Harvard rocked by hate: Kidnapped images defaced, Israel blamed for 9/11 - opinion

The poster of four-year-old Ariel Bibas was depicted with his face obscured by paint and a caricature of Hitler, a stark contrast to his ginger hair, which symbolizes the heart of Israeli resilience, barely visible beneath the layers of paint that strip away his humanity.

This distressing scene greeted me on Monday morning, marking the commencement of Harvard University's spring semester.

Adjacent to this image were several other desecrated photographs of kidnapped individuals, each under outlandish captions falsely accusing Israel of orchestrating the 9-11 attacks.

Among them was another troubling picture: Kfir Bibas, Ariel's one-year-old brother, his head marked with an arrow and the unsettling annotation, "Evidence, please - the head is still attached."

A betrayal of humanity 

Tears fought to emerge as I traversed the frostbitten campus, reflecting my despair. The university had recently hosted a conference titled "I Hear You," claiming to offer empathetic support to every student. But beyond superficial gestures lies a more profound betrayal of humanity.

Innocent lives, languishing without cause or guilt, are a violation of fundamental human principles established well before the norms of wartime were conceived. This was an appalling revelation I had not anticipated.

A professor made a poignant observation from the Department of Government at Harvard: the problem at Harvard lies not with the students but rather with the faculty and administration.

Their failure to equip students for challenging dialogues, opting instead for overindulgence in emotional rhetoric, is telling.

Harvard's so-called enlightened community appears to have lost its moral compass, blurring the lines between innocence and malevolence between a kidnapped child and a Nazi aggressor.

In this climate of hate and incitement, even the innocence of a child is disregarded, a child abducted with his mother and infant brother. This tragedy seems not to be exclusive to this institution.

The urge is to escape this place, to abandon them to their self-created abyss. However, perhaps there's a more significant lesson for us: the importance of self-strengthening. We must bolster our moral fortitude, often under assault, and commit to pursuing justice, faith, and wisdom.

The writer is a research fellow at Harvard University