Harvard has hosted a pro-Palestine speaker who previously participated in a workshop with a senior Hamas leader - despite swirling anti-Semitism claims against the college.
Noura Erakat, an associate professor of Africana studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, was scheduled to speak at the Ivy League school on Monday.
This is despite Erakat participating in an online workshop alongside senior Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad in 2020. He has since called for a repeat of October 7.
The controversial professor was set to speak at a public event called ‘We Charge Genocide; The Potential and Limits of International Law,’ in Harvard’s Science Center.
Harvard has been embroiled in controversy since former President Claudine Gay’s failure to condemn campus anti-Semitism during a disastrous Congress testimony.
The horrific October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel brought pro-Palestine protesters out en-masse around the college grounds.
Erakat, who is also a human rights attorney, has been outspoken about her belief that Israel was responsible for the terror attack.
‘Any condemnation of violence is vapid if it does not begin & end with a condemnation of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and occupation,’ she wrote on X on October 7.
Nine days later, she addressed President Biden on twitter accusing him of repeating ‘the lie about beheaded (Israeli) babies’ and supporting ‘Israel’s genocidal warfare’ in Gaza.
In 2020, she spoke alongside former Hamas spokesman Hamad at an online workshop organized by Palestinian nonprofit the Masarat Center.
Hamad served as the deputy foreign minister in the Hamas government of 2012, and he was quoted by the BBC in 2006 as saying that Israel should be ‘eradicated’.
‘Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth. It is an animal state that recognises no human worth. It is a cancer that should be eradicated,’ he told the British broadcaster.
Last year, he called for a repeat of the October 7 terror attack, known by Hamas as the al-Aqsa Deluge, which killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis.
‘Israel is a country that has no place on our land,’ he told Lebanese TV channel LBC on October 24.
‘We must remove it because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation. We are not ashamed to say this.’
‘We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times,’ he added.
‘The al-Aqsa Deluge is just the first time. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.’
DailyMail.com has approached Erakat and Harvard for comment.
It comes as six Jewish students from Harvard launch legal action against the school, claiming it has become a ‘bastion of antisemitism and hatred’ with descriptions of how they have been bullied since Gay resigned.
The lawsuit, filed January in Massachusetts, alleges that Gay’s congressional comments about campus antisemitism are just the tip of the iceberg of the school’s problem.
Gay stepped down on January 2 after sparking fury and threats of a donor boycott with her remarks. By then, she had also been accused of plagiarism.
The school stood by her, refusing to accept that it had an antisemitism problem. In her resignation letter, Gay said she had been the victim of racist threats because she is a black woman.
The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, Shabbos Kestenbaum, also told DailyMail.com that Jewish students are demanding tuition refunds from the pricey school over its ‘abject failure’ to protect them from antisemitism.
For some students enrolled in the prestigious law school, that amounts to more than $75,000 a year.
