Harvard’s Anti-Zionist Commencement

So how does Harvard University close out an academic year that saw the school lose out on billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts over its mishandling of antisemitism? Apparently, by allowing its anti-Israel students and faculty to hijack the university’s various commencement exercises with the spewing of more hateful vitriol against the Jewish state. Call it Harvard’s new definition of chutzpah.The string of anti-Israel displays was recorded by our Ira Stoll in his substack, “The Editors”: “Harvard’s recent graduation ceremonies included an honorary degree awarded to a boycott-Israel advocate,” he writes. “They included a Harvard Divinity School student speaker” who lamented Palestine’s “77 years of genocide,” before “cheering on the ‘unwavering courage and profound wisdom’” of an anti-Israel activist classmate, Elom Tettey-Tamaklo. That’s the student, Mr. Stoll notes, who was ordered by a court to do community service and take an anger management class as part of a pre-trial diversion program after he was charged with assaulting a Jewish Harvard business school student. Mr. Stoll’s final example involves “a Harvard law professor who used his speech to denounce ‘injustice’ in ‘Palestine’ and praise what he called the ‘courage’ of anti-Israel student protesters.” Mr. Stoll takes Professor Andrew Manual Crespo’s monologue as “verification of a dimension of the Trump administration’s criticism of Harvard,” which is “that the school has strayed from scholarship to instead focus on anti-Israel political activism.” Mr. Stoll reckons that there wasn’t a single Harvard leader with the “courage” to say that “a graduation speech is not an appropriate time or place for a faculty member to launch an anti-Israel protest.” Or how about a Harvard leader with the good sense to advise against such a speech, given Harvard’s current circumstances? Mr. Crespo decrying the “atrocities” and “unending civilian deaths” in Gaza — with no mention of the Israeli hostages and the crimes of Hamas against both Jews and Palestinian Arabs — does little to quiet the federal government’s imputations of anti-Israel bias. Same goes for the divinity student’s cri de coeur. It’s possible, of course, that Harvard’s leaders never actually signed off on those speeches. Perhaps the tirades against Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza were in place of pre-approved remarks that got tossed at the last minute. That gambit has already been taken up by speakers at a handful of other university commencements, including student speakers at New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those graduates, though, have already been punished, however inadequately. NYU’s commencement speaker, Logan Rozos, had his diploma withheld. MIT’s class president, Megha Vemuri, was banned from participating in the school’s undergraduate degree ceremony. No such reports have yet to emerge from Harvard, even as the school levies not one, but two, major lawsuits against the federal government. Such fecklessness reminds us of how Harvard got itself into this very muddle. It failed to confront the hostility to the Jewish state seething on its campus. Instead it is standing up against the federal government that is funding it. Rather than enforcing rules and meaningful consequences, the university directs its energy toward fighting the administration. While Fair Harvard fights tooth and nail to win that battle, it’s on track to lose the war.

Harvard’s Anti-Zionist Commencement

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