Deepa Kumar, an associate professor in media and Middle Eastern studies at Rutgers University, has been roundly criticized for tweeting in March, “Yes ISIS is brutal, but US is more so, 1.3 million killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Kumar has sent out this tweet on March 26, in a broadside consistent with her anti-US and anti-war critiques.
The tweet attracted some attention in the immediate hours and days after it was posted, with several responses asking her to get out of America if she thought so poorly of it and others dismissing her as a joke.
However, the issue was raked up again on Friday by Fox News which featured the tweet and some more caustic responses.
Following Breitbart contributor and Marine Corps University Chair of Military Theory Sebastian Gorka’s appearance this week on Fox and Friends to discuss Kumar’s tweet, the professor claimed to have received “hate mail” and “death threats.”
Kumar defended herself in an interview with a higher education journal even as her critics said she was polluting academia with what they saw as her toxic anti-US ideology. Her body of leftist, liberal work includes authorship of the book ‘Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.’