May 17: Harvard Task Force Flagged Terror Financing, Antisemitism on Campus

Qatar quietly expelled Hamas, invited it back; IDF recovers hostage bodies; Happy International Day Against Biphobia!

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The Big Story

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a staff report this week on its investigation into antisemitism at Harvard University. The report focused on the work of Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG), formed in late October to “begin the vital work of eradicating antisemitism from our campus,” as Harvard’s then President Claudine Gay put it in a statement at the time. And it confirms what educated observers could have guessed in October: that the AAG was little more than an ass-covering device, designed to shield the university from a wave of negative PR after a sizable portion of its student body announced, publicly and with great enthusiasm, that the Oct. 7 massacre was exactly the sort of nonmetaphorical “decolonization” they’d like to see tried in the United States. 

More specifically, the report found that the university routinely ignored the AAG’s recommendations and dragged its feet in implementing minimal protections for Jewish and Israeli students, despite pervasive harassment. At the same time, Harvard allowed routine violations of campus rules by anti-Israel protesters and even provided “anti-doxxing” resources for students concerned about reputational damage from their public endorsement of violent jihad. 

For instance, the AAG concluded almost immediately that anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli harassment and discrimination were problems at Harvard. In a Nov. 20 meeting, the group discussed several incidents that had been reported to the university or Harvard police but had not led to any disciplinary action. 

• A student wearing a kippah was spat on Mt. Auburn St., just off campus.

• A professor asked a student where they were from. When the student answered “Israel,” the professor asked them to leave class because they were making others “uncomfortable.”

• Another Jewish student was “followed,” “chased,” and “screamed at” by a Harvard “residential tutor.” Afterward, this student ceased using Harvard dining facilities to avoid confrontation.

• Virulently antisemitic messages—“Gas all the Jews,” “Let ’em cook,” “Get got or leave”—were posted to Sidechat, an anonymous social media app that requires a Harvard email address to use. Some of these received dozens of “likes” or “upvotes” from other users. 

Then Provost Alan Garber at one point noted that “a lot of the problem” at Harvard was not directly antisemitic speech, but the social  “shunning” and ostracism of Israeli and pro-Israel Jewish students, which he called “pervasive but not universal.” For instance, the AAG noted that the student-organized first-year international student orientation program “ostracized Israeli students,” incorporated Boycott, Divest, and Sanction and other “stridently anti-Israel” material into their programming, and barred students from leadership positions if they participated in a university trip to Israel. 

The AAG recommended that Harvard clarify its institutional position on antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, address masked protests, and publicly share outcomes on disciplinary proceedings, but these recommendations were brushed off by Harvard’s leaders. At one point, several AAG members sent a letter threatening to resign over Harvard’s perceived foot-dragging; one member, Rabbi David Wolpe, did. “It seemed quite clear that there was an interest in getting our recommendations and moving on,” AAG member (and Tablet author) Dara Horn told the committee. 

Perhaps the most interesting nugget in the report, at least for regular Scroll readers, is the revelation that the AAG was concerned about potential terror financing on Harvard’s campus, tied to Jonathan Schanzer’s November congressional testimony (which we covered here) on connections between Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and known Hamas fundraising networks in the United States. For instance, AAG members noted AMP funded a “Pal Trek” trip for 150 Harvard students to travel to “occupied Palestine” and meet with “community activists”—an initiative promoted on the Harvard Law School website. AMP also held a yearly “Arab Conference” on Harvard’s campus. According to the anonymous notes from the AAG meeting (emphasis in original):

Not about what students can or cannot say; it’s about what we’re doing as a University to not have connection financial or otherwise with federally designated terrorist organization; not students raising money for Hamas, it’s the other way around; veterans of Hamas charities financing Harvard students going on press junkets, conferences at Harvard; using Harvard name to gain credibility; similar to 90’s holocaust denier conference at Harvard; imprimatur of the University on them; is Harvard paying for part of this.

Garber told the AAG that he would ask Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel to investigate, but when the AAG asked for the results of the investigation, it received a “broad and generic response” that included this non sequitur: “Counsel identified information about contract and gift agreements from middle eastern countries [sic], including UAE funders, and no issues were identified.” As the staff report notes, this answer left it ambiguous whether Garber “fulfilled his commitment to the AAG to genuinely examine whether such malign influence was or was not occurring.” 

