After Yoav Segev was attacked on Harvard University’s campus in October 2023, shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, the university further victimized him, according to a new lawsuit which the Jewish student filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
“Harvard did everything it could to defend, protect and reward the assailants; to impede the criminal investigation; and to prevent Mr. Segev from obtaining administrative relief from the university,” per the complaint, which National Review obtained.
“After Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitism exploded on Harvard’s campus,” Mark Pinkert, partner at Holtzman Vogel, who is representing Segev, told JNS. “Amidst the chaos and protests, Yoav Segev was violently assaulted by student-employees, simply because he is Jewish.”
Segev is “pursuing justice against Harvard not only for failing to protect him and other Jewish students but for defending and rewarding antisemitism,” the attorney told JNS. “This type of treatment would be unimaginable for other minorities at Harvard, except Jews.”
The student was taking video on his phone on Harvard’s campus in 2023 during an anti-Israel “die in,” when protesters told him to leave. Segev said he had a right to be there and remained. Per the complaint, he was then surrounded by people wearing keffiyehs, who grabbed him “violently.”
The suit alleges that after Segev filed a complaint with the university, Harvard told him it couldn’t discipline the attackers, since Segev wanted to remain unnamed. Harvard conducted a “sham” investigation in January 2024 but declined to share the results with Segev, per the complaint.
The suit further alleges that Segev had sought to join lawsuits against Harvard anonymously but that Harvard publicized information that made it easy for people to identify him and the Harvard Crimson, a student paper, published an article naming him as part of a suit.
It also charges that Harvard rewarded two student employees who were involved in the October 2023 incident, with one receiving a paid Harvard Law Review fellowship and the other graduating from Harvard Divinity School as class marshal.
Harvard’s actions, and lack of response to antisemitism, continue to “severely impact” Segev’s “health, mental wellbeing and sense of security,” per the suit.
Jason Newton, director of media relations and communications at Harvard, told JNS that the school “remains committed to combating antisemitism and enforcing our anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies at all times.”
“Harvard has acted with deep concern for supporting our Jewish and Israeli students and will defend the university against these claims,” he said.
A Jewish Israeli researcher faced “discrimination and insidious, malicious conduct intended to permanently tarnish his reputation and career” at Stanford University, including “tampering with his lab results and manufacturing a bogus complaint against him, merely for being Israeli,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday.
The suit, brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the firm Cohen Williams, accuses the private school in Stanford, Calif., of being “complicit in permitting an environment saturated with intimidation and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students to flourish on campus.”
Shay Laps, a postdoctoral researcher, arrived at Stanford roughly six months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, having been recommended by a Nobel laureate, according to the lawsuit. He aimed to “develop his research of synthetic and ‘smart’ insulin, which would revolutionize treatment for millions of people suffering from diabetes,” the Brandeis Center stated.
He faced extensive discrimination in the lab of Danny Chou, an associate pediatrics professor at Stanford, per the lawsuit, including tampering with his research, a fabricated sexual harassment complaint against him and being locked out of a lab.
“I was just shocked by the set of facts,” Rachel Lerman, vice chair and director of appeals and critical motions at the @brandeiscenter, told JNS. “We all think we’ve seen it all, but this guy, he’s really traumatized by what happened.”
The widely used online encyclopedia Wikipedia deems the Anti-Defamation League and NGO Monitor to be “generally unreliable” sources to cite when discussing Israel and the Palestinians, but it maintains that Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor “can be cited as an opinion source” on Israel and the Palestinians. EuroMed has accused Israeli soldiers of harvesting Palestinian organs and their founder and chairman celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is “an advocacy organization on a controversial topic, and should be used with attribution for factual claims,” Wikipedia states on its list of “reliable” and “perennial” sources. The group appears “to gather and responsibly report claims and information gathered directly from primary sources, and is widely used with attribution by reliable news sources,” Wikipedia states.
@GeraldNGOM is the president of @NGOmonitor, whose profile of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor notes its links to Hamas. “This is outrageous, but not surprising,” he told JNS, of Wikipedia trusting the group more than his nonprofit.
“Wikipedia’s decision-making process, especially on highly disputed arenas like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, amplifies prevailing ideological biases and agendas,” Steinberg told JNS. “Advocacy NGOs and their allies have invested years in attempts to silence NGO Monitor research. This is far from preservation of knowledge.”
‘Hypocrisy, double-standards’ in effort to axe Wikipedia page on Iranian policy to destroy Israel
“The whole thing is totally arbitrary,” an observer who documents anti-Israel hate bias on the platform told JNS.
Iranian regime leaders have long said “death to Israel” publicly, and Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, told the United Nations Security Council this week that the Islamic Republic’s avowed goal is to “annihilate the State of Israel.” Iranian terror proxies, including Hamas, call for Israel’s destruction in their charters.
But that isn’t enough for some editors at Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site globally in May, who are attempting to delete an article titled “Destruction of Israel in Iranian policy.”
The article, which was created on June 4 and has garnered about 42,000 views in the past 30 days, states that Iran’s “foreign policy doctrine includes calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state” and that “the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy has remained consistent across both hardline and moderate Iranian leaderships.”
@MaxAbrahms, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University who studies terrorism and the Middle East, told JNS that “Wikipedia is waging a disinformation campaign against Israel.”
If the page is deleted, or if it is merged into a larger article, “Israel will be less popular, the Islamic Republic will be more popular and readers will be stupider,” he said.
Excited to announce that I've been published in @RCInvestigates about @Wikipedia!
Taking Sides: Wikipedia Advances Anti-Israel Narratives 🧵
Wikipedia, the world’s go-to site for information that professes to take a neutral point of view, is coming under fire for alleged anti-Israel bias in the sources it favors and content it delivers to millions of readers.
The criticism is coming from several quarters, including a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress who, in an April letter, expressed “deep concern regarding antisemitism” found in the online encyclopedia. The entries routinely highlight the work of anti-Zionist scholars and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), according to a review by RealClearInvestigations, while dismissing the views of Israel’s defenders. Amnesty International, which casts Israel as genocidal, is considered a reliable source for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the Anti-Defamation League, which rejects that view, is not.
Wikipedia is produced by volunteer editors who are instructed to follow a set of rules as they summarize the work of authoritative sources, which can include those that appear to be biased. Its consensus model encourages editors to work out their differences collegially and reach a compromise that balances the different viewpoints of sources to ensure neutrality. But critics say that so many academics and NGOs hold left-leaning views that cast Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed that it is hard for editors to avoid publishing biased statements as neutral ones.
Consider Wiki’s entry for “Gaza genocide” – a title that, critics argue, takes sides. It begins with this statement: “According to a United Nations Special Committee, Amnesty International, and other experts and human rights organizations, Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people during its ongoing invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the Gaza war.” The entry then lists several paragraphs of evidence, including large-scale deaths of Palestinians, the forced displacement of most of the population, and starvation.
Where’s the other side of the story to establish neutrality? Not until the seventh paragraph do readers learn that Hamas’ attack in Israel, killing 1,139 people, sparked the invasion of Gaza. But rather than calling Hamas a terrorist group – a classification used by the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada, and other democratic nations – whose avowed goal is the destruction of Israel, the entry describes the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas as a response to Israel’s historic treatment of Palestinians.