From a recent peaceful student rally at Columbia University came a chant that summed up their protest – “FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD AND YOU’RE ARRESTING US INSTEAD.”
This is the bloody omnipresence that the co-belligerent Trumpsters and their fearful University leaders, whom Trump has targeted for submission, are relegating to the shadows of the dying Hell in Netanyahu’s genocidal mass murder of Gaza’s Palestinian families.
A survey, reported in Harper’s Index (March 2025), reported that 49% of the children in Gaza “wanted to die,” while 96% of them “believed they would soon die.”
Instead of that annihilation’s intensification, with U.S. weaponry and unconditional U.S. government backing under both parties in Washington, D.C. being the subject of action, both Trump and the president of Harvard agreed that the big concern is “anti-semitism” against Jews at Harvard and other Universities. Both men kept referring to such “anti-semitism” against Jews with no evidence, no examples, and no other substantiation.
Today’s operating “anti-semitism” is “The Other Anti-Semitism,” to use the title of a lecture in Israel years ago by Jim Zogby. The “Other Anti-Semitism” is expressed lethally and daily by F-16s, Helicopter Gunships, and Tank Artillery from Israel’s regime against defenseless Palestinian Semites. Netanyahu’s genocidal policy, since the mysteriously collapsed Israeli border security apparatus on October 7 enabling the Hamas attack, is driven by the “no food, no water, no medicine, no electricity, no fuel,” for Gaza policy. After his truce-breaking in early March, blocking trucks carrying humanitarian aid, he is pushing more Palestinians into starvation.
Domestically, it is more than grotesque to describe Harvard University President, Alan Garber, parroting Trump’s accusations of anti-semitism against Jews on campus without mentioning that the students, including Jewish students, were protesting there and on other campuses and pressing for an end to the mass slaughter, a ceasefire, emergency humanitarian aid and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. In short, PRO-SEMITISM.
Instead of receiving praise, these protesters – Palestinian Americans and Jewish Americans in the lead, with many others – are beset upon by police, arrested, harassed, banished from their campuses, beat up (at UCLA), expelled, their events canceled, and, to rub salt into the wounds, labeled as “anti-semites.”
Leading Jewish commentators have reviled Trump – the hypocrite – for brandishing an unfounded anti-semitism smear as the laser beam for his illegal demands and freezing federal grants to these Universities. They see his exploiting ploy as being cynically driven to silence or divide his opponents.
Nonetheless, until Trump demanded turning Harvard into his fiefdom, provoking Harvard to finally sue the federal government, Garber’s public communications were groveling to Trump. Especially those adopting Trump’s wild claims of anti-semitism thus further enabling Trump’s dictates.
Here is Garber on March 31, 2025 – “We fully embrace the important goal of combating antisemitism…I have experienced antisemitism directly even while serving as president.” Why no substantiation? Because he and others like former president Lawrence Summers, have accepted a definition of anti-semitism that mostly equates criticism of Israeli government policies (e.g., Netanyahu) with anti-semitism.
Mr. Garber has not spoken out against the Gaza genocide, or the U.S. backing it while violating six federal laws (Garber is a lawyer). His public statements reveal his own thinly veiled anti-semitism against Palestinian Arab Semites.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and Israelis were being eradicated and driven towards expulsion, would Mr. Garber have remained silent? Would he have labeled pro-Israeli rights advocates on campus as “anti-semites”? He needs to be educated by Jewish Voice for Peace, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Rabbis for Human Rights.
He also needs to confront his fears and demonstrate moral courage against large complaining corporate donors, with many camouflaged axes to grind, including their ludicrous belief that Harvard has long been a hotbed of radical Marxism against capitalism.
He needs to reverse actions against faculty studying the Middle East or collaborating on public health issues with a Palestinian university. He should find ways to exit his costly hiring of a lobbying firm and lawyers close to Trump in an attempt to appease Trump. Doesn’t he know that Trump is further goaded on seeing such weakness?
He could start his self-rehabilitation consonant with his powerful position in the world of academia by having coffee with a similarly fearful Dean Goldberg of the Harvard Law School. (See, my April 4, 2025 column, When the Dean of Harvard Law School Went Dark). They can start their reflections by absorbing Aristotle’s enduring insight “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others,” and apply it to their present predicaments imposed by a fascist dictatorship moving into a police state shredding all our basic civil liberties and civil rights.
By Ralph Nader
April 25, 2025