A Week In April Says It All About Brown
All In for Hamas All the Time; Brown Becomes a Laughingstock in Florida
What passes for education at Brown when it comes to the Hamas-initiated war against Israel was on full display during the week of April 15. At Brown, the October 7, 2023 butchery conducted by the martyrdom-seeking Islamists of Hamas and the 100+ hostages still in Hamas captivity and likely dead, are distant memories, at best. After all, by October 11 fifty Brown student organizations had pledged solidarity with the “resistance” - rape, torture, beheading and hostage taking being to them “resistance”. All that matters now for so many at Brown is eliminating the Jewish state of Israel and its Jews as directed by the Hamas Nazis pursuant to the Hamas charter.
I quoted language from the Hamas charter in my October 16, 2023 post entitled “Beshara Doumani: Hard at Work for Hamas at Brown - No Longer a Hypothetical Problem”. The language bears repeating given how many Brown students and faculty apparently endorse it:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as others before it” (Preamble); the stated goal of Hamas is “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine (Article 8); “the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem wherever he may be” (Article 13); “There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad (Article 13) “in the face of the Jews’ usurpation” (Article 15); “The Day of Judgment will not come until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees and the rocks and trees will cry out ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him’ ” (Article 7); “Zionism scheming has no end…Their scheme has been laid out in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (Article 32).
It takes no great intellect to understand that Hamas and its supporters are following the Nazi playbook. And it’s not just the words. It’s their history. There is a direct link between, e.g., the virulently anti-Semitic Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (1921-1937) and the language of the Hamas charter and the conduct of the martyrdom-crazed barbarians of Hamas. Al-Husseini spent WWII in Hitler’s cozy embrace cheering on the Nazis’ failed attempt to exterminate the world’s Jews. Unfortunately, al-Husseini managed to crawl back into the Arab world near the end of the war and stay alive until 1974. To the extent Brown students and faculty embrace the Hamas “resistance”, they too are following the Nazi playbook.
Brown in the week of April 15.
(1) April 15: The Brown Daily Herald (“BDH”) publishes an interview with Niyanta Nepal, Class of 2025, the newly elected president of the Undergraduate Council of Students. According to the Herald, Nepal “ran on a pro-divestment platform, received 63% of 1408 votes in the elections last month”. Nepal explained her “divestment from apartheid” position to the BDH as follows:
“Part of the reason why I use the language of apartheid is because Brown has historically divested from South African apartheid. So I want this idea that a university should not be invested in anything that has to do with apartheid.”
She added that Brown should “never be invested in systems that carry out apartheid and genocide”.
These statements highlight not only Nepal’s profound ignorance of South African apartheid but her equally profound ignorance of Israel.
The BDH helpfully points out that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Special Rapporteur’s report have described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Citing those groups for any proposition related to Israel, as has so often been thoroughly documented, is the equivalent of citing the KKK as the authority on racism. (The BDH did mention that “some groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, contest [the apartheid] characterization.”)
For a Brown student or faculty member to allege that Israel is engaging in “genocide” in Gaza is, as I have written, about as thoughtful as someone ordering a latte at Starbucks. It’s a cool, in-with-the-in-crowd slogan that bears no relation to reality, either factually or as a matter of law.
In its typically careless and biased reporting, the BDH also noted in its April 15 interview with Nepal, that in an “ongoing case before the United Nations International Court of Justice, South Africa alleged that Israel is enacting “acts and omissions” that are “genocidal in character…(against) the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group”. Leaving aside that allegations are just that and that the entity making the allegations is the corrupt government of South Africa, the ICC ruled in January, long before the BDH’s April 15 article, only that South Africa had standing to bring its case, denied South Africa’s request for a ceasefire and took no position on whether or not Israel had committed genocide. (Notably, Germany intervened in the case on the side of Israel. In doing so, Germany noted that Israel was defending itself in response to Hamas’ “inhuman” conduct.) BDH Senior Staff Writer Leah Koritz apparently thought it would be a good idea for the Brown community to know only half, at best, of the relevant facts surrounding South Africa’s allegations against Israel.
Nepal’s ignorance about how Brown’s endowment is managed also is on display when she says she believes “that the ongoing situation in Gaza creates pressure for the University to divest immediately, so to continue putting pressure on administration for that is definitely a priority”. For her it’s not merely “divestment” that is a priority, it’s divestment “immediately”. This despite the fact that Brown president Paxson has stated that Brown’s endowment would not be used to divest from companies that allegedly engage in human rights abuses in “Palestine”.
