Harvard didn’t want to sound like it was ‘assigning blame’ in response to Oct.7 attacks - NYT

Harvard University officials removed the word “violent” from their drafted public response to Hamas's October 7 attacks because a dean complained it “sounded like assigning blame,” the New York Times revealed on Thursday citing internal emails.

“We denounce this act of terror” was also removed from the university’s final statement.

“I’m not sure why it’s necessary to delete the word ‘violent’ in the second line, unless it’s a thought that it’s redundant,” Dr. Alan Garber said in one of the released emails, along with her colleagues’ disagreement.

George Q. Daley, the dean of Harvard’s medical school, responded to Garber “on my first read it sounded like assigning blame when it’s best we express horror at the carnage that is unfolding.”

“I think Hamas’s violence deserves singling out, and I think this word is a pretty small way to do that,” wrote Doug Elmendorf, the Harvard Kennedy School dean.

The officials also decided to remove mention of the hostages abducted by Hamas during the attack. John Manning, the law school dean, claimed that mentioning the hostages may create an impression that Harvard did not care about those “who may be hurt in the escalation of the conflict.”

The mess that followed at Harvard University

The Ivy League university faced significant blowback following Hamas’s attack and the student protests which followed, leading to the house questioning former Harvard head Claudine Gay. 

Gay, who resigned from her position following accusations of plagiarism, was revealed in the report to have held deep discussions on the meaning of “from the river to the sea.” The controversial slogan refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea - encompassing the entire land of Israel.

“Clearly an antisemitic sign which calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state and Jews,” Harvard Board leading member Penny Pritzker wrote in an email to Dr. Gay. “I am being asked by some why we would tolerate that and not signage calling for lynchings by the K.K.K.”

Gay ruled, after members of senior Harvard staff defended thee use of the slogan, that an antisemitism advisory board should make the final call on the slogan.

Some 1,200 people were murdered by invading Hamas terrorists in southern Israel and an additional 250 were abducted - including several US citizens. Sexual violence was widely used during the attacks, as recorded by witness testimonies and the confessions of captured terrorists. 

Despite the mass killing of Israelis and foreign nationals, officials decided not to publicly disown a declaration by some Harvard student groups claiming Israel was responsible for the violence, according to the report.

Condemnations

The emails were released as part of a 400,000-page report by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“How could you be somebody with a job at a university and not recognize antisemitism and move to do something about it?” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and the chairwoman of the House committee, said in an interview on Thursday. “It is not complicated, and it wasn’t complicated on these campuses.”

The problem, she said, “is that they treated it as a public relations issue, not as an attack on the well-being of Jewish students.”

Jason Newton, a spokesman for Harvard, said on Thursday that “we have intensified our efforts to listen to, learn from, support and uplift our Jewish community, affirming their vital place at Harvard.”