The Ted organisation has been hit with resignations and criticisms after naming the controversial activist billionaire Bill Ackman, who was instrumental in forcing out Harvard’s president over antisemitism allegations, among its main speakers at this year’s conference.

Four Ted fellows, led by the astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz and the filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky, resigned from the group on Wednesday, accusing it of taking an anti-Palestinian stand and aligning itself “with enablers and supporters of genocide” in Gaza.

“2024 main stage speaker Bill Ackman has defended Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and has cynically weaponised antisemitism in his programme to purge American universities of Pro-Palestinian freedom of speech,” the pair wrote to Chris Anderson, who leads Ted, and Lily James Olds, director of the fellows programme. [emphasis added]

Later, in his own voice, McGreal adds:

Ackman has taken stridently pro-Israel positions, including justifying the scale of the attacks on Gaza in which more than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly civilians, and the forced removal [sic] of about 2 million Palestinians from their homes. [emphasis added]

First, as we noted on these pages recently in response to an op-ed in The Guardian on the row at Harvard, the university’s president, Claudine Gay, didn’t resign over antisemitism allegations, but over dozens of reported examples of plagiarism throughout her academic career. Further, the role of Ackman, an alumni and donor who’s Jewish, according to detailed reports in both The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, was minimal.

McGreal later notes that Farouky and the other Ted fellows who signed the letter, also called out Bari Weiss. The letter describes Weiss, a political centrist and feminist who’s the founding editor of The Free Press, as having “a long, sordid, and well-documented history of anti-Palestinian speech.” But, if you follow the link in the letter, it shows that the “evidence” of Weiss’ “anti-Palestinian” speech — even if we accept that criticizing Palestinians is a moral crime — is non-existent.

Further, the letter reveals that what Farkouky and company mean when they accuse Ackman of being a “supporter of genocide” is the fact that he expressed support for Israel’s war against Hamas, the proscribed antisemitic terror group that engaged in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

To put Ackman’s view in perspective, a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll showed overwhelming American support (80%) for Israel in its war against Hamas, with 74% agreeing that Hamas’ attack on Israel was genocidal in nature. So, per Farkouy’s logic, 80% of Americans are extremist “genocide supporters” who should be banned at Ted Talks.

Unsurprisingly, we found that its Farouky who appears to have extremist views. On Oct. 8, the day after Hamas’s massacre, Farouky posted on X his view that while Hamas’s “indiscriminate killing and kidnapping” was not justified, terrorist violence against Israel (in general) is indeed justified, necessary, moral, and legal.

We can understand two things simultaneously 1) armed resistance to occupation and colonisation is legitimate, both morally and legally, and a necessary part of the liberation movement, and 2) indiscriminate killing and kidnapping is both immoral and illegal.

— Saeed Taji Farouky (@saeedtaji) October 8, 2023