Harvard Endorses Israel's Destruction

On March 3-4, Harvard University is hosting a conference sponsored by its Kennedy School of Government entitled “One State Conference: Israel/Palestine and the One State Solution.” Its explicit goal is to discuss methods of achieving the the destruction of Israel.

According to the “Vision and Goals” of the conference, as outlined by its website:

“To date, the only Israel/Palestine solution that has received a fair rehearsal in mainstream forums has been the two-state solution. Our conference will help to expand the range of academic debate on this issue. Thus, our main goal is to educate ourselves and others about the possible contours of a one-state solution and the challenges that stand in the way of its realization.”

When you who's speaking and who's not,what the conference is about becomes painfully obvious.

The Harvard student groups involved include student groups including, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestine Caucus, the Arab Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, the Association for Justice in the Middle East, and members of the radical Jewish Voice for Peace. Speakers will include Ali Abunimah, the Executive Director of the Electronic Intifada; Dalit Baum, of the BDS organization Coalition of Women for Peace; Ilan Pappe, a radical left Israeli academic who makes a nice living lecturing in Europe about how evil the country he was born in is and whose main claims to fame were fabricating the story of a 'massacre' at a place called Tantura that was proven in court never to have occurred and popularizing a phony quotation to make it seem like Israel leader David Ben -Gurion endorsed the expulsion of Israel's Arabs ; Marc Ellis, Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, who makes a fetish out of equating Zionism with old fashioned colonialism and Israel’s treatment of the 'Palestinians' to the Nazi treatment of Jews and is now desperately trying to avoid being fired; and Hamas apologist Diana Buttu.

And of course,as a main attraction, there's the Kennedy School's own Stephen Walt, co-author of the factually challenged anti-semitic trophe The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. When he's not busily engaged in poisoning the minds of America's future foreign policy establishment, Professor Walt writes putrid little pieces for Foreign Policy shilling for Mein Kampf, which echoes his own book in repeating the dark fairy tales of a Jewish Fifth Column and fantasizing about a second Holocaust. He'll go over huge, I'm sure.

All of these individuals and groups have something in common. They all see Israel as an “apartheid state,” guilty of the “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.” And they all want a final solution in which Israel disappears by any means necessary as quickly as possible. And yes, the last sentence is exactly what I meant, because to these people a 'one state solution' means the murder and ethnic cleansing of Israel's Jews, nothing less.

Nor is this going to be just a bunch of speakers. This is being billed as an 'activist' conference, as opposed to one with an academic or research framework. It's rife with a number of how-to workshops on deligitimizing Israel. And needless to say, not a single pro-Israel voice is going to be heard.

And make no mistake..Harvard is totally behind this. The Kennedy School's logo appears on the conference website, Harvard is providing the premises and the university is admitting that this hatefest is being at least partially underwritten by “modest” funds set aside for student activities. Yet, when he was pressed, Kennedy School Dean David T. Ellwood actually had the temerity to release this statement, saying:

I want to emphasize once again that Harvard University and the Harvard Kennedy School in no way endorses or supports the apparent position of these student organizers or any participants they include. We hope that the final shape of the conference will be significantly more balanced.

No, they're not endorsing it or supporting it - all they're doing is allowing it to use university property, letting the organizers use the Kennedy School logo and helping fund it!

Melodie Jackson, Associate Dean for Communications was at least a bit more honest: “Generally administrators try to be supportive of student ideas for events that they are planning.”

Really, Ms. Jackson? That's wonderful news. So if a Harvard student group wanted to present a conference using Harvard facilities on Islamist terrorism featuring David Horowitz, Bat Ye'or, Robert Spencer, Ayann Hirsh Ali and Walid Shoebat the university would fund and support it and allow it to use Harvard's facilities?

Yes, we both no better than that. Especially given the enormous amount of money the Saudis pump into Harvard and other universities to make sure nothing like that ever happens. It's called prostitution when private entrepreneurs engage in it.

As the CAMERA link above mentions, according to the working definition of anti-Semitism developed by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), and recognized by the United States Department of State, the One State Conference Harvard is funding and hosting is implicitly “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” and thus actively disseminating anti-Semitism.

That also explicitly applies to another part of the working definition, “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”, which is something every member of this charming group has done on many occasions and is almost certain to do when being cheered on by the sort of people this conference is going to attract.

And Harvard is complicit in it, thus returning to an old Harvard tradition that dates back to the 1930's, when many of the faculty members at Harvard were openly anti-Semitic, including Harvard’s president James Bryant Conant, who was the force behind quotas to keep Jews out of the university, law school Dean Roscoe Pound, an outspoken Nazi sympathizer who attended Nazi rallies in Germany during his vacations, and Harvard history professor, America Firster and Nazi apologist William L. Langer.

Harvard didn't stop with mere quotas and openly expressed anti-Semitic sympathies. The University went one better when they invited Nazi official Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaungl, one of Hitler's top aides as the Harvard commencement speaker in 1934. When Jews in Boston protested, President Conant had them arrested for “illegally displaying signs.”

So this is a real back to the future moment for Harvard, which is, after all, a private university that has every right to promote Jew hatred if it wants to.

But they can't have it both ways and deny that Harvard is doing so. Because that's exactly what Harvard's doing. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

It's morally disgusting and a comment on the times we live that a university with the motto 'veritas' (truth) would be so eager to embrace falsehood, lies and bigotry.