Nepal’s comments make clear that she, and the 887 Brown undergraduates who voted for her, are uneducated, and likely uneducable, on the history and the issues Nepal purports to understand. One of the eight hunger strikers whose hunger strike for Hamas accomplished nothing except weight loss for the participants, Nepal has the cant down pat. Like so many Brown students and faculty she tosses around blather like “the University’s complicity in what’s going on in the Middle East, specifically as it relates to Palestine” and the “increasing death toll in Gaza” makes Brown “complicit in the ongoing genocide” with casual ease. This kind of sloganeering by students and faculty is so ingrained at Brown that actual thinking about the issues is unnecessary. The same holds true for the faux “educators” of Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (“CMES”) whose primary reason for being is to delegitimize the Jewish state of Israel and the Jews who lived there for generations before the terrorist Yasser Arafat and others cooked up the imaginary “state” of Palestine.
At bottom though, Nepal is the perfect representative of the Brown student body.
(2) Also on April 15, Lawrence Summers, renowned economist, former Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama and former President of Harvard, delivered two lectures to a total of approximately 1400 people at the Riverside Theatre in Vero Beach Florida. My wife and I attended one of them. In the course of his talk about a wide variety of topics, he mentioned, with understandable incredulity, that a professor in the Brown Anthropology Department had tweeted that the best thing the Biden administration could do to address climate change would be to force Israel to enter into a ceasefire in Gaza. Needless to say, the comment was met with laughter from the audience.
I subsequently checked to see if Summers had correctly referenced the tweet. He had it right. The tweet, not from a single professor but from “Brown Anthropology@BrownAnthro”, stated:
“The single most important thing President Biden can do for the climate is enforce an immediate cease-fire in Gaza - @thenation cites data from @CostsOfWar about the impact of military emissions on the climate.”
Summers brought up the tweet to demonstrate just how far off the rails universities like Brown have gone. Someone at Brown was embarrassed enough by the tweet, as was I, to take it down. Too little, too late. The damage the deep thinkers of Brown’s Anthropology Department did to an institution already damaged by CMES can’t be undone.
(3) April 16: The Brown University Community Council, “a university-wide representative forum for discussion, debate and advisory recommendations on a wide spectrum of issues and concerns”, met and discussed, among other things, divestment. According to the BDH, “the room was full of student protestors, many wearing keffiyeh - an Arab headscarf with symbolic ties to Palestinian history - and holding signs advocating for divestment”. With the discussion of the endowment “five students stood up and held up large tapestries…One read “Labor From Palestine” and the other read “BUCC - Do Your Duty and Drop the Charges! Advance Divestment.” The BDH reported that “As they walked to the front of the room, many audience members broke into applause.”
After Brown’s Deputy Chief Investment Officer gave “an introductory explanation of how the endowment works”, a fool’s errand, BUCC community member Aiyah Josiah-Faeduwor, Brown ‘13, gave a speech “condemning the response of the administration in regards to calls for divestment [refusing to divest] and praising the work of student activists” and calling for a vote to have Brown president Paxson “drop the charges against our students”.
The BUCC believes divestment is a good idea because Israel is exercising its right to defend itself against Hitler wannabes (and in so doing, one could argue, defending civilization more broadly). And of course for Brown students, dropping the criminal charges against those who occupied University Hall and refused to leave when told they would be charged if they remained in place, is a must. For them and their faculty and other supporters, actions can have no consequences when it comes to “resistance”.
(4) April 17: The “rape is resistance” caucus at Brown could not allow Spring Weekend to occur without poisoning the well with pro-Hamas propaganda. As stated by Brown Jewish Alumni & Friends:
“BCA’s [student-run Brown Concert Agency] Spring Weekend poster is blatantly antisemitic. The poster features a depiction of a Hamas terrorist and a font reminiscent of that used by Nazi propagandists in the Der Sturmer newspaper. BCA briefly removed the poster from social media, but then reposted it with a false “apology” that dismissed the concerns of anyone affected by the imagery. This disregard for discrimination is unacceptable and raises serious questions about the inclusivity of Spring Weekend for Jewish students.”
