If you needed any more proof that our nation’s universities are not any longer institutions of higher learning but radioactive wastelands of far-Left indoctrination, the recent Kenneth Roth/Harvard imbroglio provides it in abundance. Roth, the longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch, recently had a Harvard fellowship rescinded and reinstated after an outcry. If you ask Roth himself, he’s a noble martyr for academic freedom; in fact, the pious fraud declared to the New Statesman that academic freedom was his “biggest concern.”
But for years at Human Rights Watch, Roth made it abundantly clear that his actual biggest concern was demonizing the State of Israel and providing aid and comfort to its most vicious and genocidal enemies. For that, Harvard University initially dropped its fellowship offer, only to reverse course under pressure from the woke guardians of acceptable opinion to whom the once-respected university has sold its soul.
The Times of Israel reported on Thursday that Roth “was offered and accepted a one-year fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy last year.” All seemed well, but then “Roth said the school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, vetoed the offer in July shortly after it was made. He added that he wasn’t informed of the reason the offer was rescinded, but said he thought it was due to his criticism of Israel and donor influence.”
According to the Times of Israel, the far-Left rag The Nation blew this up into an anti-Israel firestorm, “tying the retracted offer to Israel and setting off a firestorm of controversy over academic freedom and criticism of the Jewish state.” This was, however, preposterous on its face, as the academic world is full of venomous critics of Israel, and supporters of the “Palestinian” jihad march with impunity on American campuses, calling for a new genocide of the Jews without a murmur of rebuke from woke administrators.
At the University of Southern California, the vice president of the undergraduate student government, Rose Ritch, was forced to resign after receiving a torrent of abuse for identifying herself as a “Jewish Zionist.” Antisemitism is on the rise on campuses nationwide, aided and abetted by far-Left professors who fanatically inculcate the “Palestinian” propaganda line in their hapless charges.
The academic world is full of prominent professors whose antisemitism is obvious. Marc Lamont Hill is a professor at Temple University and respected far-Left political commentator who continues to praise “Palestinian” jihad terrorists even after his antisemitism proved too much even for CNN, which fired him in 2018 after he called for the complete destruction of Israel, which would result in the murders of millions of Jews.
At Columbia, there’s Rashid Khalidi, who “has been criticized for downplaying terrorism and asserting that anti-Semitism in the Arab world would disappear when the Arab/Israeli conflict does—as if there never was anti-Semitism in the Arab world prior to the existence of a Jewish state.” Antisemitic professors of lesser stature can be found in practically every university in the country, and yet Kenneth Roth would have us believe that he was initially denied his Harvard fellowship because the Jewish lobby that supposedly controls the academic world decided that one more antisemitic professor was one too many.
Related: It Looks Like Harvard Identifies as a Garbage School Now
For his part, Elmendorf flatly denied Roth’s claims, saying: “Donors do not affect our consideration of academic matters. My decision also was not made to limit debate at the Kennedy School about human rights in any country. My decision on Mr. Roth last summer was based on my evaluation of his potential contributions to the School.” Roth was unsatisfied and, flush with victory, was demanding total submission. Elmendorf, he declared regally, “still has not said anything about the people ‘who matter to him’ whom he said were behind his original veto decision. Full transparency is key.” Brazenly posturing, Roth continued: “Second, I remain worried about academic freedom. The problem of people penalized for criticizing Israel is not limited to me.”
In a certain sense, Roth is right. There are indeed lingering concerns about academic freedom at Harvard and other universities, but they don’t revolve around any reluctance on the universities’ part to hire antisemites. If Harvard believes in academic freedom, let it hire a critic of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women or even allow one to speak on campus. It would never be caught dead doing either one, and it has millions of Saudi-supplied reasons for not doing so. So Elmendorf should as embarrassed as Roth should be to talk about academic freedom. Harvard, like so many other once-respected American institutions, is bought and paid for.
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