Read the full report here. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Michael Lind on the campus protest scam

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The Rest

→At Columbia, meanwhile, the Task Force on Antisemitism published an op-ed in The Columbia Daily Spectator on Thursday detailing the results of its own probe. The task force described the “discomfort and fear” felt by many Jewish students on campus and wrote that “we have repeatedly heard from students who feel that they cannot belong to a wide variety of student activities if they consider themselves to be ‘Zionist.’” And if you needed more evidence of the distinctly Soviet tinge of elite anti-Zionism, here’s this passage from the op-ed (emphasis ours):

Jewish students who have complained about the way they have been treated told us stories about their complaints not being taken seriously by administrators. One common story involved a student’s being assured that what she had experienced wasn’t antisemitism—two students in the same program were each independently told that there is not an antisemitism problem, there is an anti-civility problem—or that nobody else had complained. Some students reported that their complaints were treated as evidence that they had mental health problems. Several told us they had tried to reach out to their school but were directed to counseling services before they could meet with the dean of student affairs.

→Qatar quietly expelled Hamas’ leaders from Doha in April out of frustration over the lack of progress in hostage negotiations, according to a Friday report in The Times of Israel. According to “government officials” quoted in the piece (it is unclear which government), Hamas’ leaders complied with the Qatari request and spent several weeks in Turkey, where they met with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before returning to Doha earlier this month as part of a Qatari effort to salvage the latest round of Egyptian-led talks. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly told Qatari leaders in April that they should expel Hamas if the group continued to reject cease-fire proposals, but the Friday report notes that the message was “conditional” and that a “clear directive” from Washington to “pull the trigger on a formal, public expulsion” has not followed. As we reported in March, Qatar has told the White House since Oct. 13 that it is willing to expel Hamas, but the Biden administration has never requested that it do so.

→But perhaps Blinken was focused on more important matters:

→Stat of the Day: 50

That, approximately, is how many smuggling tunnels leading from Rafah into Egypt Israel has discovered so far in its operation in the southern Gaza city. The statistic was cited on Friday by Israeli attorney Gilad Noam at the International Court of Justice, where Israel is contesting charges of genocide brought by South Africa.

→The IDF recovered the bodies of three hostages—Itzhak Gelerenter, Amit Buskila, and Shani Louk—in an overnight raid in Gaza. The military, which has been operating in Rafah, did not immediately specify where the bodies had been recovered from but stated it believed that all three had died on Oct. 7 while attempting to escape the Nova music festival. Louk, a German-Israeli tattoo artist who was 22 at the time of her death, became one of the most well-known victims of the massacre after Hamas released a video showing what relatives believed to be Louk’s body being paraded around Gaza in the back of a pickup truck. Louk had been presumed dead since late October, but Gelerenter and Buskila had been “presumed alive until recently,” according to TOI.

→Quote of the Day: 

I think they are looking to reshape the Democrat Party long term. And so I think if you look at [the protest] movement… what they are ultimately doing is saying, we’re willing to actually lose one election. If in doing so, it sends a long-term message to the Democrat party, that it’s my way or the highway, and they want party discipline going forward. To show this you have to take this anti-Israel position or we will cause you to lose in that election. I think something like the Soros types are more willing to play in that long term view of ‘we want to reshape the party’, and that this is Biden’s last election, but that there are many, many more to come in the Democrat party.

That’s former State Department official Gabriel Noronha speaking to The Daily Caller in a piece that follows up on Tablet’s reporting on the Obama faction’s influence over the anti-Israel protest movement.

Read The Daily Caller story here, and the Tablet story here. 

→On X, Elliot Kaufman of The Wall Street Journal provides an English translation of a portion of Amit Segal’s latest column in Ynet, which we’re quoting here at length. Segal quotes an Israeli official who says that Biden’s attempted arms embargo against Israel was “the most decisive moment in U.S.-Israeli relations in the last generation: If it succeeds, any Israeli government for the next 20 years will hesitate to take independent military action. If it fails, every American administration for 20 years will hesitate before [trying it again].” Segal goes on:

The Biden administration is going through Israeli society with an X-ray machine, trying to find places where it can target Netanyahu’s right-wing partners without provoking the wrath of the center-left.

It started by cracking down on some hilltop guys. Gantz and Lapid did not express public opposition, and the next step came in the form of a move against the Netzah Yehuda Battalion. The rationale was that it was a battalion politically identified with the extreme right. But something went wrong in the calculation, and even Lapid came out against the move. The Israeli public does not see its army as a collection of separate militias of parties, and the Americans had to withdraw.

