Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has slammed a Nigerian-born professor of linguistics studies at Carnegie Mellon University, Anya Uju, over her comment against the deceased Queen Elizabeth II.
The tweet now taken down by Twitter, the academician wished the Queen an “excruciating” death just hours before the Royal family announced her death.
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” Uju Anya, an associate professor of second language acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in a tweet on Thursday. “May her pain be excruciating.”
The world’s third-richest man then quoted Anya’s tweet and wrote; “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?” the New York Post reported.
The back-and-forth came as the 96-year-old monarch was under medical supervision at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, and less than an hour before Buckingham Palace officially announced that Queen Elizabeth had died at 96.
In follow-ups to her initial post elsewhere, the Carnegie Mellon professor defended her tweet in explicit terms.
After one Twitter user wrote “Ewww you stink,” Prof Anya responded: “You mean like your p-ssy?”
Prof Anya also doubled down in a response to Bezos posted just minutes after Elizabeth’s death was confirmed, writing: “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonisers.”
Twitter later took down Prof Anya’s initial tweet for violating its rules, which bar “wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm.”
When another user asked why she would wish Elizabeth dead, the professor wrote: “I’m not wishing her dead. She’s dying already. I’m wishing her an agonisingly painful death like the one she caused for millions of people.”
“If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star,” Prof Anya added.
Reacting, the management of Carnegie Mellon University also distanced itself from the offensive tweets.
“We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Freedom of expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster,” Carnegie Mellon University tweeted Thursday.