“Furthermore, BCA has politicized Spring Weekend. This is evidenced by the watermelon theme and the red-green-black-white color scheme. BCA has adopted a divisive political agenda for what should be a campus-wide, non-political event.”
The Jewish alumni group went on to request the Brown administration to revise the posters and enforce various university policies.
After agreeing to “archive”the poster given its blatantly anti-Semitic tone, the BCA decided to “un-archive” it. BCA Co-Head Catherine Yang doubled down:
“We reject the notion that the lineup or poster contains antisemitic sentiments in any way and condemn all forms of racism and identity-based harassment that have arisen in response to our lineup and poster…We reject the notion that the lineup or poster contains hateful symbolism in any way.”
Yang should be required to take a course on the propaganda of the Third Reich before she is allowed to graduate.
But quite apart from the plainly antisemitic poster Yang defends because she is unaware of the basics of the history of the 20th Century, the poster also announces the lineup of performers. These include Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna, supposedly because she sings in Arabic. According to Yang, “diversity of language” was important in presenting performers. Apart from a Spring Weekend performance in 2022 highlighting a performer who sings in Spanish, she said “we haven’t really been able to feature someone who is predominantly [a] non-English [performing artist]” said Yang. Fair enough - showcasing diversity of language is a good idea.
So who is Elyanna? She is, as noted above, “Palestinian-Chilean” and quite prominent. She famously cancelled her November 2023 tour of the United States and Canada. Why? A couple of weeks after October 7, she posted that “My heart hurts with everything going on in my homeland…Gaza, I’m praying for you. I wish peace among my people” followed by emojis of the Palestinian flag, a white heart and a white dove with an olive branch. She also noted “we have to stay strong”. According to GQ Middle East she also “posted a video with a song dedicated to Palestine with lyrics that read: I’m far away, but I’m praying for you…In the land of peace, peace is dead. And the world is sleeping on a hurt child”. Perhaps someone should tell Elyanna that peace is dead because Hamas terrorists killed it and, further, that Hamas is directly responsible for every dead Gazan - man, woman and child. Israelis who were raped, tortured, beheaded, and taken hostage? Not worthy of mention by Elyanna. Not her problem.
So much for Yang’s comment that “BCA is in no way a hurtful or exclusionary organization.” After all, who at Brown isn’t 100% behind Hamas just like Elyanna? Then again maybe Yang and BCA Co-Head Brian Wang will be handing out keffiyehs and hijabs for Jewish students to wear during the Spring Weekend concert this weekend. Wearing garb in support of Hamas will surely make Jewish students feel more welcome and included when listening to Elyanna. And if BCA is not clear as to whom among Brown students is Jewish, there is precedent for having Jews wear a yellow Star of David for identification purposes.
The Brown administration will likely do nothing about BCA’s anti-Semitic poster. It probably will be excused under the rubric of “academic freedom and free speech”. But just imagine Brown’s reaction to a student group putting up a poster with white people in blackface, or a cartoon satirizing the Prophet Muhammad - think Charlie Hebdo, or demanding that Syria be wiped off the map because its government has killed approximately 600,000 Muslims in the last 11 years - men, women and children. Those hypothetical students would be expelled from Brown in a heartbeat. But channeling Der Sturmer as to Jews? Free speech.
(5) Also on April 17, CMES, along with 14 additional Brown academic entities, sponsored a “conversation” with Peter Beinart. The conversation was facilitated by three Brown faculty, two of whom are outspoken Israel-haters, the third may or may not be. (See my post of April 14.) The Beinart talk was livestreamed but not recorded. Unfortunately I was unable to view the livestream. I foolishly thought the Beinart “conversation” might be reported on by the BDH, but so far it has not been.
It is by now clear that the current BDH, like previous iterations of the BDH, has entered into a deal with the devil regarding CMES, or taken a monastic vow of silence, when it comes to CMES and its propagandists posing as educators. CMES is virtually never the subject of BDH news coverage. Evidently the BDH has no interest in covering what in any forum at Brown other than CMES would be hate-speech.
Nor does the BDH believe that coverage is merited when CMES brings to Brown the worst of the worst - or the best of the best from the CMES perspective - when it comes to demonizing the Jewish state, e.g., Noura Erekat from Rutgers, a Spring 2022 “Visiting Fellow in Palestinian Studies” at Brown. Perhaps the BDH is terrified by the prospect of being deemed Islamophobic for even mentioning CMES. Then again BDH staff may well see no issues at all with CMES’ anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic agenda.
