Thread by @KassyAkiva

Harvard is sending students to a school with deep terrorist ties this summer.

When I asked them to comment on partnering Birzeit University, which has barred Jews from campus and has a student government run by Hamas, Harvard defended the upcoming program.

THREAD:

The “Palestine Social Medicine Course” is a “three-week intensive summer course is designed to introduce students to the social, structural, political, and historical aspects that determine Palestinian health beyond the biological basis of disease.” 

The curriculum content will include hearing from health practitioners, academics, and activists about various topics including “Settler colonialism and its manifestations in Palestine” and “Health and racism,” the website adds.

Birzeit’s students voted for a Hamas-affiliated bloc for its student government for a second year in a row in May.

The Islamic Bloc won 25 of the 51 seats with 4,481 votes in the race that had a 77% voter turnout.

The Bloc said its victory proves students favor “the option of resistance” against Israel, and disapprove of the Palestinian Authority’s policies.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh praised their victory and even spoke to participants at its celebrations over the phone, claiming the victory shows Hamas is “unbreakable” in the West Bank, Middle East Monitor reported.

In September, the student government president, Abdulmajid Hassan, and seven other students were arrested by the Israel Defense Forces. Some of the students confessed to planning a terror attack.

One of the co-directors of Harvard’s program condemned the raid during a webinar about the trip.

“We condemn the Israeli raid of Birzeit University on September 24th and stand in solidarity with our colleagues at Birzeit University,” David Mills said. “These raids violate the right of Palestinians to education, freedom of speech, and freedom of association.”

In 2022, Birzeit student activists were arrested for helping to launder money from Gaza to Hamas members in Turkey to finance terrorist attacks, The Jerusalem Post reported.

m.jpost.com/middle-east/ar…

About 60 to 70 Birzeit students are imprisoned at any given time for security offenses, according to a 2017 feature by the Financial Times.

ft.com/content/5c7ed0…

Stephanie Simon, Harvard’s Dean for Communications and Strategic Initiatives acknowledged the student body’s association with Hamas, but said it has not affected its program. She referred to Hamas as a major political party.

“Student government elections at Birzeit typically involve candidates affiliated with each of the major political parties in the region, including Hamas,” she said. “These student government elections are not germane to and have not affected the FXB Center’s work with the scholars and students at Birzeit’s Institute of Community and Public Health.”

Birzeit University, widely considered the most prestigious Palestinian university, called for “glory for martyrs” on October 10, just days after Hamas’ attack on civilians in southern Israel.

Birzeit University’s website describes itself as a “thorn in the side of the occupation,” and says it is “transforming Palestinian higher education through its impact on community awareness, culture and resistance.”

In 2022, Birzeit University’s Sports Education Club hosted an athletic competition named after one of its many prominent terrorist alumni, Marwan Barghouti, who received his master’s degree in 1998. Barghouti is considered a leader of the First and Second Intifada and was convicted of killing five people.

palwatch.org/page/29904

Birzeit University’s Kamal Nasser Hall is named after a leader of Black September, the terror organization responsible for kidnapping and killing 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

On Nov. 24, 2022, the bloc hosted a “Ayyash’s Army,” event after Birzeit electric engineering alum Yahya Ayyash who is known for revamping suicide bombs and helping kill 100 civilians.

It was hosted the day after 22 Israelis were injured, and two killed, from terrorist bombs at a bus stop.

memri.org/reports/praise…

Ahlam Aref Ahmad al-Tamimi, who helped bomb an Israeli pizza shop in 2001, is also an alum.

At a 2014 prisoner release deal celebration al-Tamimi spoke through recorded message and reminisced about her time as a student and thanked Hamas’s Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

middleeastmonitor.com/20140220-islam…

In 2021, a parade celebrating Hamas’s 34th anniversary was held on campus — against the school’s COVID-19 gathering restrictions — where masked students wearing the Hamas banner beat up university security guards. The school announced it temporarily suspended one student involved.

jpost.com/middle-east/ar…

Birzeit University had an official policy banning Israeli Jews from being on campus, which came to light in 2014 when a left-wing reporter for Haaretz was removed from a conference. It is unclear if this policy is still in place.

“She and her colleagues were afraid, she told me, that students would break into the conference hall in protest over my presence,” Amira Haas wrote, recounting the incident. “Palestinian citizens of Israel who teach at Israeli universities are not subject to the same policy.”

haaretz.com/2014-09-28/ty-…

Harvard launched its relationship with Birzeit University last summer when its FXB Center for Health and Human Rights brought the first group of students to the West Bank for the program.

The faculty for the program are all affiliated with the FXB Center, including Yara Asi, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, who wrote a letter in November with colleagues calling for a ceasefire and “centering Palestine in the classroom.”

hhrjournal.org/2023/11/health…

Bram Wispelwey, who will teach during the program and also teaches at Harvard Medical School, published an op-ed in Al Jazeera in November calling the war in Gaza a “U.S.-backed genocide.”

He went on to accuse Western doctors of being “collaborationists” with “colonial violence” if they engage in “passive silence.”

aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/…

All of the program’s faculty members — Mills, Asi, Wispelway, as well as two others named Weeam Hammoudeh, and Osama Tannous — joined to pen an academic article in 2022, claiming that “health equity” for Palestinians “is possible only with the abolition of all oppressive structures that ensure Jewish supremacy and Palestinian inferiority from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

The Harvard spokeswoman said that “leadership at Harvard Chan School and the FXB Center unequivocally condemn Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel and its taking of hostages.”

This year’s program is set to take place from July 29 to August 17, with a cost of $2,750 per participant.

My full report for @realDailyWire:

dailywire.com/news/harvard-t…