Does American Ivy League sympathize with Hamas?

The latest cycle of bloody escalations in the Israel-Palestine conflict following the October 7 terrorist attack by the Hamas militant group has led to vastly differing mindsets among the international community. One such area of conflicting views turned out to be the American Ivy League universities. The administrations of several institutions have issued statements condemning the horrendous attacks by the Hamas on mostly civilians in Israel, yet there has been widespread support for the Palestinian cause as well which oftentimes proved to cross over into sympathy for the perpetrators of the murder spree against Israelis, as the Newsweek publication reported on detail. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

Last week, as more details of the brutality and barbaric cruelty perpetrated against Israeli civilians by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists were coming to light, University of Michigan President Santa J. Ono joined a select club of campus leaders: those willing to publicly condemn the atrocities and stand with their devastated and traumatized Jewish students.

As University of Florida's President Ben Sasse later remarked, it "shouldn't be hard" to denounce crimes against humanity.

But apparently it was.

I scoured university websites across the country to locate statements that unequivocally denounced the horrific violence unleashed as Israeli families observed the Sabbath on Simchat Torah—the last of the fall season's Jewish high holy days.

I came up empty, even though by the time I started looking many of the horrors that had befallen the people of southern Israel had already been widely reported in the mainstream media: entire families burned alive; parents murdered while protecting their children; party-goers gunned down at an open-air music festival; a baby sliced from the womb of a pregnant woman; the young and the elderly kidnapped; and dead bodies of women paraded on the streets of Gaza.

By October 11, days after these atrocities had garnered considerable press coverage, only a handful of strong university pronouncements had been issued. Most leaders had still not spoken out against the carnage, even as they have been quick to respond to past crises and acts of violence around the globe, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

A few had released anodyne and inadequate statements that failed to even mention Hamas. Take the statement issued by a senior official at Yale. Some Yale faculty who I spoke to were also discouraged by it, reading this administrator's reference to the "violent events in Israel and Gaza" as suggesting an "incomprehensible moral equivalency between military defense and barbaric savagery".

Among the worst was a downright offensive message released by President Ava L. Parker at Palm State College, emailed to me by a professor there. Instead of condemning the horrendous attack and the immense loss of life—the greatest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust—her ill-chosen wording seemed to equate Hamas and its unlawful attacks on noncombatants with Israel's self-defense against those very atrocities.

How can Jewish and Israeli students on campus feel like they are respected and belong if it's considered acceptable to make excuses for last weekend's butchery and even to praise the deaths of Jewish children?

Last week, on dozens of US campuses, student groups issued incendiary pronouncements that justified the Palestinian right to "resistance by any means". Some even celebrated Hamas for its "creativity" and its "historic win". Student clubs on America's most prestigious campuses and those with large Jewish student populations hosted vigils for Hamas "martyrs". Others organized anti-Israel protest rallies and demonstrations, publicizing these hateful and intimidating events with an obscene cartoon drawing of a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel—an image meant to positively evoke the ambush and merciless killing of at least 260 young revelers at an outdoor rave.

Such an utter disregard for their distraught and shaken Jewish peers is appalling. Yet, university leaders on most campuses said nothing about it.

After doing the right thing and exercising moral leadership, Michigan's president is now feeling the heat—including from some of his own faculty. Currently circulating is a petition criticizing his powerful October 10 statement, an expression of deep concern for Jewish and Israeli students on his Ann Arbor campus and the students, faculty, and staff at Israel's major universities. Hundreds of professors there have signed it.

Fortunately, there are plenty of US academics who don't share their moral confusion and have been standing up for heartsick Jewish students.

Hundreds of professors affiliated with my organization and others have in recent days been voicing full-throated support for Israel's right to self-defense and demanding accountably from those students who are rationalizing and justifying, and in some cases even celebrating, Hamas.

An open letter, now signed by over 350 Harvard faculty members, sharply castigates the school's 35 registered student organizations for issuing an appalling statement that basically condones the mass murder of civilians while "terrorists were still killing Israelis in their homes". Another, signed by faculty at the University of Southern California, offers its support to the people of Israel and to all students and members of the campus community affected by the "unimaginable tragedy".

These interventions can make a difference.

At Harvard, a number of student groups have now retracted their support for the much-maligned student statement. And at the University of Arizona, a planned protest was cancelled by the school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter after its "Day of Resistance" toolkit and messaging were condemned by President Robert Robbins as "antithetical to the university's values".

On October 7, Israel experienced a great and horrendous evil—adjusted for population size, the equivalent of 45,000 American deaths or fifteen 9/11 attacks in a single day. Standing in solidarity with Jews on campus means bearing witness to this devastating communal tragedy which has reopened wounds and deepened fears. And it means educating that some acts—like massacres perpetrated by Jew-hating jihadists—are beyond political debate or difficult conversations. They are simply wrong".