Harvard: Pro-Palestinian Disruptions Occurred for ‘Years’ Before October 7

Pro-Palestinian activists regularly disrupted important university ceremonies for “years” at Harvard before the antisemitic outbursts that followed the Hamas terror attack in Israel on October 7, according to media reports at the university.

The latest edition of the Harvard alumni magazine, which devotes an article to the divisions on campus over the war, noted that “it was not unprecedented that during breaks between speaker’s at this year’s convocation, on September 4, organized groups broke in with cheers advocating Palestinian rights.”

Those “cheers,” an earlier edition of the magazine noted, had interrupted the speech of the minister of Memorial Church, who had “invoked the Native peoples and unnamed enslaved people who had, respectively, owned the land on which the University was built.” (Harvard was a cradle of the abolitionist movement.)

The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, had noted in September: “As has been the case in recent years, the ceremony — which was hosted in Tercentenary Theatre — was punctuated by shouts of protest by members of the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, who also held banners during the ceremony.”

These protests took place during a time of growing peace in the Middle East between Israel and neighboring Arab states. The university appears to have done little to discipline the pro-Palestinian students for their repeated disruptions of events.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.