NEWSRAEL: Today, you can say the most outrageous lies - even if you are a UCLA law professor, or a so-called right-wing podcast star - and you will find people actually believing it. You don't need facts to back your lies!
UCLA law professor and Islamic scholar Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadi said in his December 19, 2025 Friday sermon at the Usuli Institute that American businesswoman Miriam Adelson has been pressuring President Trump to invade Venezuela because, he claimed, Israel has designs on the country's oil. He also claimed that Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado is a Mossad agent advocating war against her own country. El Fadi added added that Adelson and Machado are pressuring the United States to launch a "disastrous war with Venezuela for the sake of Israel. He attributed these claims to remarks made by Col. (Ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson.
According to the website of the University of California, Los Angels, Dr. El Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He was also formerly the Chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA, he is the founder of the Institute of Advanced Usuli Studies ("The Usuli Institute"), a non-profit which describes itself as "dedicated to research and education to promote humanistically beautiful and morally elevating interpretations of Islam"