The decisive step was intended to be the cessation of armaments for the operation in Rafah. Again, someone has read too many translated commentaries from the Hebrew. If it’s either Rafah or a deal, they thought in Washington, and a significant number of Netanyahu’s opponents (including within his government) are in favor of a deal, harming Israel’s ability to operate in Rafah will help. ... 

They were right about the reactions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but they were seriously wrong about the reactions in Washington [i.e. with centrist Democrats coming out in opposition to the move]. The clumsy efforts that the administration has been making ever since to minimize the decision to delay armaments testify to the depth of the strategic predicament it has fallen into.

For those who read Hebrew or who don’t mind a little Google Translate, the full column is here. 

→The world’s top-ranked golfer, Scottie Scheffler, was arrested outside of the PGA Championship in Louisville, Kentucky, early this morning on four criminal charges, including felony assault on a police officer. According to reports, police had stopped traffic outside of the Valhalla Country Club due to a fatal incident with a pedestrian; Scheffler, arriving early for his round, mistakenly believed the police were event security and attempted to drive around the roadblock; he briefly continued to drive as an officer approached his vehicle and ordered him out of the car (hence the assault charge). In a statement, Scheffler described the incident as a “big misunderstanding.” Scheffler was booked and returned to the golf course about an hour later, where, according to ESPN, he “walked into the clubhouse dining room and said, ‘Hey everybody,’ before sitting down and eating a plate of eggs.”

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Columbia’s Jewish Commencement, by Michael Hoberman

In 1800, Sampson Simson delivered a history lesson in Hebrew about the deep-rootedness of New York City’s Jews to the trustees of Columbia College

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Left’s Campus Protest Scam

From Black Lives Matter, to climate change, to the war in Gaza, the demand to hire more identity studies faculty and consultants is a constant

by Michael Lind

“The issue is not the issue.” This saying of the campus left is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Whatever the ostensible issue may be that provides the occasion for a nationwide wave of campus protests, the list of demands presented to university administrators by student protesters and allied outside agitators is remarkably similar—suggesting that the point of the exercise may lie closer to home.

For half a century now, the passion of idealistic students involved in campus protests that were purported to be about national and global issues—the Vietnam War, racism, police shootings, climate change, and now Israel’s war against Hamas—has been diverted into narrow efforts to multiply jobs and teaching opportunities for leftist professors, administrators, consultants and other foot-soldiers and clients of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In turn, these campus activists have helped to transform American universities from engines of upward mobility and economic growth to taxpayer-funded ideological indoctrination centers.

The modern era of left-wing identitarian studies programs on campus dates back to 1968, when a 133-day strike by students at San Francisco State College led to the creation of America’s first Black studies department. The protest at San Francisco State was dominated by a group called the Third World Liberation Front. The most prominent protest leader was George Mason Murray, who taught freshman English as a graduate student while serving as the minister for education of the Black Panther Party. According to The Daily Sundial, the student newspaper at San Fernando Valley State College:

An immediate, violent revolution of black people against “the fascist leaders of this country” was called for by Black Panther George Murray, addressing a crowd of about 300 in the open forum Tuesday … “A tide of fascism led by Lyndon Johnson is running rampant in America,” said the bearded Murray … Murray called Hubert Humphrey “a homosexual, freakish monster.” He further charged that the federal government was “full of homosexuals.” To confirm this he said that the atom bomb was copied after a man’s penis.

The acting president of San Francisco State, an English professor named S.I. Hayakawa, became a folk hero among moderates and conservatives in California following a widely publicized confrontation with the protesters. His celebrity helped Hayakawa win election in 1976 as a Republican U.S. senator from California; he served until 1983. But Hayakawa in fact had caved in to mob pressure and authorized the establishment of the Black studies program demanded by the radicals.

By 1980 hundreds of American universities followed the example of San Francisco State and established Black studies programs under various names. The civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, opposed Black studies programs as self-segregation: “These students are seeking to impose upon themselves the very conditions of separatism and inequality against which Black Americans have struggled since the era of Reconstruction.”

To increase their resources and personnel, the academics and bureaucrats who benefit from Black studies and other ethnic studies programs have exploited public outrage over the killings of Black Americans in confrontations with police, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015 and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. For example, in 2015 a new group of protesters began a sit-in outside of the office of Brandeis’ interim president, Lisa Lynch, with the hashtag #FordHall2015, a reference to the building whose takeover by radicals in 1969 led Brandeis to create the African and Afro-American Studies (AAAS) Department.

