The Crimson editorial board’s decision to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign and pledge support to the extremist student organization, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, should be deeply concerning for students, academics, and members of the Harvard community.
The editorial board claims to have “wrestled” with Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians and A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, reports published by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in the year leading up to this announcement. However, the editorial is silent on the widespread criticism surrounding both reports. The reports feature blatant distortions of Israeli law, historical revisionism, and statistical manipulation to draw their slanderous conclusions.
Ultimately, we must ask, what source material is the editorial board using to make their claims?
Furthermore, what “educational events” is the editorial board praising?
On November 9th the Palestine Solidarity Committee, hosted Mohammed El-Kurd, an antisemitic writer who spreads antisemitism and misinformation online.
In one such instance, El-Kurd argues, Jews praying at a Jewish holy site amount to would-be “invaders” of mosques.
Does the editorial board’s praise of PSC’s activism extend to the endorsement of such an antisemitic speaker?
Furthermore, the board’s unbounded support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign is equally objectionable. Leaders and those campaigning for BDS call for the silencing and uprooting of Jewish and pro-Israel voices in the classroom, student life, and campus outlets. By endorsing BDS, The Crimson editorial board willfully condones anti-normalization tactics that may threaten intellectual diversity, ethical journalism, and civil discourse.
The demands of BDS are discordant with Harvard University’s longstanding commitment to remain at the “frontier of academic and intellectual discovery” and also violate Harvard’s anti-discrimination policy, which deems discrimination against any legally protected class, including “basis of race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, age, national or ethnic origin, political beliefs” unlawful.
The flagrant endorsement of an unmistakably anti-Jewish and anti-intellectual agenda comes at a significant cost to the journalistic integrity of the university paper and further tarnishes Harvard University’s academic imprimatur.