talk, Nguyen proudly bragged that he signed a letter last year calling for a ceasefire shortly after Oct. 7 and that he participated in an encampment on a college campus the following spring, as if to share his fashionably moral pro-Palestinian bona fides.
The letter that Nguyen signed minimizes civilian casualties on Oct. 7, makes no mention of the hostages still held in Gaza, and uses language that protects and justifies Hamas terrorists and their actions. While he claims this letter was in the pursuit of peace, in reality, it was far from it.
Under the guise of “ending” the war in Israel and Gaza, letters like these have been extremely one-sided, advocating for Israel to lay down its arms without a mention of Hamas’ violence against Israel or any demands for them to refrain from committing more atrocities.
Nguyen’s support for this letter illuminates the moral failure of his positions and the publicity of his harmful viewpoint. It calls on Israel to forgo its right to self-defense and negotiate with a genocidal terrorist organization. In reality, negotiation would be impossible given that Hamas just rampaged through Israeli communities — kidnapping, murdering, raping, and torturing its citizens — and promised to carry out such barbaric attacks until all of Israel is eliminated.
The underlying message of Nguyen’s speech echoed the letters’ sentiments: His advocacy is not toward an ultimate goal of peace, but instead for the victory of genocidal terrorists — a viewpoint that a quick internet search could unveil. Sixth College clearly did not do enough research before inviting a speaker whose views only further fragmented the UCSD community and targeted Jewish students — or perhaps, they simply did not care.
At one point in the speech, Nguyen — who is not Jewish — declared that “one can be Jewish and opposed to Israel at the same time.” This is true; it is fair for anyone to express opposition to Israeli policies, but for one to be opposed to the existence of the sole Jewish state strongly suggests an antisemitic double standard is at play. For the over 80% of Jews who recognize Israel as the religious and cultural center of global Jewry and understand it to be the only country that protects Jewish life without hesitation, this sentiment is not only inaccurate but also profoundly dangerous.
Later, Nguyen claimed to be cut from the same cloth as Martin Luther King Jr., equating his anti-Israel activism to MLK’s public rebuke of the Vietnam War. Nguyen, a successful, Americanized intellectual, pushing his ideological slander in the face of potential financial and social rebuke and isolation is hard to swallow. It’s also a bit ironic, considering the substantial and unencumbered national platform Nguyen continues to enjoy, as well as the general proliferation of pro-Palestine talking points impossible to escape on most college campuses.
To self-righteously compare himself to MLK is to insult the memory of the latter. MLK advocated for equal rights and an end to the Vietnam War, a war the United States was waging on a vulnerable population. Nguyen is advocating for Israel to forgo its right to self-defense in its own ancient homeland — where it is a vulnerable minority surrounded by 19 Arab countries — against a genocidal terrorist organization devoted to its destruction.
It is the epitome of privilege and hypocrisy for Nguyen to base his entire career on protecting the self-determination of the Vietnamese and then use his legitimacy to attempt to take away those same rights from Jews, who have fought and died to protect these rights. He is profoundly misguided and has poisoned his legacy with antisemitic beliefs about the evils of Israel.
The University clarifying its commitment to disavowing hateful perspectives would be especially important after the local Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — a student organization banned on campus for illegal activity — wrongfully advertised this event as their own and removed the post from Instagram only after the event occurred.
Sixth College’s mission is to “create an inclusive community dedicated to and built on fostering curiosity and critical inquiry.” The time has come for them — and for UCSD as a whole — to begin upholding these values, not only in words but in practice as well. We must cultivate an environment where diverse ideas can be explored thoughtfully and completely, where one-sided narratives and misinformation are not met with departments passively distancing themselves from their own events, but with discussion and academic dialogue.
