As anti-Israel activity sweeps US academia, Indian-origin students at Harvard have gotten caught up in JNU-style casual radicalism, supporting Hamas with their South Asian colleagues.
After the Hamas attack, thirty other Harvard student organizations and four South Asian groups with leadership members who are Indian students signed a statement declaring that they held the “Israeli regime entirely responsible” and refusing to denounce the terrorist Hamas attack that claimed the lives of at least 1,400 civilians in Israel.
The comment, which sounded like support for and justification of the Hamas assault, was soon met with the inevitable criticism.
After billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman made the controversial comment that students connected to it shouldn’t be recruited, a number of CEOs joined him and demanded to know the identity of the students in order to prevent them from being employed by their firms. This is when things really heated up.
In due course, a conservative group rented a truck equipped with large display monitors, which it used to tour the Harvard neighborhood. The displays showed the names and pictures of the group’s leaders, who had concealed their identities behind their organization’s titles, defaming even the non-supporting members of the group.
Others faced criticism and threats after posting their identities and contact information on social media.
With Indian-origin students holding leadership roles, Undergraduate Harvard Gunghroo, a “South Asian” cultural organization and signatory, crumbled under the pressure of the CEOs and retracted its signature.
It “strictly denounces and condemns the massacre propagated by the terrorist organization Hamas,” Gunghroo stated, apologizing for signing the declaration.
The Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Student Association ceased endorsing the declaration as well.
The declaration was signed by the South Asian Law Students Association, South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research, Sikhs and Companions of Harvard Undergraduates, as well as students of Indian descent holding prominent roles.
If they have distanced themselves from the comment, it is unknown.
In a video shot at New York University, a lady identifying as a “young Indian and Middle-Eastern, American, Hindu girl” was seen pulling down posters of Hamas captives that were displayed to raise awareness of their predicament.
She also took a step back when a student who was the leader of the university’s law students union discovered that her employment offer had been rescinded because she had supported Hamas in a statement.
“She is forever sorry for her action of taking away the attention Israeli hostages on posters deserved then and now,” said a statement released by the poster-ripper’s representative.
The degree to which average Americans were enraged by the ferocity of the Hamas attacks—which mercilessly murdered infants and the elderly and resulted in hostage-taking—was unexpected by the students who were exposed to radical theatrics.
Following the death of an African American man in 2020, there were widespread rallies against racism and police brutality. These protests, which sometimes descended into rioting and looting, were backed by Democrats and academics, and their radicalism has fed pro-Hamas sentiment.
Furthermore, it now poses a danger to create a rift in the country between the majority of Americans who support Israel and the radical student activism that supports Hamas on campuses and in schools, often disguising its support for Palestine.
Protests in favor of Palestine were held this week on US universities and in schools all throughout the country.
The Harvard episode focuses on the relationship between university cancel cultures and academic freedom.
The left or progressives have successfully argued for their often extreme beliefs at the majority of prestigious colleges while simultaneously stifling others who have differing opinions via campaigns and sometimes by physically interrupting events.
Harvard’s cancel culture was used as a weapon to dismiss BJP MP Subramanian Swamy from a summer school professorship in 2011. This was in response to objections by a number of Harvard academics, some of whom were Indian-origin, over an essay they saw as “incitement” against Muslims.
The institution was notified by the civil liberties organization Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that “this action violates Swamy’s free speech rights” and that dismissing him for his legal free speech might cause academics to self-censor.
The left has called for suppressing anyone connected to the Indian government—or, in their opinion, the BJP—at different points in time and at various institutions.
For example, the Columbia University Coalition of Progressive South Asian Students urged that the Deepak and Neera Raj Center on Indian Economic Policies “cut ties with current BJP party members” and claimed that the center was hosting “mostly BJP supporters and party members.”
However, the current state of affairs is different, with professors and students claiming that the act of publicly identifying the students who were behind the joint statement on the Gaza crisis constituted a danger to free speech and that they should not be singled out for personal criticism or employment refusal.
It is not a matter of standing up for Palestine and denouncing assaults on people; rather, the problem lies in aiding Hamas or in not denouncing its atrocities.
Anti-Semitism has crept into certain criticisms of Israel to the point that Jewish academic members and students feel threatened.
at the prestigious Cooper Union in New York. This week, pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched approached a library and pounded on its doors while Jewish pupils were confined inside.
Nazi symbol Swastikas have appeared on other campuses, and Jewish student centers have been vandalized.
As a result of the response, major contributors to Ivy League schools including Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Columbia have stopped giving money, alleging a variety of reasons, including the colleges’ role in creating an environment that led to radicalization and/or the leadership’s inability to swiftly denounce Hamas.
A portion of the radicalization has been aimed at India and “Hindutva,” a loose term that sometimes refers to everything Hindu.
for pupils of Indian descent. Being South Asian might be problematic as it puts them in the same category with people from Bangladesh and Pakistan who follow different religions or have different national origins.
Like with Harvard Gunghroo, some students of Indian descent voluntarily embrace them, while others get drawn in unintentionally.