Following the well-established conventions of contemporary campus extortion efforts, the protesters issued a list of demands that had little to do with the occasion of the protest, and which together amounted to a university jobs program and patronage scheme:

1. Increase the percentage of full-time Black faculty and staff to 10% across ALL departments and schools, while prioritizing the following:

2. Anthropology, Heller, History, HSSP, Fine Arts, IBS, NEJS, Sciences, Sociology, and Theatre.

3. Increase the number of tenure tracks for Black faculty across ALL departments and schools.

4. Implement educational pedagogies and curriculums that increase racial awareness and inclusion within ALL departments and schools.

5. Mandate yearly diversity and inclusion workshops for all faculty and staff with optional workshops being offered consistently throughout the academic year.

6. Employ additional clinical staff of color within the Psychological Counseling Center in order to provide culturally relevant support to students of all backgrounds.

7. Increase funding of Black student organizations and programs.

8. Appoint a Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion.

9. Increase the admixture of Black students via the general admission process to 15$ within both undergraduate and graduate schools.

10. Establish an Office of Ombuds within Academic Services …

11. Increase minimum wage for all hourly paid university employees by 15%.

12. Increase the number of professional development workshops specifically tailored for Black students.

Brandeis capitulated almost completely.

In 2015 the polling website FiveThirtyEight, relying on information gathered by a website called The Demands, listed the demands of campus protests following the death of Michael Brown. The most common demands presented by campus “anti-racist” protesters to university administrations in 2015 were “Increase diversity of professors” (38%), “Require diversity training” (35%), “Fund cultural centers” (25%), “Require classes for students” (21%), and “Increase diversity of students” (21%). None of these policies would increase the safety of Black civilians—or those of any race—in altercations with police. The manifest if unstated purpose of all of these reforms was to expand the bureaucratic empires of campus ethnic studies programs.

The thinly disguised, self-serving lobbying of the ethnic studies programs never stops. On March 3, 2024, the editorial board of The Georgetown Voice, a student newspaper, wrote: “For over 50 years, student activists have pushed for the establishment of ethnic studies programs at universities across the United States. Currently, 43 American universities offer degrees in ethnic studies, and waves of students have demanded that Georgetown implement a similar degree.” Noting that Georgetown already has a “Black studies department,” the student paper called on the university to “work with the existing Black studies department and establish programs in Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, and Latinx studies. The editorial board calls on the Office of the President and the Provost to cluster-hire a group of tenure-line faculty members in these fields who would launch a pilot program in ethnic studies and advance a university-wide ethnic studies pedagogy.”

The Georgetown Voice is described as a “student-run magazine.” Having worked on student newspapers and magazines at the University of Texas and Yale, I find it hard to believe that the student editors came up with phrases like “cluster-hire,” “tenure-line” and “pedagogy” without prompting from faculty members with financial and status interests in the debate.

Inspired by the success of Black radicals and their allies in using mob pressure to force universities to create institutions which left-wing faculty could control with little or no outside supervision, radical Chicanos, Asian Americans, and left-wing gays and lesbians have campaigned to create their own academic ghettos which could serve as ideological indoctrination camps for future cadres of young sectarians.

You can get a sense of the scholarly depth of these race- and gender-focused programs from MIT’s Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women & Sexuality, which recently hosted a “roundtable” of professors to discuss “Erotic Methods”: “In queer and trans studies, BDSM, dungeons, public sex, erotic vomiting, and other dissident acts are crucial venues for re-organizing hegemonic formations of gender, class, and race, dragging colonial histories to the present, and inventing sexual futures … We invite panelists to consider how sex, erotics, and intimacy operate in their research, pedagogy, art-making, and activism.”

Needless to say, non-Hispanic white heterosexual “cisgender” progressives have been left without any “studies” programs of their own. In recent years, however, white leftists have discovered that they can overcome the stigma of a white skin if they paint themselves green. This explains why environmentalism, formerly known as “conservationism,” once the preserve of patrician Republicans who liked to hike and fish in unspoiled wilderness, has become a de facto ethnicity for many non-Hispanic white progressives—some of them, no doubt, descendants of those high-net-worth Republican conservationists of yesteryear who happily combined a love for the outdoors with support for eugenics programs to sterilize lesser races. The whiteness of the green left has not gone unnoticed. Some years ago, some pollsters asked respondents what they pictured when they thought of an environmentalist, and the most common image that came to mind was that of an annoying blond woman lecturing people.

