Harvard Equates Criticizing Hamas Supporters With Racism

Higher education, legacy media, and the broader left have long wielded “anti-discrimination” as both philosophy and policy—not to foster debate, but to silence critics, distort established terms, and advance an anti-Western agenda. Since October 7, anti-Semitism suddenly could no longer be discussed without bringing up “Islamophobia” in the same venue. Leave it to the Ivy League to intellectualize and stretch a concept like anti-discrimination to defend terrorism. In a new mandatory student training, Harvard claims that calling someone a ‘terrorist sympathizer’ violates its anti-discrimination policy. Placed within the full context of the flagship school’s fight with the Trump administration over “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) funding, anti-Semitism, and foreign students, Harvard’s move is about much more than federal lawsuits. Instead, it’s about legitimizing groups like Hamas and stifling criticism.

Harvard’s schtick is obvious. It draws from critical theory and extends anti-discrimination policies well beyond their intended boundaries to chill free speech. In this case, it is now forbidden to call someone a “terrorist sympathizer.” Harvard is only protecting what its university culture condones. Shortly after the Hamas attack on October 7, 33 Harvard student groups self-righteously declared that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.” That’s right, Hamas is innocent in the eyes of Harvard’s campus culture. Never mind the ties between the early Palestinian national movement and actual Nazis; after all, Israel is seen as a Western project and therefore condemnable in the eyes of what academia substitutes for morality.

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A closer look at Harvard’s policy shows how warped Ivy League morality actually has become. The now mandatory training declares that: “Accusing an individual of being a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer, supporting genocide, or urging them to self harm based solely on their race, ethnicity, religion, or other protected characteristic.” In other words, criticizing the rampant support for terrorism at Harvard is now held to the same prohibitions against racism and anti-religious bigotry.

Back when 33 Harvard groups ran cover for Hamas in 2023, Harvard’s administration sought to distance itself from its own students. Harvard’s then-president, Claudine Gay, who later stepped down from the position and into an $800K salary after being caught plagiarizing, claimed that “students speak for themselves” and that none of them represented Harvard. Harvard distanced itself from its own students, whom it helps indoctrinate, to contain a public relations backlash.

Harvard has always legitimized the Palestinian cause, with support for Hamas being the end result of support for that cause. In a 2022 study conducted by the AMCHA Initiative, Harvard was found to lead college campuses on “redefinition, denigration, and suppression” in facilitating anti-Semitism. One Jewish outlet, Aish, noted then what all of America now knows: “antisemitism is given a platform under the guise of academic free speech and supposed anticolonialism.” Academia has not changed, but America has. Once elected, the Trump administration sought to prevent American tax dollars from funding Harvard’s craziness by freezing $2.2 billion in public funds for the university. (Why, with its endowment of over $50 billion—larger than the GDP of Latvia—does Harvard need tax dollars to fund it in the first place is another question.)

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But Harvard successfully challenged the Trump administration’s freezing of federal funds, where the presiding judge, U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs, accused the Trump administration of using anti-Semitism as a “smokescreen” for a broader agenda. Burroughs’s stated that:

We must fight against antisemitism, but we equally need to protect our rights, including our right to free speech, and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other … Harvard is currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be.

While the judge views anti-Semitism as a “smokescreen” for Trump’s broader crackdown on Harvard, Harvard itself is using its own policy to stifle the speech of anyone who opposes terrorism. What makes Harvard’s policy even sicker is that the administration’s blanket defense of “terrorist sympathizers” is going to protect the very same people who make Harvard hostile to Jews and have earned the Ivy League’s well-deserved contempt.

Image: “Harvard University Widener Library” by Joseph Williams on Wikimedia Commons