Harvard Faculty Doctors Demand Release of Suspected Hamas Terrorist
Speaker calls to wipe Zionism off the Earth
Some faculty members at Harvard Medical School are demanding an immediate embargo on arms to Israel and the release of a Gaza doctor, Hussam Abu Safiya, that the Israel Defense Forces says it is holding “for suspected involvement in terrorist activities.”
The doctors from Harvard and other Boston health care institutions made their demands at an outdoor event in Boston at noon today. Gathered on a public sidewalk outside the old Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, a crowd of 30 activists gathered for what was promoted as a “call out sick for Gaza” event. Wearing white lab coats, checkered keffiyehs, and scrubs, they unleashed a stream of inaccurate accusations demonizing Israel.
Dr. Lara Jirmanus, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, accused Israel of “crimes of extermination in Gaza.”
“This is not a war,” Jirmanus said. “There is a medical and humanitarian consensus that it is a genocide.” (Not accurate.)
She called for “an arms embargo, now.”
Dr. Jennifer Brody, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, claimed eight Gazan children had “frozen to death” in the past two weeks. She accused Israel of waging a “genocidal assault on Palestinians,” alleging that the money spent on the “imperial war machine” and weapons for Israel was creating “profit” for “large corporations” and draining funding that otherwise would be spent on affordable housing units, health care, and social programs in America. (Somehow America lacked socialized medicine or universal affordable housing even before Israel declared independence in 1948, so blaming Israel for the failures of American welfare policy seems a stretch.)
The most vicious anti-Israel rhetoric came from Scott Gilbert, who identified himself as representing Refuse Fascism and Refusefascism.org. Wikipedia identifies that as a coalition led by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. “Zionism is a racist and fascist ideology that needs to be swept off the face of the earth,” Gilbert said, echoing the Soviet Union’s old lie that Zionism is racism.
Zionism “has turned many Jews into Nazis,” Gilbert claimed, adding that the “greatest criminal in the world today” is “the U.S. capitalist imperialist system.”
Gilbert, a physician’s assistant, was wearing a white coat from Atrius Health, which was formerly known as Harvard Vanguard healthcare.
Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle-Hawash, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, told the crowd, “We have to escalate. We have to take things into our hands.” She did not specify what she meant by that.
She said that she had been in contact with Hussam Abu Safiya, who “became a personal friend.”
“He is being tortured and he might be killed over the next few hours,” Kuemmerle-Hawash said. Later, she used scissors to cut a red ribbon on what the group called the “Kamal Adawan pop-up clinic,” after the hospital in Gaza where Hussam Abu Safiya was the director.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, posted on January 2 that “Hussam Abu Sufaya was apprehended for suspected involvement in terrorist activities, and for holding a rank in the Hamas terror organization, while hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists were hiding inside the Kamal Adwan Hospital under his management. He is currently being investigated by Israeli security forces.” He added, “The cynical exploitation of the Kamal Adwan Hospital by the Hamas terrorist organization is not new, with the previous hospital manager having confessed to being a senior Hamas operative.”
Eitan Fischberger has noted multiple Palestinian outlets referring to Abu Safiya as a colonel in Gaza’s military medical services, and also found a social media post from Abu Safiya that appeared to refer to the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel as God’s work.
No one at today’s rally publicly mentioned Hamas or the Israeli hostages who were kidnapped and are being held in Gaza. And while some anti-Israel rallies in Cambridge have been met with pro-Israel counterprotesters, none were in evidence at today’s event.
There’s been a view around that health care might be the salvation of higher education. By this analysis, leaders like Harvard’s President Alan Garber, who is a medical doctor; the University of Pennsylvania’s interim president J. Larry Jameson, who is also a medical doctor; and Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong, who is also a medical doctor, are somehow better suited than their rapidly resigned predecessors because medicine, unlike social science or the humanities, involves practical, life-or-death issues in which results matter. On the basis of today’s event, that seems an overly rosy view of things. It turns out that doctors can be just as misguided as scholars in the fields of history, literature, government, philosophy, or Middle East Studies.
Perhaps the thirty activists are best ignored as an unrepresentative fringe. Yet at least some top Harvard leaders have declined to marginalize such views. The senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, gave an interview last month to the Harvard Gazette, the university’s public relations news arm, in which she asserted, “We’re dealing with deep divisions that have emerged in our community due to the war in the Middle East.”
My own view is that Pritzker is wrong, and that there’s a broad consensus view at Harvard and in America overall against Hamas terrorism and against wiping Israel off the map (and, for that matter, in favor of capitalism, and against communism). Most Americans and most people at Harvard know the greatest criminal in the world today isn’t America but is Iran and its proxies, or Russia, or Communist China, or the axis of the three of them cooperating together.
Yet so long as Pritzker shrinks from denouncing these knuckleheads and instead embraces them by defining them as part of a divided community, the risk persists that Harvard, and Boston hospitals, will be defined publicly by an extremist fringe rather than by a reasonable and better-informed majority. That’s certainly how it appears from Israel, where, just hours before the event in the Harvard Medical Area, Brigadier General (Reserve) Amir Avivi, the founder and chairman of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, was faulting the Palestinian Authority for fueling “all the antisemitism in all the universities.”
The inability of these people to have a g-d given and functioning bullshit alarm is incomprehensible.