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‘Harvard Has Caved In’: Pro-Hamas Demonstrators Celebrate ‘Student Intifada’ After School ‘Downgrades’ Punishments
Demonstrators take their “Emergency Rally: Stand with Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza” out of Harvard University and onto the streets of Harvard Square, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct.14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University has “downgraded” the disciplinary sanctions it levied against several pro-Hamas protesters it punished for illegally occupying Harvard Yard and roiling the campus for nearly five weeks, The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday.
The shocking development will likely erase the good will Harvard regained by appearing to embrace an approach to discipline that would deter future unruly behavior as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate incidents the protesters perpetrated throughout the school year, which damaged the reputation of the institution and prompted a slew of lawsuits and federal investigations.
Per the Crimson, “The most severe probation charge will last for just one semester, a remarkable change from the initial punishments which required at least one student to withdraw from the college for three semesters. Some students who were initially placed on probation in late May also had the length of their probations reduced.”
For a time Harvard University talked tough about its intention to dismantle a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” — a collection of tents in which demonstrators lived and from which they refused to leave unless Harvard agreed to boycott and divest from Israel — protesters had set up on campus, creating an impression that no one would go unpunished.
In a public statement, interim president Alan Garber denounced their actions for forcing the rescheduling of exams and disrupting the academics of students who continued doing their homework and studying for final exams, responsibilities the protesters seemingly abdicated by essentially taking an early summer break to participate in the demonstration.
Harvard then began suspending the protesters following their rejection of a deal to leave the encampment, according to The Harvard Crimson. Before then, Garber vowed that any student who continued to occupy the section of campus would be placed on “involuntary leave,” a measure that effectively disenrolls the students from school and bars them from campus until the university decides whether they are allowed back. The disciplinary measures were levied one day after members of Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) created a sign featuring an antisemitic caricature of Garber as Satan, and accused him of duplicity.
During Harvard’s commencement ceremonies in May, reports emerged that some students had been banned from graduation and receiving their diplomas.
However, Harvard, as well as the organization responsible for the encampment, HOOP, always maintained that some protesters would be allowed to appeal their punishments, per an agreement the two parties reached, but it was not clear that the end result would amount to a victory for the protesters.
Unrepentant, HOOP on Wednesday celebrated the revocation of the suspensions on social media and, in addition to suggesting that they will disrupt the campus again, called their movement an “intifada,” alluding to two prolonged periods of Palestinian terrorism during which hundreds of Israeli Jews were murdered.
“Harvard walks back on probations and reverses suspensions of pro-Palestine students after massive pressure,” the group said. “After sustained student and faculty organizing, Harvard has caved in, showing that the student intifada will always prevail … This reversal is a bare minimum. We call on our community to demand no less than Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea. Grounded in the rights of return and resistance. We will not rest until divestment from the Israeli regime is met.”
The news was met with disappointment from Jewish Harvard students and leaders, many of whom have met with lawmakers to discuss their experiences with antisemitism there.
“What?! Harvard reverses the very few suspensions they gave to students who harassed Jews and called for violence,” tweeted Harvard student Shabbos Kestenbaum. “Antisemitic classmates consider this a victory, declaring ‘long live the intifada.’”
The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance added, “It’s fine to ignore Harvard’s rules as long as you’re putting Jews in their place … if you’re targeting any other group, you will be disciplined.”
The past year has been described by experts as a low point in the history of Harvard University, America’s oldest and, arguably, most important institution of higher education. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas across southern Israel, the school has been accused of fostering a culture of racial grievance and antisemitism, while important donors have suspended funding for programs. In just the past nine months, its first Black president, Claudine Gay, resigned in disgrace after being outed as a serial plagiarist; Harvard faculty shared an antisemitic cartoon on social media; and its protesters were filmed surrounding a Jewish student and shouting “Shame!” into his ears.
According to the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Harvard has repeatedly misrepresented its handling of the explosion of hate and rule breaking, launching a campaign of deceit and spin to cover up what ultimately became the biggest scandal in higher education.
