Jessica Costescu writes for the Washington Free Beacon about disturbing news from an elite American university.
In late March, Harvard University, anticipating a funding fight with the Trump administration, suspended its School of Public Health’s longstanding research partnership with Birzeit University, a West Bank institution known for hosting Hamas military parades. But a half-dozen faculty members and affiliates who have defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and accused Israel of “genocide” and “terrorism” remain at the school, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
They include the director of Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, former New York health commissioner Mary T. Bassett, who sent a message to the center’s students and faculty just one week after Oct. 7 that accused Israel of “potential genocide.” Bassett penned an article for Qatar’s Al Jazeera in February arguing that Israel aims to kill “all Palestinians in Gaza” and calling on the Jewish state to pay “reparations.”
The Center for Health and Human Rights is housed within the School of Public Health and was the primary source of collaboration between Harvard and Birzeit. Her views are widespread among the academics working underneath her. FXB Center visiting scientist Sawsan Abdulrahim, for example, posted an image of a Hamas paraglider to her since-deleted X account on Oct. 8, 2023, a nod to the terrorists who flew into the Nova music festival, massacred 364 Israelis, and took another 40 hostage. The next day, she shared a post expressing solidarity with the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for the attack.
FXB Center postdoctoral fellow Rania Muhareb, meanwhile, has argued that any improvement in conditions for Palestinians “is predicated on the radical dismantling of Zionist settler colonialism.” On Oct. 8, she said those in the West who condemned the attack engaged in “undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern.”
