The Freud Museum is hosting an event featuring  a speaker with a history of antisemitism,  to the dismay of many psychoanalysts who have contacted UK Lawyers for Israel.

The event, called “Psychoanalysis Under Occupation” is due to take place on 15 March 2024 at the Freud Museum, featuring Professor Lara Sheehi.

UKLFI has written to Giuseppe Albano, director of the Freud Museum, to urge him to cancel this event in order to protect the reputation of his important museum and organisation.

In January 2024, it was reported that Professor Sheehi, who had been a George Washington University (GWU) psychology professor,  had been accused of verbally abusing and discriminating against her Jewish graduate students and that she was under federal investigation for the mistreatment of students at GWU.

She subsequently left GWU and is now employed as an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, based in the capital of Qatar, a country which hosts leaders of Hamas and, has provided a significant portion of the Palestinian terrorist group’s budget. The current head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, has resided in Doha since 2016.

In the days following Hamas’s slaughter of innocent Israelis on 7 October 2023, Professor Sheehi shared posts on her private Instagram account that described Hamas terrorists as “martyrs” and endorsed their “armed resistance.”

In one of her Instagram posts she wrote to the President of GWU, Ellen Granberg, “How dare you Ellen Granberg. How dare you call our mourning a “celebration of terrorism”. How dare you slander the names of our martyrs as terrorists.”

She also reposted the message “I sleep well every night knowing I’m not some little bitch who supports apartheid”.

In a video, posted by Habibi on Twitter, she is recorded as saying “If you have solidarity with our corpses but not our resistance, that’s not solidarity.”

She also re-posted a message which said “Israelis are NOT being killed for being Jewish. This attack is a response to ethnic cleansing and apartheid.  Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing.  Many Jews, like myself, reject the Zionist occupation.”

This message was a response to the World Jewish Congress pointing out that the death toll from the Hamas assault was the largest amount of Jewish people killed – because they are Jewish – in one single day since the Holocaust .

Caroline Turner, director of UKLFI, commented: “The Freud Museum would be ill advised to host a person with this antisemitic and pro-terror history.  Furthermore, as a charity, the Freud Museum should be wary of hosting an extremist speaker, since this could conflict with the Charity Commission’s guidelines.”