Jewish Students at Harvard, Cornell to Sue Over Anti-Semitism (Update)

AP Photo/Michael Casey

We’ve all seen the situation before where woke students claim they need a safe space because some conservative speaker is coming to campus. In fact it’s usually the woke students who are the ones crossing the line on acceptable behavior by shouting down people they disagree with or making threats until the school decides to shut down the speech for them.

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But this situation is not that situation. Jewish students on some of these elite college campuses are actually being threatened. Today there are reports about a Cornell students who is being charged with threatening to murder Jewish students.

Patrick Dai, a junior at Cornell, faces a charge of posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications, federal prosecutors in the Northern District of New York said.

In a post in an online discussion board, prosecutors said, the student allegedly threatened to “shoot up” a campus building. In another post, he said he he would “stab” or “slit the throat” of Jewish men, and rape or throw off a cliff Jewish women he encounters on campus, according to the prosecutors.

He also said he would behead Jewish babies and threatened to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you” Jewish people, prosecutors said, attributing the words to Dai…

The federal complaint filed against Dai states he admitted to making the threats. “Dai admitted, after receiving Miranda warnings, that he was the person who used the internet to post the threatening messages described above,” the complaint, citing an interview of the suspect by the FBI earlier in the day, said.

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I’m sure Dai’s attorney is going to argue that these weren’t legitimate threats, just someone mouthing off on the internet, but given the number of school shootings no one is going to take a chance assuming that. It also gives you a good idea of the campus environment many Jewish students have been facing for the past several weeks.

Cornell is also the place where a professor described the 10/7 attack by Hamas as “exhilarating.” That professor is now on leave for at least the rest of the semester.

The situation at Harvard has also been intense. A bunch of groups signed onto a statement blaming Israelis for the murderous rampage by Hamas on Oct. 7. But as some law firms and professors began pushing back, some of the students associated with the letter tried to back away from it. But by that point several of the students had been identified by name and there was a truck driving around campus with their images.

Then, a couple days ago, Harvard’s president announced she was forming an antisemitism advisory board to help deal with the problem. That was the same day this clip turned up in which a possible student, who was ripping down posters of kidnapped Israelis, explained that he loved Hamas and wished they would blow up all of Israel.

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And just today there is another clip making the rounds. I’m not sure what is going on here but the person who posted this claims the student being harassed here is Jewish.

Again, it’s not completely clear what was going on. Lots of people are commenting about this on X but I haven’t seen anyone explain who was involved beyond the caption in the video.

As a result of the antisemitism on these campuses some Jewish students have decided to sue their schools.

Jewish college students in the United States are gearing up to sue elite universities like Cornell and Harvard over allegations that the schools have turned a blind eye in the face of rampant antisemitism on campuses, Insider has learned.

The lead attorney handling the soon-to-be-filed lawsuits, Mark Ressler of the New York City-based firm Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, said in an interview on Tuesday that antisemitism on college campuses has long been a problem, but that the deadly Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel “poured a lot of fuel on an already raging fire.”…

“We’re going to show that the universities had notice of acts of hatred and bigotry towards Jewish students, that there was pervasive anti-Jewish bigotry on campus, and that administrators and university bureaucrats acted with deliberate indifference, which is the legal term, with respect to campus antisemitism,” Ressler said.

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Will they follow through? According to the law firm they’ll be filing these lawsuits in a couple weeks. That’s probably long enough for several more antisemitic incidents to take place on these campuses.

Update: The incident at Harvard in the video above happened on Oct. 18. The Washington Free Beacon wrote about it on Oct. 21.

The student, who asked to remain anonymous, described being pushed and shoved as he tried to film them with his phone. A report to the FBI identified two of the people laying hands on him as fellow Harvard University graduate students, one a law student, Ibrahim Bharmal, a member of the Harvard Law Review, and the other a divinity school graduate student, Elom Tettey Tamaklo, who lives with Harvard undergraduate students in supervisory role known as a proctor…

A report has been filed with the Harvard University Police Department and the FBI’s Boston office. “An Israeli student on his way to class pulled his phone out to film the rioters and he was attacked. He was assaulted both physically and verbally. Throughout the assault he kept calm, but was aggressively attacked by Pro-Palestine rioters,” reads the report to the FBI, which was reviewed by the Free Beacon. “At least 2 of those involved have been identified as employees of the University and have not yet been dismissed from their posts.”

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Here’s the full video from the WFB.

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