Adams praised Dima Aboukasm’s ‘peaceful ways.’ Then she joined a mob that injured security officers and passed out Hamas propaganda.
A student arrested last week for storming a Columbia University library—during which radicals distributed pro-Hamas propaganda and injured two security officials—was once hosted by New York City mayor Eric Adams, who lauded her commitment to peace and dialogue.
Dima Aboukasm, an anthropology student at Barnard College who studies “the intersection of healthcare and social justice,” went to Gracie Mansion—Adams’s official residence—as an honored guest at his “Abate Hate Summit.” She attended the July 2024 event with Columbia student Eliana Goldin, who Adams said had managed to find friendship despite their different views about Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Eliana Goldin and Dima Aboukasm are two @Columbia students who have found productive, peaceful ways to discuss political issues they disagree on and maintain a friendship. We can all learn something from their example,” Adams said in an X posting. “Our nation is threatened by rising levels of dangerous political rhetoric that’s turning into violence. We hosted the ‘Abate Hate and Hate Violence Summit’ to find productive ways to talk about hard issues, especially religious bigotry.”
The conference brought together dozens of city officials, advocates, and students. The unlikely friendship between Goldin and Aboukasm was “one of the highlights” of the one-day summit, PIX11 reported. The event was organized by Norman Siegel, a longtime civil rights attorney in New York City.
Goldin declined to comment. Adams’s spokeswoman, Kayla Mamelak Altus, told the Washington Free Beacon that the mayor stands by his remarks.
“The mayor’s comments remain accurate—this is a painful conflict, and while healing takes time, we should always try to speak to one another, not past each other,” she said. “What we can also learn from this example is if you break the law, you will be arrested.”
Adams has made fighting anti-Semitism a key priority during his time in office. Just this week, he unveiled the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, the first such dedicated initiative in a major American city.
Yet less than a year after the conference, Aboukasm was among the 81 radicals arrested after storming Columbia’s Butler Library during finals week. The mob vandalized and damaged the library, and renamed it after Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian terrorist killed in a 2017 shootout with the Israel Defense Forces.
Aboukasm’s anti-Israel activism dates back even further. In April 2024, she signed a letter to then-Columbia president Minouche Shafik urging her to stand up to the House Committee on Education and Workforce, where Shafik was scheduled for a grilling later that month.
“The prospect of Congress calling university presidents to account for alleged antisemitism on their campuses reveals these proceedings as disingenuous political theater,” the letter read.
The letter was also signed by Aboukasm’s mother, Marie-Claire Maroun, who is listed just underneath her daughter’s name as a “Parent/guardian.” Maroun serves as an associate professor at Rutgers’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Her father, Rachid Aboukasm, also signed the letter. According to his LinkedIn profile, he works as a senior electrical engineer for United Technologies, a firm that merged with Raytheon in 2020.
While the younger Aboukasm has become a staunch anti-Israel advocate, she grew up with a silver spoon. Her high school years were spent at the MacDuffie School, a private institution in Granby, Massachusetts, where tuition runs as high as $75,420.
Like many of those arrested, Aboukasm also writes poetry. “I write as I feel— and I feel a lot,” Aboukasm noted in a blog. In 2024, her prose won her first place in a Barnard poetry contest.
Neither Aboukasm nor Barnard responded to requests for comment.
