Harvard Gives $90,000-a-Year Fellowships to Four Anti-Israel Activists
Plus, Committee to Protect Journalists, key source for Kristof ‘rape’ claims, has board stacked with left-wing figures who accuse Jewish state of ‘genocide’
Harvard is bringing four more anti-Israel activists to campus as “Radcliffe Fellows,” giving them nearly $90,000 over nine months and use of paid research assistants to work on “groundbreaking projects across disciplines,” as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute puts it. Our Ira Stoll took a closer look at some of the newly named fellows, who include
— Mahdi Fleifel, the Dubai-born writer-director of NakbaFilmWorks, a London-based production company that supports the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Fleifel had this to say about the Oct. 7 terror attack: “You leave the Palestinians to rot and die in a cage, what do you expect is going to happen? They’re going to send Christmas cards?”
— Ibtisam Azem, a New York-based “journalist and novelist” for the Qatari-owned outlet Alaraby Aljadeed Ltd. Azem conducted a fawning interview with Columbia University encampment organizer Mahmoud Khalil last July, asking him, “How do you situate your arrest and the broader Palestinian freedom movement in the U.S., especially student-led activism, in relation to other justice movements like the civil rights movements for African Americans, Indigenous struggles, or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa?”
— Ahmed Kamal Junina, a New Zealand citizen who teaches English at the Gaza-based Al-Aqsa University, over which Hamas reportedly exerts substantial control. Junina has accused Israel of “scholasticide.”
— Irus Braverman, a University of Buffalo professor who has described Israel as an “ecofascist state” guilty of “domicide” and who contributes short videos to a demonize-Israel project with fellow academics that consists of TikTok-ready titles like “Israel uses parks to seize lands” and “Sheep-Washing: How Settlers Use Sheep to Colonize Palestine.” Braverman will “pursue a project on ecopastoralism in Palestine-Israel,” according to Harvard.
“Harvard’s May 14 press release announcing the new group of fellows named ten of them but omitted the four anti-Israel activists, relegating them to a hyperlinked ‘full list’ in the last sentence of the announcement,” writes Stoll. “Radcliffe used to be a women’s college before Harvard went co-ed. Instead of shutting down it started offering fellowships, led by Drew Faust, who went on to become president of Harvard, and by a longtime Harvard academic administrator, Judith Vichniac, who died in 2019 and who I suspect would have been dismayed to see the institution head in this direction, with anti-Israel activists swarming the Radcliffe endowment like Hamas thugs in Gaza looting a truck full of U.N. humanitarian aid.”
READ MORE: Harvard Gives $90,000-a-Year Fellowships to Four Anti-Israel Activists
The Committee to Protect Journalists—the nonprofit whose claims about detained Palestinian “journalists” being raped by Israeli troops were cited prominently in New York Times columnist Nick Kristof’s lurid report on the topic—has a board of directors brimming with anti-Israel sentiment. The board includes two prominent media figures who have compared Israel to Nazi Germany and accused it of “genocide,” a Free Beacon review found.
One of the CPJ’s board members, Maria Ressa, is CEO of the Philippines-based news site Rappler, which just a month after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack published an editorial comparing Israel’s “disproportionate response” to “genocide at the hands of Adolf Hitler.” When the piece prompted criticism ahead of Ressa’s 2024 Harvard University commencement speech, Ressa used the platform to attack her critics, accusing them of chasing “money and power.” Harvard’s Chabad, walked off the stage during her address. The Rappler also accused the Free Beacon of mistranslating the piece, but a translation from the former executive director of the Commission on Filipino language confirmed that it indeed likened Israel’s actions to Hitler’s.
Another board member, Nika Soon-Shiong, who publishes the George Soros-funded anti-Israel startup Drop Site News, has said that the United States is “openly financing genocide” in Gaza, that Israel is waging “a war on children,” and that the “verdict of history will be merciless” for “media institutions that downplayed genocide, ignored apartheid, and fail to cover America’s role in foreign wars.” Soon-Shiong is the daughter of the pharmaceuticals billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, best known as the owner of the Los Angeles Times.
None of the CPJ’s 29 board members, by contrast, “have publicly supported Israel's response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks or supported the United States' providing military and diplomatic support to the Jewish state, calling into question the journalism group’s objectivity as it inserts itself into the debate over the Gaza war,” our Adam Kredo writes. “The CPJ was recently caught quietly removing terrorists’ names from its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza. The CPJ’s separate allegations that Palestinian journalists detained by Israel are subjected to sexual violence was a lynchpin of the lurid Times piece by Nicholas Kristof, which quoted two ‘Palestinian journalists,’ one named and one anonymous, claiming they were raped by a carrot and a dog while in Israeli detention. (Kristof cited CPJ stats extensively to bolster his case against Israel. It’s unclear if CPJ connected him with the men telling the carrot and dog stories.)”
Additional reading:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “is making new moves toward a possible White House bid,” according to Axios, which reported that the far-left Democrat is in the midst of a “national tour” and “has raised eyebrows by attending meetings with Democratic Party powerbrokers.” AOC is “still genuinely undecided on whether to run for president” but isn’t likely to stay in the House: She could also launch a Senate bid against Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a “person close to AOC” told Axios.
Iran pledged to “leave no act of hostility unanswered” after the United States struck Iranian regime boats attempting to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz—which is to say the U.S. responded to an act of hostility. It came after President Donald Trump said Iran’s enriched uranium will be “immediately turned over to the United States to be brought home and destroyed” as part of any peace deal—and as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that such a deal, rumored to be imminent over the weekend, could take “days” to finalize.
Democratic congressman Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts said what any reasonable person already knows: that left-wing Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo “and his commentary about it” are “disqualifying.” Naturally, those on the Left, including anti-American influencer Hasan Piker and former AOC chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti, labeled Auchincloss “Israel first” and called for him to be ousted in a primary. The pressure campaign worked: Auchincloss later said that he was not endorsing Platner’s opponent, Republican Susan Collins, and that “regardless of what happens in Maine, Democrats need to take back the Senate.”
That was fast: Less than two weeks after Israel took out Hamas military chief Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the Jewish state killed his successor, Mohammed Odeh, who served as head of Hamas’s intelligence wing during the Oct. 7 attack. “We will continue to pursue everyone who took part in the October 7 massacre,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said. “Sooner or later, Israel will reach them all.”
A sign of progress: Prominent Michigan Democratic fundraiser Kelly Neumann penned a Memorial Day post thanking U.S. service members without mentioning her late grandfather Albert Neumann, who served “on the German side in WWI & WWII” before escaping to Brazil, as Neumann noted in a 2024 Veterans Day post. Neumann threatened legal action after the Free Beacon reported on the Nazi post, arguing that she made it “in her private capacity as a granddaughter.”
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I am astonished by the number of leftists who bellow at the top of their lungs that Trump is the new hitler while THEY are the ones bashing Jews for simply being alive and having the AUDACITY to want to protect themselves from HATEFUL TERRORISTS like hamas. Heaven forbid these leftist loons look in the mirror.
Amazing to me how the Jewish people keep supporting the Ivy’s and what’s left of the once formidable Democratic Party.