Hamas attacks and Harvard: University’s determination to go full woke leads to moral bankruptcy

Editor’s note: The following column was originally published. City Journal.

Harvard University found itself in an ideological bind. In the wake of Hamas’ horrific terrorist attacks against Israel, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, joined by 33 other student organizations, released a statement condemning the Jewish state for Hamas’ killing, rape, and mutilation of its own citizens. . “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement said. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

The response was swift. The media, the public, and prominent politicians accused the students of justifying atrocities against innocent people, including women, children, and the elderly. Harvard’s leadership, long used to towing a radical line, issued a general statement of condemnation, saying, “The student organizations that speak for Harvard and its leadership — even 30 student organizations — I hesitated for days before writing, “It doesn’t exist.”

Meanwhile, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers expressed surprise on social media and wondered why the university would do this. did it “We found nothing that matched the moral clarity of Harvard University’s statements after the death of George Floyd and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Former Harvard University President Larry Summers is ‘disgusted’ by students’ ‘morally unconscionable comments’ about Israel’s war

It’s hard to believe that Summers is sincere. As anyone associated with Harvard, especially a longtime professor and former president, knows, the politics of decolonization, critical race theory, and anti-Israel demagoguery have been part of Harvard society for decades. It has become the center of life. And it’s not just a cause raised by misguided students. Administrators, departmental leaders, and prominent faculty have all developed it, institutionalized it, or at least publicly delegated it to radicals who have done so.

One need only look at the current Harvard University course catalog to see how deeply embedded the rhetoric of “decolonization” is. One of his courses, “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization,” draws on critical ethnic studies, a branch of critical race theory, to “black, Asian, It promises to promote “Latinx, Indigenous radicalism” or the left. Ethnic politics for everyone except whites and Jews. The purpose, according to the course description, is to “discuss how BIPOC communities have built transracial, internationalist solidarity in opposition to global white supremacy.”

Harvard student group claims Israel bears full responsibility for Gaza attack

Another course, “Colonialism and its Postcolonial/Decolonial Afterlife,” features readings of Lenin and Frantz Fanon, the latter saying that “violence is a cleansing force” and that “the He claimed that it frees people from feelings of inferiority and restores their sense of self. respect. ”

The rest of the course description is a repetition of the old Third World Revolutionary Front slogan, “The relationship between empire and the rise of industrial capitalism, the importance of race, class, and gender in colonial exploitation; We promise to explore the style of That is the basis of violence. ” solution? Common metaphors: ‘refusal’, ‘resistance’, ‘postcoloniality’, ‘decoloniality’.

What do these terms mean? To answer this question, we can look to a program funded by Harvard University called “Harvard Decolonization.” In 2021, the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University announced that Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, a visiting assistant professor of Latinx studies who uses the pseudopronouns “he/they,” will lead the university’s “decolonization” efforts. hired. The premise was simple. Administrators, faculty, and students must “understand and frame Harvard as a settler-colonial, genocidal, Eurocentric institution” built on the “fundamental violence” of white Europeans. That’s true, Montalvo said in a recorded lecture.

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The solution, Montalvo says, is to engage in a “decolonization process” that incorporates critical theory, ethnopolitical struggle, and leftist pedagogy throughout the university. After this process was completed, Montalvo surmised: “Harvard University and Settlers College [may] The goal, ontologically and epistemologically speaking, could be to “abolish universities altogether.”

Israel also participates in this dialectic. Montalvo touted a program called “Decolonizing Harvard” that emphasized the work of Harvard students and faculty against Israel’s supposed “apartheid regime” and “settlement enterprise.” The student body accused Israel of “structural and cultural forms of violence” and called for both “academic action” and “collective resistance” against the Jewish state.

Five Harvard University faculty members also released a statement linking the work of “Palestinian liberation” to Harvard’s decolonization efforts, calling for “teaching about Palestine, incorporating Palestinian studies into the syllabus, He advocated for a “stronger commitment to inviting academics and community members.” These include speaking at university events and supporting campus activities for the liberation of Palestine. ”

Montalvo and his fellow travelers are clear that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” as the title of their academic paper asserts. The logic is that as Palestinian militants decolonize Israel, domestic academics should also decolonize institutions such as Harvard University.

As we have seen since October 7, the results of “decolonization” are barbaric. For Hamas, that means killing women, children, and the elderly, executing innocent people in the streets, and dismembering infants in their homes.

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For radical scholars, this process is less brutal, but still barbaric. It means destroying our highest institutions, obliterating academic standards, and elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudoscience to positions of authority. Philosopher Leo Strauss once defined nihilism as the opposition to civilization itself. And this is exactly what decolonizing scholars have done in their vengeful fantasy of “abolishing” Harvard University, once the crowning symbol of Western civilization.

Americans need to understand that the massacre in Gaza is not simply the result of foreign anger. The same extremists who support Hamas’s destruction of civilization abroad are also committing civilized suicide here at home.

Click here to read more articles by Christopher F. Ruffo