Harvard Votes to Fund Israeli Apartheid Week
By David Lazarus
Israel Today
April 4, 2019
The Palestine Solidarity Committee cheered a decision by Harvard University to fund a week of events accusing Israel of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Jewish students on campus were appalled that the Ivy League school would endorse speakers invited to the event who support terrorism and boycotts against Israel, the Harvard Crimson reported.
The headliner of the week-long event is Omar Barghouti, founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement who is a radical anti-Zionist and outspoken Palestinian who has said that he supports the euthanasia of Zionism.
The bill to fund the event at Harvard, which started Saturday and runs until Thursday, passed by a vote of 21-13-4. The money to run the anti-Zionist propaganda campaign will come from a grant earmarked to address “race relations,” according to the Harvard Crimson. How absurd that funds would be used in support of a “relations” activity that is polarizing in the extreme and no more than a thinly-veiled antisemitic hate-fest.
Israeli Apartheid Week is a global anti-Israel campaign that brings lectures, film screenings, cultural performances and other events to college campuses around the world to “expose Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime,” according to their website. The Palestinian group that organizes the events equates life in Israel to South African apartheid, a deeply twisted and false narrative. Celebrity speakers participating in Israeli Apartheid Week at the Cambridge, Mass. campus include the extremist film producer Ahlam Muhtaseb, who made the ahistorical film 1948: Creation and Catastrophe. This movie develops the antisemitic trope that Jews invaded the Arab ancestral homeland in a fashion akin to Western imperialism, while avoiding any mention of the 3,000-year history of Jews in Israel. The theme for this year’s Israeli Apartheid Week is "Stop Arming Colonialism.”
One Harvard student sarcastically commented: “The KKK, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, ISIS, al Qaeda, the Mullahs of Iran, neo-Nazis, David Corbyn, tiki torch marchers and any anti-Jewish bigots not already mentioned above thank the Harvard Council and the Palestine Solidarity Committee for siding with Hamas, the PLO/PA and Hezbollah in their efforts to eliminate Israel.”
Another scoffed at the decision and suggested, “If they're going to be fair, Harvard should fund the other side's Take A Terrorist/Jihadi To Lunch Week.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Being Jewish, this is hard for me to swallow. The pro-Palestinian and BDS movements have a strong foothold in most of our leading universities, but with the exception of Harvard, I have not heard that any of them fund speakers that call for the obliteration of Israel.
I wonder if any of the 21 members of the university's Undergraduate Council who voted to fund this event were Jewish?
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