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Republican lawmakers have stepped up their campaign to pressure colleges including Harvard, Northwestern and Columbia to take a tougher stance against anti-Semitism with a report that comes after protests erupted last year following Hamas attacks on Israel. Checks their reactions.
The 325-page document released by the House Education and Workforce Committee seeks to highlight the failure of elite schools to follow their rules amid the turmoil created by the terrorist attack and Israel’s retaliatory response in Gaza. It has been presented in this form. The committee collected more than 400,000 pages of text messages, emails and documents, some of which were collected by subpoena.
In a key section, the investigation revealed how Harvard officials such as then-President Claudine Gay, current President Alan Garber, and others tailored their responses in a way that appeared to committee members as unsupportive of members of the Jewish community and Israel. seen. The report also includes discussions among administrators at other schools affected by the protests, from the University of California at Los Angeles to the University of Pennsylvania.
“For over a year, the American people have watched anti-Semitic mobs rule over so-called elite universities, but what was happening behind the scenes is arguably worse,” said U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the committee. Said in one. Statement Thursday.
Harvard and Gay, who resigned in January amid allegations of plagiarism and following his disastrous testimony before the committee in December, came under particularly tough scrutiny. When 30 student groups blamed Israel solely for the events of October 7 just hours after the attack, Gay was criticized for being too slow to respond.
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The report paints a picture of Harvard’s difficulty drafting a statement after Hamas fighters killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took hundreds of hostages.
“Even the seemingly uncontroversial proposal to label a Hamas terrorist attack ‘violent’ proved distasteful to Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley,” the report said.
According to the email cited in the report, Daly said he would feel more comfortable eliminating the “violent” qualifier.
“It is factual while avoiding highlighting Hamas’s violence,” he wrote. Saying he did not feel dogged, he argued that the change in wording would “avoid focusing on blame when the best we can do is express horror at the unfolding carnage.”
Pritzker, Friedman
Gay, Garber and Penny Pritzker, who leads Harvard’s board as a senior fellow, also discussed the reaction of Josh Friedman, a hedge fund manager and board member of Harvard Management Co., which runs the school’s $53 billion endowment. Is. He wrote to Pritzker about the phrase “from the river to the sea”, which many consider a call for the expulsion of Jews from Israel.
Pritzker expressed similar concerns.
According to the report, Pritzker wrote, referring to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, “I have to admit that it strikes me as very anti-Semitic, especially since it is used by the anti-Israel terrorist groups Hamas and the PFLP ” “So I’m struggling with why this is not hate speech and why this is acceptable on our campus and why we don’t condemn it.”
He further said, “Perhaps the question is about freedom of expression which cannot be abolished but it can be condemned.”
Harvard spokesman Jason Newton said in an emailed statement that the university “remains steadfast in its efforts to create a safe, inclusive environment where students can pursue their academic and personal interests free from harassment and discrimination.”
According to the statement, “Anti-Semitism has no place on our campus, and across the University we have continued our efforts to listen to, learn from, support, and uplift our Jewish community, reaffirming its important place at Harvard.” Has been accelerated.”
Campus protests intensified earlier this year with the Israel-Hamas war. More than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
In American colleges, protest rallies and tent camps were followed in some cases by actions and suspension of students.
After protesters took over a university building in Columbia, the school called the New York Police Department. In Los Angeles, police closed down a UCLA camp after pro-Palestinian protesters were attacked by counter-protesters, triggering a melee that left more than a dozen people injured.
At Northwestern, school administrators reached an agreement with protesters to lift an occupation — a move ridiculed by the House Education Committee, which subpoenaed the school’s president to testify in May.
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The committee’s report included correspondence between Northwest officials regarding a proposed boycott of Sabra brand hummus due to Israeli co-ownership. The committee criticized Provost Kathleen Haggerty, saying she agreed with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
In the correspondence, the committee said that according to text messages cited in the report, Haggerty “quietly” supported faculty negotiator Nour Ketili’s proposal for Northwestern to boycott Sabra Hummus in order to meet students’ demands.
Hagerty reportedly responded, “It’s probably too simple.” Catley replied, “I think symbolically it would be quite valuable to them” and “could be something you could trade at a meaningfully lower price upon divestiture.”
Northwestern objects to “the unfair characterization of our provost and valued members of our faculty based on isolated and out-of-context communications,” spokesman John Yates wrote in an email. “The university clearly stands behind him and his work on behalf of our students, and stands behind his hard work to successfully bring our stoppage to a quick and peaceful end.”
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