Harvard Student Groups’ Letter in Support of Hamas Stirs Academic Debate

A letter from 31 Harvard University student groups that placed all of the blame for Hamas’s heinous attacks on Israel served to further accentuate the distress in US higher education standards. Even the local chapter of Amnesty International has joined this chorus of making excuses for targeting and kidnapping civilians, buying into fighting imperialism, which justifies such atrocities.

This privileged group of students seeks to legitimize outright war crimes. They call Israel an “apartheid regime,” though Israeli Arabs fully enjoy civil rights. In fact, it is Hamas that oppresses the people of Gaza, and their commitment to wiping Israel off the map is directly responsible for the strip’s isolation.

These students also demonstrate blinding historical ignorance, saying that “Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,” when for decades Israel had no control over Gaza or the West Bank. The Arab states weaponized the Palestinian cause rather than providing refuge, even as Israel opened its arms to Jews expelled from the Arab world.

Hamas is nothing but the shill for the imperialist power in Tehran, and its government over Gaza wasn’t elected there or chosen to be there; it took it by force, and that makes Hamas the real “occupying power.”

Harvard either doesn’t want to or can’t educate these students out of their prejudice. They are so blinded by their hatred for the Jewish state that it appears to them that anyone who dies as a result of the bombings must have been guilty. It is unclear how much of the rest of the Harvard faculty really disagrees with such sentiments, even if professors and administrators are merely deciding not to voice their own prejudices publicly so as not to jeopardize alumni donations.