A report generated by the committee as part of a wider investigation of the school claimed that the university formed an Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) largely for show and did not consult its members when Jewish students were subject to verbal abuse and harassment, a time, its members felt, when its counsel was most needed. The advisory group went on to recommend nearly a dozen measures for addressing the problem and offered other guidance, the report said, but it was excluded from high-level discussions which preceded, for example, the December congressional testimony of former president Gay — a hearing convened to discuss antisemitism at Harvard.
So frustrated were a “majority” of AAG members with being an accessory to what the committee described as a guilefully crafted public relations facade that they threatened to resign from it.
Harvard must still tend to outstanding issues which resulted from the events of this past academic year. A congressional investigation of its handling of antisemitism is ongoing and six Jewish students are suing it for allegedly ignoring antisemitism discrimination.
In April, attorneys representing the school attempted to have the suit tossed out of court, arguing that the plaintiffs lack legal standing.
“Without minimizing at all the importance of the need to address energetically antisemitism at the university, plaintiff’s dissatisfaction with the strategy and speed of Harvard’s essential work does not state a legally cognizable claim,” said the motion to dismiss, as quoted by The Crimson. “Consequently, the amended complaint should be dismissed.”
Shabbos Kestenbaum, one of the plaintiffs in the case, has vowed to see the litigation through to the end.
“Harvard’s meritless motion to dismiss our lawsuit only proves our point: It has never taken the concerns of us Jewish students seriously, and has no plans to start now,” he said in a statement. “We will continue to apply maximum pressure in both the court of law and the court of public opinion … We hope that donors and prospective students follow closely.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘Harvard Has Caved In’: Pro-Hamas Demonstrators Celebrate ‘Student Intifada’ After School ‘Downgrades’ Punishments first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Leaders Push US Congress to Bolster Antisemitism Protections Amid Rising Anti-Jewish Violence
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul lays flowers in honor of shooting victims Israeli Embassy workers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, US, May 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Hundreds of Jewish leaders from across the US gathered in Washington, DC on Wednesday with a clear and urgent message to lawmakers that Jewish communities in the United States are under threat and need stronger federal protection.
Nearly 400 advocates representing more than 100 Jewish communities participated in the two-day United for Security Emergency Leadership Mission in the nation’s capital, holding more than 200 meetings with members of Congress and their staff. The mission, organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, comes amid a rise in domestic antisemitism and increased tensions between Israel and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter urged American officials to take a hard line as talks with Iran are set to resume.
“The basis of any agreement pursued with Iran has to be there is no more attempt to annihilate the Jewish state, the Jewish people,” Leiter said during remarks at the Hilton in Washington.
Much of the mission focused on concerns regarding domestic antisemitism. Organizers say Jewish Americans have faced a surge of threats since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault on Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, with attacks and harassment targeting synagogues, schools, and community centers across the country. Data indicates that antisemitic attacks have surged across the US since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
The meeting also comes one month after the fatal shooting of Israeli Embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, D.C. The pair was targeted by a pro-Palestinian activist after exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Milgrim’s father has suggested that the pair might have been saved had there been more security at the venue.
“Had there been more security at the event where Sarah and Yaron were tragically murdered, had there been more security outside, watching the crowd, I feel that it possibly could have identified the shooter pacing back and forth and possibly disarmed him,” Bob Milgrim told the Jewish delegation on Wednesday.
Advocates are calling on Congress to adopt a six-point federal policy plan that includes raising the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to $1 billion annually, providing support for private security costs, expanding FBI counterterrorism resources, and enhancing federal aid to local law enforcement. The plan also calls for stronger enforcement of hate crime laws and new efforts to regulate online hate speech and violent incitement.
“We are here to speak with one voice,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America. “We know there are many things on the nation’s agenda, but we must insist that the safety and security of the Jewish community and the battle against domestic terror be at the very top.”
“Support for Israel’s security is not a partisan issue. It is a moral imperative, a strategic interest and a Jewish responsibility,” added William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents. “Support for Israel is not negotiable, Jewish safety in America is not optional, and the silence in the face of antisemitic incitement, whether it comes from Iran’s Ayatollahs or American campuses, is unacceptable.”
The mission brought together more than 50 national organizations in what participants described as an unprecedented show of unity. Organizers said the gathering reflected a growing sense of alarm over the safety of Jewish communities at home and abroad.
