On the Harvard campus on June 29, 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Scott Eisen)
At the head of the United States, the Biden administration has displayed unfailing and unequivocal support for Israel since the bloody Hamas attack. But the conflict is igniting the campuses of several of the country’s most prestigious universities, breeding grounds for future American leaders and bubbling laboratories of activism.
At Harvard, Stanford and NYU, the subject is so explosive that disagreements between students, professors and administrative officials have caused a storm on social networks and in the political-media world. They have even cost some people job offers and caused others to fear for their safety.
It was a press release signed by around thirty student organizations that set fire to the powder at Harvard.
The text holds “the Israeli regime fully responsible for the violence”, affirms that the assault of the Palestinian Islamist movement “did not come out of nowhere” and that “Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence since 75 years old.
– “Moral cowardice” –
“I am disgusted” both by this press release and by “the silence of Harvard leaders,” reacted former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who was president of this university. Harvard appears “neutral at best in the face of acts of terrorism against the Jewish state of Israel,” he said on X (formerly Twitter).
The elected Democrat from Massachusetts, Jake Auchincloss, told him he was “ashamed” of his university, describing the text of the associations as “morally corrupt” and the position of the leaders as “moral cowardice”.
“It’s anti-Semitic and anti-American,” added former President Donald Trump, candidate for the 2024 election, on Saturday.
The university management did publish a press release, but it was considered too timid. Faced with the avalanche of criticism, the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, had to publish a second one.
Read more
“I do not want there to be any doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas,” she wrote.
Following the scandal, “and for the safety of students”, the complete list of signatory student organizations disappeared from the original document.
Because some of their members have been victims of “doxxing”, the dissemination of their personal data on the internet without their consent. A vehicle displaying a screen with names and photos even drove near the university with this denunciation: “Harvard’s biggest anti-Semites.”
Some of these groups have since withdrawn their bylines according to the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, and students have also distanced themselves from the text.
Too late perhaps: on
– Malaise –
The president of the law student association at New York University (NYU) has already paid the price for a similar policy. After writing that she would not condemn “the Palestinian resistance” and that Israel bore “full responsibility” for the human losses, she saw the job offer that the law firm Winston & Strawn had given her rescinded. done.
At the other end of the country, the prestigious Stanford University also found itself under fire after refusing to condemn pro-Palestinian banners, in the name of the freedom of expression of its students and its desire to remain neutral.
Finally, teachers at Georgetown University, in the capital Washington, wrote to their president to reproach him for his “long silence on the suffering of the Palestinians”; while more than 44,000 people signed a petition calling for a Yale professor to be fired over tweets calling Israel a “genocidal, murderous settler state.”
In this tense atmosphere, students from both sides express their discomfort.
“So many Jewish students” feel “threatened,” “we’ve never felt like that before on campus,” Jillian Lederman, president of Brown University’s Students for Israel, told CNN.
“It’s really, really scary to be Palestinian today (…) in such a hostile environment,” said a Harvard student, quoted by ABC News and who preferred not to give his identity. .
This week, to prepare for any eventuality, Harvard announced that university police had increased their presence on campus.
fever/cjc/rle
2023-10-14 16:31:07
#Storm #American #campuses #war #Israel #Hamas
