Harvard 'pausing' ties with one university is a good first step

(JNS) — Harvard University’s decision to “pause” a research partnership with Birzeit University, a Palestinian university near Ramallah, was long overdue.

In 2023, Israeli security forces arrested eight students from Birzeit University who were planning what was described as “an imminent terror attack.” That apparently meant that the plan wasn’t just theoretical; it was on the verge of becoming operational. Birzeit should be known as “Terror U” for its students’ active support of Hamas.

For instance, a basketball championship game was held at Birzeit under the auspices of the university’s Sports Education Club to honor Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences in Israel for five murders. The student players wore shirts bearing a photo of Barghouti, and the winners received trophies—from Barghouti’s wife, of all people—featuring text calling for his release from jail.

Students representing the terrorist groups Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were permitted to stage military parades on campus. Marchers carried facsimiles (hopefully) of bombs and rockets. They held posters featuring the likenesses of the founders of Hamas and the PFLP, and waved the official flags of the two terrorist groups.

A group of Birzeit students were arrested for taking part in a Hamas funds-transferring scheme, in which funds from the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip were withdrawn by Birzeit students from ATMs in nearby Ramallah and then used to finance terrorist activities.

OK, so good for Harvard for its latest action.

Yet the Ivy League school’s relationship with Birzeit followed a partnership with another Palestinian Arab university that supports terrorism: Al Quds University near Jerusalem.

Al Quds has a long record of pro-terrorist activities. In 2016, the university administration organized a “chain of readers” to publicly honor the multiple murderer Baha Alyan. Several months earlier, Alyan and an accomplice boarded a Jerusalem bus and began attacking passengers. One of those he murdered was a 78-year-old American Jewish civil-rights activist from Connecticut, Richard Lakin. Alyan stabbed and shot the defenseless elderly man in his face and chest.

The Palestinian TV station Wattan reported on the Al Quds chain-reading celebration: “More than 2,500 male and female students participated in the chain, and it included the reading of books and letter-writing by the participants, all of this in the presence of the martyr’s father, the lawyer Muhammad Alyan.” The students wrote letters “to the souls of martyr Baha Alyan and the other martyrs and their relatives. … Participants in the activity wore shirts with a picture of martyr Baha Alyan.”

Students affiliated with the PFLP have set up a monument on campus called the “Monument to the Martyrs of Al-Quds University.” It features this inscription: “Beware of natural death; do not die, but amidst the hail of bullets.” That’s a quote from the late PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani (translation comes courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch). Kanafani was one of the masterminds of the 1972 Lod Airport attack in which 26 travelers, including 11 American citizens from Puerto Rico, were massacred.

When Al-Raouf Abd Al-Sinawi, the dean of student affairs at Al Quds, was asked by Wattan if the university authorized the pro-terrorist monument, he replied: “Why would we oppose [it]?”

The PFLP students are not the only pro-terrorist group that Al Quds permits on its campus. There’s also a “Sisters of Dalal Mughrabi” group, honoring the woman terrorist who led the massacre of 37 Jews in the Tel Aviv Highway massacre in 1978. The first victim of that slaughter was American Jewish nature photographer Gail Rubin, who was the niece of Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, a Democrat.

What makes Harvard’s embrace of Birzeit and Al Quds especially appalling is that some of Harvard’s own students have been victims of Palestinian terrorism.

Harvard student Etan Bard and his father, Seldon Bard, were murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists who blew up a TWA flight from Israel in 1974. Harvard alumnus Harold Rosenthal, who had served as an aide to U.S. senators Walter Mondale and Jacob Javits, was murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the Istanbul airport in 1976. Another Harvard graduate, Dr. Alan Bauer, was severely wounded, as was his 7-year-old son, in a Palestinian Arab suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2002.

Harvard’s continued partnership with Al Quds is a slap in the face to the families of Etan Bard and Harold Rosenthal, as well as an insult to the memory of all victims of Palestinian Arab terrorism.

Stephen M. Flatow is president of the Religious Zionists of America. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995, and author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”