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Harvard University will host radical professor Dalal Saeb Iriqat, who defended Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel, The New York Post reported.
Iriqat, daughter of former Palestinian Authority (PA) chief negotiator Saeb Erekat who died in 2020, is scheduled to speak as part of a “Middle East Dialogue” at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center on March 7.
According to The New York Post, on the day of Hamas’ attack on October 7, she wrote in a post on X, “The Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves, the right to live with dignity and freedom. I am shocked that the world is shocked! Today is just a normal human struggle 4 #Freedom.”
“We will never forgive the Israeli right wing extreme government for making us take their children and elderly as hostages,” she added a day later. “The Israeli public need to realize that their own government had caused all this bloodshed and they remain the ones responsible for this escalatin [sic] and losses of civilians lives.”
Her scheduled visit to Harvard comes when the university is already under fire for failing to properly handle the antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7.
Shortly after the war began, a coalition of 34 Harvard student organizations released a statement in which they blamed Israel for Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel.
Later, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay came under fire after she, along with MIT President Sally Kornbluth and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, testified before a congressional hearing on the issue of antisemitism on college campuses.
All three university presidents gave similar answers to Rep. Elise Stefanik in which they failed to unequivocally condemn antisemitism or even calls for genocide against Jews.
In response to a question about whether such calls for genocide violate Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay responded that this depended on the “context” and whether or not the genocidal language turned into action.
Gay last week resigned as President of Harvard amid the backlash over her congressional testimony on antisemitism. She later claimed she was the target of a sustained campaign of lies and personal insults.
Harvard representatives did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
