Students and student groups at practically every university in America have sided with the Hamas terrorists. Worse is the equivocation of administrators.
Commentary
It’s not just Harvard. Students and student groups at practically every university in America have sided with the Hamas terrorists who launched the Oct. 7 rampage of mass rape and murder in Israel that targeted civilian women, children, and the elderly and left more than 1,200 dead.
Harvard was the first and the worst, with more than 30 campus organizations signing a “
joint statement” on Oct. 9 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The statement went on to declare that the Hamas killing spree “did not happen in a vacuum.” The “apartheid” Israeli government has forced “the Palestinian people” to live in “an open-air prison” in Gaza “for over two decades,” the statement said. “Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.” (Five of the signatory groups, including the Harvard chapter of Amnesty International, have since withdrawn their signatures.)
That was only the beginning. Soon enough, groups representing students at a raft of other prestigious universities issued their own statements pinning the blame for the slaughter frenzy solely on Israel. The institutions included Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, Brandeis, Georgetown, the University of Chicago, the University of California, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, and law schools at Columbia, the University of Michigan, and New York University (NYU). The Columbia students’
statement, representing such organizations as the National Lawyers Guild, Columbia Law’s Restorative Justice Collective, and Empowering Women of Color, declared that the bloody Hamas attacks were “rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”
All this—for which there have been no apologies from the various drafters—is very bad. But there’s something even worse: the disconcerting equivocation of faculty and administrators at the involved universities.
Harvard was typical. On Oct. 9, after the Harvard student groups had issued their statement blaming Israel for the violence, Harvard president Claudine Gay released an email together with 17 other Harvard administrators saying they were “heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend.”
Yet the email carefully avoided any mention of either the immorality of the deliberate targeting of civilians or the 30-odd pro-Hamas student groups at Harvard and their manifesto—as though Ms. Gay was afraid to cross swords with Harvard’s Hamas-supporting left-wing contingent. The statement caused so much outrage, especially from Harvard’s faculty and student Jewish population, that the next day, Oct. 10, Ms. Gay came out with a
second statement cautiously declaring that “no student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”
Finally, on Oct. 12, Ms. Gay
released a video in which she condemned the “barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” Still, her words seemed more directed at protecting pro-Hamas students from real or imagined reprisals by some of their fellow students than pointing out that there might be something wrong with blaming Israel for outrages that deliberately targeted its innocent civilian population.
“Our University embraces a commitment to free expression,” Ms. Gay said. “We do not punish or sanction people for expressing [objectionable] views.”
There was some irony here. In September, Harvard had
ranked last for freedom of speech in a survey of students at 248 colleges by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). A full 94 percent of surveyed Harvard students told FIRE that they had self-censored their opinions in conversations with their peers.
At Stanford, students, along with chalking pro-Hamas messages on sidewalks, hung bedsheets on campus buildings, including the student union, painted with the Palestinian flag and reportedly
bearing such slogans as “The land remembers her people” and “The Israeli occupation is
nothing but an illusion of dust.” The Stanford administration’s response was to announce its intention to help the pro-Hamas students find alternative places to hang the sheets.
“An effort is being made to identify the individuals who hung the banners so they may be advised where the banners may be posted without violating university rules,” a
statement from Vice Provost for Student Affairs Susie Brubaker-Cole and Dean for Religious and Spiritual Life Tiffany Steinwert declared.
Stanford President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez issued a
statement on Oct. 9 merely noting that many on campus had “been affected by the devastating events in Israel and Gaza” and urging that they “care for one another as members of a common intellectual community.”
It wasn’t until Jewish students at Stanford reported that a teaching assistant had
singled out Israeli and Jewish students in class and made them stand in a corner while calling the Hamas terrorists “freedom fighters” and declaring that Israeli “colonizers” had killed more people than the 6 million slaughtered in the Holocaust. Only then, on Oct. 11, did Mr. Saller and Ms. Martinez act more forcefully,
announcing that the instructor had been relieved from teaching duties. But their letter remained studiedly neutral. It condemned “all terrorism and mass atrocities,“ including ”the deliberate attack on civilians this weekend by Hamas” and stated that Stanford would “refrain from taking institutional positions on complex political or global matters.”
In New York City and Santa Cruz, California, a conference targeting Israel’s right to exist sponsored, at least until recently, by academic departments at NYU and the University of California–Santa Cruz went ahead as scheduled on Oct. 13 and 14. The stated focus of the conference, put together by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), was to undermine the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s
definition of antisemitism, which includes defining the existence of the state of Israel as a “racist endeavor.”
Neither university
officially endorsed or promoted the conference, which was held off-campus in both cities. The ICSZ’s list of academic and activist sponsors had originally included NYU’s cinema studies department, although the department reportedly later
revoked its sponsorship. But three UC-Santa Cruz departments remained committed: the Center for Racial Justice, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and the university’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department, some of whose faculty are founding members of ICSZ. Several UC-Santa Cruz professors were scheduled to speak.
As for UC-Santa Cruz’s position on this involvement, assistant vice-chancellor Scott Hernandez-Jason stated to the
Jewish Journal: “We are vigorous proponents of free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, and believe that more speech is the best approach to countering speech we find troubling.”
This is pure pusillanimity. The issue at stake isn’t free speech, or whether Israel has been harsh to Palestinians, or whether Palestinians have a right to resist oppression. It’s about disgusting attacks perpetrated solely on unarmed, helpless non-combatants: 18-year-old girls attending a music festival, mothers and grandmothers in their homes, small children slaughtered and taken hostage. This was sheer murderous terrorism, not military resistance.
The fact that thousands of middle-class students at elite, expensive universities in America saw fit to side with the terrorists, not the victims, says something damning about the state of their education and the extent to which it forecloses any critical thinking. The fact that their professors and university administrators couldn’t bring themselves, except when forced, to condemn either Hamas or its student cheerleaders says something even worse.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
