Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an interesting development at the nation’s oldest university.
The weekend after the federal government sued Harvard for ongoing “relentless antisemitic on-campus discrimination,” Harvard co-sponsored an event with a boycott-Israel advocacy group in which a Harvard researcher accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza.
Signup for the online event of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council was available via the website of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, which sits within Harvard’s School of Public Health. The “Harvard FXB program” was announced at the start of the event as a cosponsor, and the main speaker at the event, Bilal Irfan, was introduced as a bioethicist at “Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s hospital.”
After greetings from Alice Rothschild of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council, which is promoting on its website a report about Israel’s “engineered collapse of Palestinian life,” and Miguel Garcia, global secretary of the People’s Health Movement, which issued a statement Thursday condemning “Israel’s military assaults on Lebanon and the US backing that makes it possible,” Irfan plunged into a slide presentation that he described as “documenting the Gaza genocide.”
Irfan spoke of what he said was “Israel’s policy of destroying the health system,” which he said was “a part of the genocidal aims.” He accused Israel of acting to “abduct these physicians” without mentioning that the Israel Defence Forces have described at least some Gaza doctors as suspected Hamas terrorist operatives and the released Israeli hostage Sharon Cunio said that most of her time in Hamas captivity was spent in a hospital. Irfan did not mention Hamas once in the entire presentation. At one point he referred to October 28, 2023, as “three weeks into the genocide” without making any mention of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. He accused Israel of “targeted attacks on maternity wards,” without acknowledging that Hamas stores weapons in hospital neonatal incubators. He also demonized Israeli doctors: “there are a number of Israeli health-care providers who are pro-genocide.”