Relatedly, the BDH has yet to mention the three comprehensive studies of what goes on in CMES as fully documented by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (“CAMERA”) or as summarized in a New York Post opinion piece.
While CMES didn’t record the Beinart “conversation” and the BDH staff is quivering in the shadows when it comes to CMES, Beinart recently spoke at Harvard and Duke. Student journalists at the Harvard Crimson and the Duke Chronicle found appearances by highly visible Beinart newsworthy. Imagine that. Student journalists doing what student journalists are supposed to do, except at Brown.
While I am unable to report on what Beinart said at Brown, at Harvard he held a “conversation” with a Harvard Crimson writer. Described in the preface to the article “as one of American Jewry’s most prominent critics of Israel”, “he has proclaimed the death of the two-state solution and said he no longer believes in a Jewish state.” According to the Crimson article, Rabbi David Wolpe, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School has accused Beinart of “whitewashing” the “unremitting hostility of Israel’s neighbors” while the progressive group J Street has called him “the troubadour of our movement”. Some of the following comments are no doubt the reason Beinart was invited to Brown. Whether he made the comments at Brown, I cannot say, but it’s difficult to imagine he strayed too far from them or their themes:
“Gaza [as] an open air prison”, citing Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International;
“Denying people [Palestinians] their basic human rights is okay is the actual position of the organized American Jewish community”;
“Republicans in the congressional hearing [where the presidents of Penn, MIT and Harvard testified] really could not care less about Palestinian life”.
Interestingly, Beinart cites Brown professor Omer Bartov as a “former Israeli Defense Force soldier and one of the world’s great Holocaust scholars, has warned [that Gaza] could be a genocide”.
According to the Duke Chronicle, during his “conversation” there Beinbart said:
“Questioning the idea of Jewish statehood…will be a current in American Jewish life”;
“Anti-Zionist discourse is a threat to Jewish students so it needs to be shut down…a convenient way to use the claim of antisemitism to basically shut down changes in the universities that have empowered the voices of a whole group of people whose vision of America is fundamentally antithetical to the vision of MAGA”;
“I’m not a fan of Hamas, or the way it’s used its money [from the Gazans they tax…they’ve used a lot of that money for military purposes”.
Apart from the fact that Beinart does not speak for anywhere close to the majority of American Jews, his comments noted above underscore several key points related to CMES and Brown.
First, again, it couldn’t be more obvious as to why Beinart was invited to speak at Brown.
Second, that CMES organized its program to either minimize or completely eliminate the possibility that Beinart would be challenged as to anything he said, including things that could easily have been debunked, underscores why CMES should have no place at Brown. None. Beinart loves to debate but debate is antithetical to CMES’ purposes. (And if I am wrong about how the Beinart “conversation” was handled, maybe someone will provide me the facts.)
CMES is an entirely political, illiberal, anti-intellectual petri dish for anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism. Beinart, a “progressive” Jew, may believe that the anti-Zionism CMES peddles isn’t anti-Semitism. That is his right, however wrong he is. But anyone seriously interested in liberal education would welcome hearing another point of view, even the polar opposite point of view. But education as to Israel/Palestinians is as far from the mission of CMES as could possibly be imagined.
Third, I have been very critical of the BDH because it, like CMES, consistently traffics in biased coverage when it comes to Israel/Palestinians. It is easy and tempting to dismiss campus newspapers as irrelevancies with respect to the real world. But they do play a role in - and provide a window into - the campuses they cover. And the role the BDH plays at Brown by burying its head in the sand when it comes to CMES is to foster the climate that results in what I have described above. And all the above in just a few days in one week in April.
Willis J. Goldsmith, Brown Class of 1969
Some universities have become hotbeds/nodes of pro-Hamas sentiment. Many are quiet. It would be interesting to figure out why this is. What is it about Columbia, MIT, and Brown that have made them this way? Bay Area is easy to figure out.
Mr. Goldsmith, Thank you for your work tracking the dissolution into vile anti-Semitism and general ignominy of a once-esteemed intellectual institution, Brown. Leadership there seems to have vanished and the installation of hitler-style - as you note - Jew-hatred continues apace. It is hard to believe. What happened to America - where Jewish contribution across every field is so immense? A decent leader at Brown with a sympathetic heart for justice could sweep out the hate-loving faculty and students in a day.