Oh, alma mater, your jihadi-covered halls… A Harvard Center will soon be hosting a pro-Hamas author at an antisemitic, woke event on campus.
The Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) is hosting an April 18 event “Gaza as Epicenter: An Alternative Reading.” Translation: we hate Jews. Tareq Baconi, president of the board for Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, is the featured writer. There’s one little problem, however; Tareq is a radical terrorist supporter.
The CMES website sums up the event:
Tareq Baconi is working on a book about decolonization in the 21st century. He is the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, among others. He is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at the International Crisis Group based in Ramallah. He serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and the book review editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies.
According to Campus Reform, Baconi justified the heinous and hideous Oct. 7 atrocities mere days after they occurred. If you ask this jihad lover, the attacks that left Israeli children, women, and whole families brutally tortured and massacred were just a freedom struggle. The facts that Baconi totally ignores are that the “Palestinians” are an invented “people” with no right to Israeli land, the Arabs were already given their own state (Jordan), and the Arabs have refused peace with Israel for decades in favor of trying to obliterate the Jewish nation through jihad.
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Baconi rambled to Jewish Currents about his desire to “push back against any effort to try to suggest this was driven by antisemitism because doing that also completely erases any motivation that imprisoned people might have in breaking out of their prison.” He tried to downplay the original Hamas charter, which specifically expresses genocidal aims against the Jews. Of course, antisemitism was a driving factor for the Hamas attack!
Ignoring the unimaginably obscene crimes Hamas committed on Oct. 7 and the fact that Israel has bent over backward trying to appease the “Palestinians,” Tareq told Jewish Currents:
He argued that Hamas’s recent attack “isn’t driven by hatred and bloodlust,” but rather “by a regime of oppression that has held 2 million Palestinians captive for 16 years and was ready to continue to do that indefinitely.”
By the way, the Palestinian population has been steadily growing, another fact against Baconi’s nonsensical claims of dictatorial Israeli oppression.
Baconi did admit the Oct. 7 attacks were “gruesome” but then insanely asserted that Israeli rocket fire against Gaza targets was “obviously a war crime.” Baconi even attempted to defend terrorist Hamas: “Hamas occupies this unusual space of not always necessarily being ideologically appreciated by Palestinians, but at the same time, providing a model of resistance that has advanced certain protections for the Palestinian people.”
Baconi also falsely accused Israel of “occupation” when speaking to Ezra Klein of The New York Times in December, and he again defended Hamas even as poll data shows nearly three-fourths of “Palestinians” continue to support Hamas. Baconi referred to “historic Palestine,” a completely fictional concept, and denied that Hamas is a terrorist organization, claiming against years of evidence that Hamas is willing to negotiate with its enemies.
“When Hamas was democratically elected and it entered into the body of the Palestinian Authority, the movement ended up offering a whole host of concessions in discussions directly with Fatah to try to achieve a reconciliation agreement,” Baconi blathered in one of multiple comments defending Hamas. He also scoffed at the idea Hamas could be destroyed. Campus Reform noted that Baconi put forth similar defenses in his book “Hamas Contained.”
This man should unequivocally never have been invited to speak at a U.S. university, and whether he should even be allowed to roam free around the country explicitly defending and promoting terrorists is an open question. Harvard, by featuring Tareq Baconi, is promoting antisemitic jihad.