The Shooting of Brown Student Hisham Awartani
Before the tragic shooting of Hisham Awartani, Class of 2025, and two others last Saturday evening, I had intended to write of the Brown Daily Herald’s entirely one-sided, poorly researched, poorly written coverage of the Hamas-initiated war against Israel as related to the Brown community. As I have written here previously, the Herald has a recent history of soft-pedaling or ignoring anti-Semitism at Brown, including the anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism that emanates cancer-like from Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies. While BDH staffs change with graduations, when it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism on the Brown campus, as the song lyric goes, “the melody lingers on”, Herald staff to successive Herald staff.
The headline of the lead story of the November 28 issue of the Herald reads “At vigil for Palestinian junior, crowd shouts Paxson off microphone amid calls for divestment”. To its credit, the BDH describes the shooting “as a possible hate crime”. That is true - the three victims may have been victims of a hate crime or just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. As to the latter possibility, Jason Eaton who pled not guilty to the charges against him, had just been fired from a finance job after working at it for less than a year. He previously had left or been fired from two finance jobs in the Syracuse, NY area in, it seems, a three-year period before moving to Vermont this past summer. According to his mother, Eaton had suffered from depression and other mental health issues and had “a lot of struggles in his life”.
The rest of the article highlights much of what is so wrong, and so out of control, at Brown. Condemning the violence and holding a “vigil for peace and healing” turned out to be just the jumping off point for the usual suspects to go into overdrive with unhinged anti-Israel rants. Brown President Paxson was shouted down and unable to complete her remarks with students chanting “‘Brown divest’, ’shame on you’ and booing.” The cowardly “organizers” of Brown Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) complained, anonymously of course, about Brown’s response being “too little, too late”, incanting by rote their standard nonsense demanding “protection of students, ceasefire now and divestment from apartheid” and of course “free Palestine”. To them “free Palestine” means “Palestine” “from the river to the sea”, ie a mythical state free of all the Jews in the only Jewish state in the world. Good luck with that one girls and boys.
Further as to Brown SJP, the BDH continues to treat it as some sort of normal student organization like, say, a chess club. They are anything but. President Paxson had the good judgment and common sense not to attend the SJP post-October 7 “vigil”, in reality a “vigil” for Hamas. Did anyone on the BDH staff ask her why she made that decision? Has any BDH reporter or editor done any research on the terrorist funding of SJP? No one on the BDH staff wonders how it is that professionally prepared signs and banners appear at every SJP protest? Who paid for the banner that hung from Faunce House on Monday night? Did any BDH staff member look into the history of SJP’s physical threats to Jewish students on campuses throughout the country? Do BDH reporters know that Brandeis University banned SJP for repeatedly violating university policies and that at Columbia (of all places) and George Washington universities SJP has been suspended? Do BDH staff know whether the almost always anonymous SJP leaders and demonstrators at Brown are even students at Brown? Why does the BDH keep giving these junior varsity terrorists a platform?
A curious aspect of the BDH article on the shooting in Vermont relates to a message allegedly written by Awartani and read at Monday night’s vigil by, who else, but Brown’s very own Hamas mouthpiece Beshara Doumani. Of the three victims of the 6:30 pm shooting last Saturday, Awartani was the most seriously injured with a bullet lodged in his spine. According to Awartani’s mother, “he should be having an operation today [November 29]”. Yet despite his very serious condition and the undeniably tragic circumstances, very soon after being grievously wounded he was able to compose, presumably from his hospital bed, a lengthy text/email reciting many of the standard talking points of Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies which, as noted above, Doumani read to the crowd on Monday:
“It is important to recognize that this is part of a larger story. This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum…As much as I appreciate and love every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict. Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who shot me would go home and never be convicted. I understand that the pain is so much more real and immediate because many of you know me, but any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine. This is why when you say your wishes and light your candles today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as a proud member of a people being oppressed.”
Following his no doubt performative reading, which according to the BDH was met with cheers and applause, “Doumani reiterated students’ calls for divestment.”
It is of course possible that Awartani has quite amazing powers of pain suppression, concentration, and compartmentalization. That would explain why, within an extremely short time after a bullet entered his spine, he was able to compose the above notwithstanding whatever pain he was experiencing, whatever medications he was receiving and the effects of whatever IVs and other medical devices were being used to keep him alive.
It also is possible that Doumani composed the message on his way to Awartani’s hospital bed in Burlington or at the hospital, read it to a seriously injured young man, and maybe even gotten Awartani to sign it or give his permission to use it and describe it as his. That of course, would have been an entirely irresponsible, entirely inexcusable, entirely unethical abuse of Doumani’s position and power and be cause for very serious consequences to follow. But given the long, well-documented history of the extent to which supporters and enablers of Hamas/Palestinians like Doumani have dissembled, told half-truths and lied to advance their cause it cannot be ruled out as a possibility. One need only recall the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion of October 17. Even the rabidly anti-Israel NGO Human Rights Watch has concluded that the explosion “resulted from an apparent rocket-propelled munition, such as those commonly used by Palestinian armed groups”. Has Doumani yet recanted his position on that or does he still maintain that Israel fired on the hospital?
Notwithstanding the circumstances, the BDH apparently never thought to question the provenance of the Awartani message. There would have been no reason for any reporter or editor to do so - the message fits the BDH-approved narrative perfectly.
Once again, what happened to those three young men in Burlington, VT last Saturday was a horrible tragedy whether or not it was a hate crime. Hopefully all three will recover fully and promptly.
Willis J. Goldsmith, Brown Class of 1969