UCLA Med Students Forced to Participate in 'Progressive' Religious Ceremony

https://www.johnlocke.org/ucla-med-school-subjects-students-to-speaker-touting-mother-earth-free-palestine/

In a mandatory course on "structural racism" for first-year medical students
at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised
Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of "Free, Free
Palestine" and demanded that they bow down to "mama earth', according to
students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as
"justice", began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described
as a "non-secular prayer to the ancestors", instructing everyone to get on
their knees and touch the floor-- "mama earth", as she described it-- with
their fists.

At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said.
Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about "Housing
(In)Justice" proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving "what the
settlers call L.A.," and to remind students of the city's "herstory".

The prayer also included a benediction for "black, brown, and houseless people
who die because of the crapatalist lie of private property".

"Mama earth," Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, "was never meant to be
bought, sold, pimped, or played."

So began a long and looney lecture that shocked some students at the elite
medical school and has led to calls for an investigation. Wearing a keffiyeh
that covered her entire face, Gray-Garcia, a self-described "poverty scholar",
led the class in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" as faculty and staff looked
on in silence, according to people in the course and contemporaneous text
messages reviewed by the Free Beacon.

One of the onlookers was Lindsay Wells, a pediatrician at UCLA and the
director of the mandatory first-year course, "Structural Racism and Health
Equity". Wells did not respond to a request for comment.

Gray-Garcia later referred to modern medicine as "white science" and inveighed
against the "occupation of Turtle Island"-- that is, the United States--
before asking students to stand for a second prayer. This time, nearly
everyone rose.

When one student remained seated, according to students in the class, a UCLA
administrator inquired about the student's identity, implying that discipline
could be on the table.

"The net effect was that UCLA staff intimidated first-year medical students
into participating in a religious service in derogation of their own personal
beliefs," UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group wrote to university
chancellor Gene Block on Sunday.  "There needs to be an urgent and thorough
external review and investigation of the [medical school's] curriculum and
systemic antisemitism."

UCLA and Gray-Garcia did not respond to requests for comment.

The course became the subject of a civil rights complaint in January after it
separated students into race-based discussion groups-- one for white students,
another for African Americans, and a third for "non-black people of color".
UCLA cancelled the exercise after a Wall Street Journal editorial highlighted
the complaint.