MESSAGE
| DATE | 2025-05-05 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Harvard Is an Islamist Outpost
|
Harvard Is an Islamist Outpost
For decades it nurtured resentful leftists, and antisemitism united them
in a common cause.
By Ruth R. Wisse
April 24, 2025 11:49 am ET
I taught at Harvard from 1993 through 2014, and I don’t think the
federal government’s threats will be effective at changing the
university’s culture. Harvard’s leaders don’t yet understand the danger
that culture poses to the country or why it required intervention.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the Islamists of al Qaeda attacked the U.S. in a
suicide mission that used American planes as their instruments of
destruction. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas Islamists exploited Israel’s
openness by invading the country, massacring civilians and kidnapping
others. Jihadists use these new forms of warfare against those they
can’t conquer by force. What concerns us here is their capture of elite
American schools as outposts.
Harvard became directly implicated on Oct. 8, 2023, when the
Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement endorsed
by more than 30 student groups that asserted “the Israeli regime” was
“entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Students for Justice
in Palestine declared Oct. 12 a “day of resistance” and had a “toolkit”
ready for the encampments and demonstrations that spread beyond campus.
SJP praised the “unity intifada” and “resistance” and declared that
Palestinian students were “PART of this movement, not in solidarity with
this movement.” In 2001 there were no such support groups for Islamists
at Harvard.
Harvard was a soft target for foreign penetration, having developed an
adversarial relationship to the American government and increasingly to
the country itself. Veterans of the antiwar movement banished the
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from Harvard in the 1970s and kept it
off campus for 40 years. When memories of Vietnam faded, the military’s
exclusion of open homosexuals became the high-minded excuse for shutting
out recruiters—but not government funding. This selective antigovernment
policy was reflected in the curriculum, which took an increasingly
critical approach to America and Western civilization.
Meanwhile, the 1960s civil-rights laws that outlawed discrimination
failed to satisfy those who sought equal outcomes. The university
responded with group preferences in hiring for women and minorities.
That elevated grievance groups and put Harvard solidly in the activist
“progressive” camp. With rare exceptions, there would be no more hiring
of conservatives or teaching their “reactionary” ideas.
By the 1990s, black campus groups were hosting Afrocentric and Nation of
Islam speakers who agitated against whites and Jews. In 1992 Prof. Henry
Louis Gates Jr. warned: “This is anti-Semitism from the top down,
engineered and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a
larger resentment.” To this grievance coalition were added groups of
Marxists, anticapitalists, anticolonialists, and anti-imperialists. The
2011 Occupy Wall Street encampments were allowed to close Harvard Yard
for several months.
All these demonstrators lacked a common cause until they united around
the handiest target in the history of civilization under the guise of
liberating the Palestinians. Students who had been kept from marching
for their country and warned against insulting every other minority
jumped at the chance to attack a politically approved target.
In a letter to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber acknowledges
valid concerns about rising antisemitism and pledges that Harvard will
continue to fight “hate” with the urgency it demands and federal law
requires. Harvard’s record provides ample evidence against this claim.
Campus coalitions for jihad count on liberal administrators to
accommodate their assault.
The most useful of many political functions of anti-Zionism—as with
antisemitism before Jews returned to their homeland—is building
coalitions of grievance and blame against a small nation with a
universally inflated and mostly negative image. This galvanizing enmity
has united the pan-Arab and Islamist alliance against Israel since 1948.
It powered the red-green coalition at the United Nations and seeds
anti-Israel campus coalitions that are anti-American in all but name.
Attacking only the Jews—now only Israel—is its key to becoming the
world’s most powerful antidemocratic ideology.
The goal of destroying Israel remains central to Arab and Islamist
identity and was admitted to Harvard along with some foreign students
and investors. The Education Department reports the university received
more than $100 million from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar and Bangladesh between January 2020 and October 2024.
In 2007 I began warning successive presidents and deans that academic
standards were being violated by the substitution of anti-Israel
propaganda for a comprehensive program in the Center for Middle East
Studies. They acknowledged the problem but refused to address it. As
long as other institutions took Muslim money and ignored the war against
the Jews, why should Harvard be holier than the pope?
Oct. 7, like Kristallnacht in 1938, forced some people to confront what
they had tried to ignore. Students and faculty celebrating the
atrocities against Israel could have been perpetrating them, given the
chance. A committee of the new Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance
investigated the campus “hatred” and found it “worse than we had
anticipated.” Ideological anti-Zionism governed not only the Center for
Middle East Studies but also the School of Public Health and the
Divinity School and figured in departments ranging alphabetically from
anthropology and African American Studies to the Weatherhead Institute
of International Affairs, and academically from music to the medical
school. Harvard undertook a similar review only under pressure from
Congress.
The university had taken steps to prevent campus unrest—by curtailing
the Jewish and Christian presence. The Semitic Museum, established by
Jacob Schiff in 1907 to make the same point as the Abraham Accords about
the common sources of the three religions, was renamed the Museum of the
Ancient Near East. The only vestige of Schiff’s intention remains in
carved stone above the entrance. Archeological projects in Israel were
discontinued and museum collections that once centered on the Bible and
Jerusalem were refocused on the pyramids. The Harvard Divinity School
restructured its curriculum to reflect that it was no longer a Christian
or Unitarian seminary but a “pluralistic” religious-studies program.
Just when Harvard’s proud heritage should have been strengthened,
biblical studies were degraded, and its traditions put on the
defensive—Christianity even more than Judaism. Islamism was on the rise
against America in decline.
There are still good people and programs at Harvard, and I am grateful
for my time there. In an ideal world the government wouldn’t micromanage
universities. But if Harvard shirks its responsibility to shore up the
foundations of America and allows itself to be hijacked by an
Islamist-inspired grievance coalition, why would it expect any support
from the government?
Ms. Wisse is a senior fellow at Tikvah and author of the memoir “Free as
a Jew.”
Advertisement
image
A statue of John Harvard draped in the Palestinian flag at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Mass., April 25, 2024. Photo: Ben
Curtis/Associated Press
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the April 25, 2025, print edition as 'Harvard Is an Islamist
Outpost'.
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