University of Kentucky Professor of Law Ramsi Woodcock Calls for the World to Destroy Israel
Nov 19, 2025 4:00 pm
By Hugh Fitzgerald
17 Comments
In the green and rolling hills of horse-country and mint-julep Kentucky, a man has just stood up for evil in the garden. His name is Ramsi Woodcock — “Ramsi” suggests a partly Arab background — and he is a tenured professor at the University of Kentucky law school. He thinks that Israel should be wiped out, and that the entire world should join in eliminating the tiny Jewish state. For this, he was removed from his teaching duties, but not suspended. He’s been moved to another position, in the office of professional development, where he won’t be meeting with, and poisoning the minds of, students. More on this monster can be found here: “US professor sues university for probing his call for global war to ‘end Israel,’” by Luke Tress, Times of Israel, November 15, 2025:
A professor at the University of Kentucky on Thursday sued the university leadership and the head of the US Department of Education after he was investigated and removed from teaching for eliminationist rhetoric against Israel.
Ramsi Woodcock’s calls to destroy the Jewish state ran afoul of state antisemitism law, but he contends that his anti-Zionist diatribes are protected speech, in a case that touches on First Amendment protections and serves as a counterpoint to lawsuits filed by Jewish groups against universities across the US that argue anti-Zionism is discriminatory toward Jews.
Criticism of Zionism, or of Israel, is protected speech under the First Amendment. But calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state, which would of course involve the mass murder of Jews in Israel, is not. This is intended to whip up violence against the Jewish state. It is likely to do so. Some of those reading Woodcock’s words may well be inspired to attack individual Israelis — say, a speaker from the IDF — or Israeli institutions, including violent attacks on Israel’s consulates and embassy, which those attackers see as initial milestones along the way to destroying the Jewish state. It’s not hard to imagine that Woodcock’s inflammatory words would likely incite “imminent lawless violence,” and thus should lose their protected status, according to the opinion in Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Woodcock is a tenured law professor at the university’s J. David Rosenberg College of Law and has worked at the university since 2018. He sued the university president, other university leaders, and US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a federal court in Kentucky.
Woodcock’s anti-Israel positions, published online, amount to a broadside of common far-left attacks against Israel, combining genocide and apartheid accusations, international law, colonialist academic theories, and characterizing Israel as an impediment to the world order.
“Zionism is not only racism, but colonialism, and the remedy is not equality but decolonization,” he said, characterizing Israel as an “American colony” and arguing against “any right of self-determination for Jewish people” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Loathsome as they are, those words are still protected speech. But Woodcock did not stop there.
He has taken the argument a step further than many anti-Israel academics, though, by explicitly arguing for the violent destruction of Israel and laying out a plan for a global war against the Jewish state.
In public statements last year, he called to “end Israel” and demanded “war — by the international community against Israel.”
“We demand that every country in the world make war on Israel immediately and until such time as Israel has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine,” he wrote in a petition….
Woodcock is urging “every country in the world” to “make war” against the Jewish state, until it submits, through violence, to being part of a state of Palestine, which Palestinians would presumably rule once their land, which, in Woodcock’s view, the Israelis “stole,” has been returned to its rightful owners. No Jewish state, no matter how small, will be permitted to exist.
In July, in response to Woodcock, university president Eli Capilouto released a public statement calling Woodcock’s views “repugnant” and stating that the rhetoric could be antisemitic.
Woodcock’s rhetoric “could be antisemitic”? No, of course it is antisemitic. He’s just called for a war of annihilation to be waged against the Jewish state, which inevitably will mean the murder of many of its Jewish citizens. That’s stone-cold antisemitism, the kind of thing to warm the cockles of your heart, if you are Hitler or Himmler or Adolf Eichmann.
The question is this: is Woodcock’s “speech” calling for a war by everyone in the world against the Jewish state likely to cause some among his potentially vast online audience to be moved to “imminent lawless violence” against the state of Israel, its citizens, or its supporters? There is an epidemic of antisemitism now raging in the world. There are violent antisemites who, when they read what Woodcock is advocating, will very likely be inspired to that “imminent lawless action.” It doesn’t have to be a murder, like Elias Rodriguez’s murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two employees of the Israeli Embassy. Someone who, having read Woodcock’s words, goes out and firebombs a car belonging to an employee of an Israeli consulate or company, or scrawls swastikas all over a Jewish school where an “Israel History Month” is being celebrated, could commit that “lawless action.”
As the University of Kentucky Law School, they are already lawyered up. See you in court, Ramsi Woodcock. I see that among those supporting you is CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial. If you lose your lawsuit, the law school may decide that moving you to a non-teaching position was not enough, given the violent nature of your views. Perhaps you could become the Al-Thani Professor of International Law at the University of Doha, sitting in your comfortably endowed chair, among your fellow Israel-haters, but still pining for a seat at the three-day eventing in Lexington and a glass of ole Kaintuck. |
