Welcome back for the latest installment of “Why You Shouldn’t Send Your Kids to Ivy League Universities.” Today we are going to discuss how Harvard appointed a professor who falsely accused Israel of apartheid and downplayed the issue of anti-Semitism to the university’s anti-Semitism task force.
If you’re going to tackle the growing and dangerous problem of anti-Semitism, you want someone who thinks the problem is exaggerated, right? That appears to be the attitude of Harvard, despite its scandalous plague of jihad-empathizing activists. Harvard Interim President Alan Garber, who took charge after President Claudine Gay had to resign amid a series of scandals including justifying pro-terrorist activism on campus and plagiarism, issued an announcement on Jan. 19. “Incidents of bias and hate against Jews and against Muslims, Palestinians, and other people of Arab descent have risen across the country,” Garber declared. “Reports of antisemitic and Islamophobic acts on our campus have grown, and the sense of belonging among these groups has been undermined.”
For the record, I have yet to see any solid evidence from anyone of a rash of Islamophobic crimes, but putting that aside, Garber also announced the “Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism” and the “Presidential Task Force on Combating Islamophobia.” Sure, there have yet to be mobs of Jews or Christians marching around campuses screaming genocidal slogans against Muslims, but let’s keep pretending these issues are equivalent. Garber stated that Derek Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will co-chair the Anti-Semitism task force. But Campus Reform has two good reasons for why Penslar shouldn’t have the position.
First of all, Penslar signed onto a letter in August falsely accusing Israel of apartheid and occupation of Palestinian lands. In actuality, there has never been a nation called Palestine, and PJ Media’s Robert Spencer previously provided an excellent explanation of how Israel is not engaging in occupation. The letter Penslar signed whined that Israel had killed almost 200 Palestinians in 2023, without clarifying whether these were terrorists. In fact, the reason the Palestinians do not have a democracy is because of the very terrorist and terrorist-funding entities that they strongly support, particularly Hamas, not because of Israel. And while various terrorist groups carry out constant jihad attacks on Israel, Israel does not launch attacks specifically to kill civilians or purely to terrorize the Gazan population, rather going out of its way to avoid killing the human shields Hamas hides behind. That’s how the Gazan population was able to grow so much in recent decades.
Related: Israeli UN Ambassador Slams ‘Shameful’ Harvard at On-Campus Screening of Hamas Atrocities
Keep in mind that the letter signed by Penslar came out only about two months before Hamas massacred over 1,400 Israelis in unimaginably brutal ways, without provocation, only to be financially rewarded by the Palestinian Authority. From the letter:
We, academics, clergy, and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad, call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.
Without equal rights for all, whether in one state, two states, or in some other political framework, there is always a danger of dictatorship. There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population. The problems did not start with the current radical government: Jewish supremacism has been growing for years and was enshrined in law by the 2018 Nation State Law...
Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid. As Israel has grown more right-wing and come under the spell of the current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda, young American Jews have grown more and more alienated from it...[We] Demand from elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation.
Yes, these people are woke nutcases. They also repeatedly used terrorist propaganda in the letter. It’s no wonder Penslar scoffed that he thought the problem of anti-Semitism at Harvard was exaggerated. He probably sympathizes with a number of the anti-Semitic student activists who chanted terrorist slogans.
From Campus Reform:
Penslar also told JTA earlier in January…“Yes, we have a problem with antisemitism at Harvard, just like we have a problem with Islamophobia and how students converse with each other,” Penslar said. “The problems are real. But outsiders took a very real problem and proceeded to exaggerate its scope.”
As pointed out by Jewish Insider, Penslar also told the Harvard Crimson in late December 2023 that the amount of media focus on anti-Semitism at Harvard has “obscured the vulnerability of pro-Palestinian students, who have faced harassment by actors outside of the University and verbal abuse on and near campus.”
In reality, the hatred against Jews is so strong and threatening at Harvard that a group of Jewish students is suing the school. Students have even been assaulted. Instead of being “exaggerated,” the issue of Harvard anti-Semitism seems exponentially worse than most Americans could have imagined.
I think we can note in conclusion that Harvard University has not learned its lesson. Even while pretending to care about anti-Semitism, it is appointing a professor who spouts terrorist propaganda and lies about Israel to deal with the very anti-Semitism he downplays.
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