In 2023 at Cornell, green student protesters using the ALL CAPS style favored by serial killers and crotchety old coots on the internet issued their ritualistic list of demands: “We call on Cornell to declare a CLIMATE EMERGENCY and mobilize all its forces to address the climate crisis by enacting the following six changes, EXPEDITIOUSLY.” (What do we want? Decarbonization! When do we want it? Expeditiously!)

After the usual demands for the divestment of university funds from fossil fuel companies and zero-carbon emissions by the campus by 2035 (which would have no measurable effect on anthropogenic global warming), the fifth demand is an institutional power grab by left-wing professors and their student disciples: “Recognize and integrate leaders from climate justice communities in the design and implementation of university transformation.”

If moderate and conservative university officials during the first wave back in the 1970s and 1980s hoped that far-left ideologues would leave the rest of the university alone if they were given their own sandboxes to play in, they have been proven wrong. A frequent objective of the pseudo-scholars in the left-wing activist programs on campus is to manipulate students into demanding that a university require all students to take required courses in their own bogus subjects like anti-racism studies, gender studies, and climate change activism.

For example, the University of California at San Diego now requires all students to take a mandatory climate change course if they hope to graduate. In 2019 University of Maryland climate change protesters included in their list of demands, along with divestment from fossil fuels by the university, a demand that the university impose a “university sustainability general education requirement” on all undergraduates. Who would teach the enormous number of new required courses in “sustainability?” The left-wing environmentalist activists on the faculty, of course, along with their colleagues and former students, who could be hired to expand the institutional empire of green studies at UMD.

The demand to make indoctrination in the ideology of their subjects mandatory for graduation for all students in all degree programs—including medical and engineering programs, as well as Ph.D. programs in the hard sciences, where “diversity statements” are now routinely required from new hires—has obvious material benefits, increasing work and pay for the activist professors and the cronies and former students who are hired to teach the compulsory courses. Moreover, the professors in these sub-intellectual studies programs undoubtedly sense that they are privately held in contempt by many university administrators and regents and donors who value traditional subjects with well-defined subject matters and greater degrees of intellectual rigor, like the sciences and engineering and medicine and law. What delicious revenge it must be for thinly educated and poorly qualified leftist academics to persuade gullible students to camp out in the quad and yell until the university agrees to force those hated chemistry majors and business majors and computer programming majors to take a course in ethnic studies or LGBTQ ideology or climate change activism in order to graduate?

In addition to making their subjects mandatory for students in every degree program, another strategy of institutional empire-building used by leftist academics and bureaucrats on campus involves scattering their fellow sectarians throughout traditional departments, “boring from within” to redefine those disciplines in a way that aligns them with anti-racist/feminist/queer/environmentalist ideology. The colonization of traditional disciplines is well underway at Brown, according to Time:

If you are in Ada Smailbegovic’s English-lit class at Brown, you get some unusual assignments. For Earth Poetics: Literature and Climate Change, students spend time following squirrels and sparrows around. They sit and observe seasonal changes and record their thoughts in blogs. They also watch films and read poems about fishing communities in the U.S. and Canada, comparing patterns of human migration to the life cycle of salmon and the movements of the tides.

(Tuition for Brown in 2024-25 will be $68,612, adding up to a four-year expense of $274,448.)

The clearing of tent encampments on a number of universities by police during the present anti-Israel protests does not mean that most universities will not capitulate to some or all protester demands later, when public attention is focused elsewhere. Already Brown has bowed to pressure and agreed to a vote on divestment from Israel. The Rutgers administration has also agreed to consider divestment from Israel and—you saw it coming, didn’t you?—agreed to “develop anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism training for all administrators and staff.” All that training means more work and money for existing left-wing faculty and perhaps the hiring of additional left-wing bureaucrats or nice paychecks for external consultants who will develop expertise in anti-Arabophobia training overnight. Northwestern has agreed to create a segregated community center for the exclusive use of “Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim students” and has promised to fund five fully paid undergraduate scholarships for Palestinian students and two professorships for visiting Palestinian faculty.

The kaffiyeh may have replaced the kente cloth, but the self-serving strategy in which leftist professors persuade naive students to blackmail university administrators into giving them more subsidies, status, and institutional power has not changed since Black Panther Education Minister George Murray led the movement for Black studies at San Francisco State in 1968. Decades from now, when today’s campus protests have receded into history, their legacy may be the permanent transformation of American universities from engines of upward mobility and scientific progress to fairgrounds with expensive tickets and midway tents on a quad, displaying exotic varieties of leftist identity politics.