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New York Police Arrest Shirtless Man After Wig Theft, Child Attack, Knife Threats Against Jews in Crown Heights
The headquarters of the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch movement in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Law enforcement in New York City arrested an unnamed individual alleged to have terrorized multiple Jewish residents in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights in Brooklyn.
Photos from the scene on Wednesday morning showed New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers leading away a skinny, shirtless man whose pants sagged down just above his knees. The images showed him handcuffed with bare feet and a report described him as riding a bicycle.
The man allegedly approached a Jewish mother and her children before stealing her wig (worn for religious observance) and hitting one of her children. He also reportedly yelled antisemitic slurs, punched a Jewish man, and threatened him with a knife before the NYPD and Crown Heights Shmira, a nonprofit Jewish security agency, arrested him.
The attacks came amidst a surge of antisemitic hate crimes in New York City following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks across southern Israel. Earlier this year, the NYPD released a report showing that for 2024, it counted 641 total hate crimes with 345 targeting Jews — an increase of 7 percent from 2023 and a staggering 54 percent of all hate crimes.
Antisemitic criminals in New York City have often chosen Crown Heights as their hunting ground for harassing or even assaulting Jews.
In November, for example, three men who hid their faces behind hoods and ski masks chose to stalk and rob a Hasidic man. Yaacov Behrman, liaison of Chabad Headquarters and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance (JFA) nonprofit, said following the crime that his organization was “deeply concerned not only about the increase in crime but also the fact that, once again, the perpetrators were wearing masks. We need to reinstate mask laws.”
Other antisemitic attacks against Crown Heights Jews in 2024 included a failed robbery which devolved into a beating instead, an assault on a 13-year-old Jewish boy biking to school, a kidnapping attempt, and a stabbing.
Many of the incidents — including the most recent Wednesday attacks — have been acts of Black-on-Jewish crime, straining cross-cultural relations in the multi-ethnic New York borough. A 2022 report by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) identified Orthodox Jews as the group most targeted for hate crimes in the city with 69 percent of their attackers African American.
In an interview about the crime surge, former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) asked The Algemeiner in November, “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”
May 25 also saw an antisemitic protest led by an African American activist named Terrell Harper — also known as “Relly Rebel” — described by the Jewish security service Shomrim as “a known antisemitic agitator, accompanied by approximately 30 cohorts.” The group targeted the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters during a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a prominent Hasidic leader. They waved signs attempting to link the Israel Defense Forces with the 2020 police death of George Floyd and broader indifference to global Black suffering. Law enforcement soon intervened to block off the protesters from the Jews attending the service.
While in previous decades fringe Black nationalist figures such as Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan fueled Black-Jewish antisemitism, today such celebrities as rapper and former billionaire Kanye West and his friend, far-right podcaster Candace Owens, have used their much larger platforms to promote radical ideologies and conspiracy theories targeting the Jewish people. In a June 24 interview with Piers Morgan, Owens declared, “I’d want my kids to go to jail before they fought for Israel.”
Another clash between protesters and law enforcement in Crown Heights occurred on April 28. A planned anti-Israel march through the neighborhood inspired a robust police counter-presence with officers dispersed among the activists.
Chabad-Lubavitch spokesperson Rabbi Motti Seligson described on X how others had come out to support their Jewish neighbors. “It was heartening to see scores of people, some Jewish and some not, who came to Crown Heights to protect the residents. These people weren’t looking for a fight. Some gathered in front of the synagogue at 770, others stood at strategic corners. Clearly this was not 1991,” he wrote.
Seligson concluded in reference to the Crown Heights race riot which took place from Aug. 19-21, 1991, and which EJewishPhilanthropy described as “widely considered the worst antisemitic riot in American history.”
The post New York Police Arrest Shirtless Man After Wig Theft, Child Attack, Knife Threats Against Jews in Crown Heights first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel ‘Achieved Its Objectives’ in Iran Operation, Says Leading War Studies Think Tank
Smoke rises following an Israeli attack in Tehran, Iran, June 18, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
A leading war studies think tank has assessed that Israel “achieved its objectives” in its recent operation against Iran’s nuclear program.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) released a report on Tuesday explaining that, in the 12-day operation, “Israel achieved its objectives vis-a-vis the nuclear program by destroying nuclear facilities and enrichment capacity with US support and killing key nuclear scientists who were instrumental in the development and weaponization of the program.”
