The long-awaited Harvard report on its own campus anti-Semitism is more than 300 pages long. By now, we have heard most of these stories or stories just like them, and the subsequent lack of impact is no doubt what Harvard was betting on by dragging out this process as long as it has.
But “most” is not “all,” and there is one story buried within the dense report that is genuinely shocking, even after all we’ve seen. I’m going to include the crux of the story, which isn’t long, in the words of the faculty member who experienced it. Every single Jew in America should read this story to understand the current situation and where it is headed.
The faculty member had walked over to a campus Gaza encampment to listen to what participants had to say about the conflict during an open-mic period. Here is the key part of what she recounted to the anti-Semitism commission that produced this report:
“While I quietly stood watching the open mic in the encampment (I attended alone and not in ‘counter protest’), a Harvard alum and former student called me on the phone, and then texted several times, which is not normal. When we were able to speak after I left the yard that night, he informed me that he had seen my name come up on an internal chat (apparently a large group communication for ‘marshals of the encampment’) and that there was concern with my presence there. I was described so that others could recognize me and identified as a ‘Zionist.’ It was unclear if he was alerting me to warn me to be careful or to ask me to leave, but during our brief conversation he wrongly associated me with counter protest and communicated that he was hoping I’d act in an especially nonthreatening way because my presence was a concern. It was chilling.
“What I’m taking from this, and perhaps I’ve internalized it in the wrong way, is that I was surveilled, identified by name, and profiled as a ‘Zionist’ threat in a chat that reached far enough that an alum not at the protest, who I had no idea was even involved, knew exactly where I was and reached out with concern. I have not shared any of my views (complex and ever-changing) with students or in any public setting save for asking a question at a ‘teach in.’ I have no idea what I did to end up on a blacklist, but whatever the reason I was profiled, beliefs about me that are inextricable from my Jewishness seem to have made me a potential target.”
An unavoidable characteristic of the pro-Hamas extremists on campus is that they engage in projection: They make paranoid accusations that turn out to reflect their own creepy behavior. So masked campus lunatics stomp and shout about some kind of Jewish-backed system of surveillance because, it turns out, they have been surveilling Jews and keeping in constant communication about the whereabouts of those Jews.
There isn’t much more to say that the anecdote doesn’t itself convey clearly. It’s worth keeping in mind the evidence of these tentifada groups’ coordination with the network of Palestinian terrorists they support, as well as the Iranian sponsors of that terrorism, and asking yourself how safe you’d feel under that level of nighttime surveillance on campus and under those conditions.