ISW, in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (CTP), explained the details and implications of the conflict in their daily Iran Update, “which provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests.”
Israel launched a broad preemptive attack on Iran earlier this month, targeting military installations and nuclear sites across the country in what officials described as an effort to neutralize an imminent nuclear threat. Over the next several days, Israeli forces systematically dismantled Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities, destroying much of the infrastructure and killing top military leaders and nuclear scientists.
The US on Saturday night joined Israel’s campaign by bombing three key Iranian nuclear sites, before President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire to the conflict between the two Middle Eastern adversaries that went into effect on Tuesday.
Debate has raged this week over how extensive the damage was to Iran’s nuclear facilities, especially in the wake of the US bombings.
In the immediate aftermath of the strike, Trump declared that the Iranian nuclear facilities were completely destroyed. However, CNN and other media outlets subsequently reported on a leaked preliminary assessment from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, which found that key elements of the nuclear program were not destroyed and that the strikes only set the program back a few months.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lambasted the fact that the “top secret report” was leaked, adding that “it was preliminary; it was low confidence.” Trump and other senior administration officials have similarly dismissed the findings of the DIA report, saying that the Iranian nuclear program has been decimated.
ISW indicated it believes the US and Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites were successful.
“The destruction of the centrifuges and equipment inside does not necessarily require the collapse of the facility itself,” the think tank wrote in its Iran Update published on Wednesday. “The Institute of Science and International Security, a nuclear nonproliferation think tank that has long studied the Iranian nuclear program, assessed that it was very likely the strikes destroyed or damaged most of the centrifuges at Fordow on the basis of the impact locations and the effects of the blast waves.”
The Institute of Science and International Security said in its own report that although there are “non-destroyed parts [of the Iranian nuclear program] … [that] can be used in the future to produce weapon-grade uranium,” the US and Israeli attacks “have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program. It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.”
Meanwhile, Israeli assessments found that “significant damage” was done to the nuclear sites. Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said that based on the assessments of senior military intelligence officers, the damage “is … systemic … severe, broad and deep, and pushed back by years.”
The Israeli Atomic Energy Commission added that “the devastating US strike on [the Iranian nuclear site Fordow] destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable. We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes … have set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”
Axios reporter Barak Ravid noted that Israeli officials were reportedly “perplexed by a leaked US intelligence report that suggested otherwise.”
Ravid also reported that an Israeli official with direct knowledge of intelligence on Iran told Axios that “intercepted communications suggest Iranian military officials have been giving false situation reports to the country’s political leadership — downplaying the extent of the damage.”
Then, in a new assessment on Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program. He explained that they had gained additional intelligence since the initial DIA report. “This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years,” Ratcliffe wrote.
The central goal of the Israeli campaign, known as Operation Rising Lion, was to disable Iran’s nuclear program, ISW explained. And this main effort was supported “by conducting a campaign designed to prevent Iran from conducting effective retaliatory strikes on Israel by degrading its ballistic missile capabilities.”
“The IDF sought to limit Iran’s ability to respond to Israel at the start of its campaign and continued to destroy Iranian missile launchers and stockpiles throughout the air campaign,” ISW wrote. “Iranian leaders originally planned to launch up to one thousand ballistic missiles at Israel in the immediate aftermath of an Israeli strike, presumably in multiple barrages. The first Iranian missile barrage included about 30 missiles, and Iran never managed to launch over 40 ballistic missiles in a single barrage throughout the 12 days of attacks.”
This aspect of the operation, likewise, was a success. ISW reported that over the entire two-week operation, Iran fired a total of only 543 missiles, of which 89 percent were intercepted (and many that were not intercepted hit open, not residential, areas).
Still, “Iranian ballistic missiles did penetrate Israeli air defenses striking populated areas in some instances, however. Air defense systems are not perfect, and some projectiles will penetrate the system.”
Additionally, the missiles Iran used were not particularly helpful in a military sense. “The relatively poor accuracy of these missiles compared to a precision-guided munition means that even in instances when Iranian missiles struck military targets, they were largely ineffective and caused no casualties and limited damage,” ISW noted.
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