Harvard Faces New Test With Anti-Israel Protest Inside Widener Library

Plus, the problems with Volkswagen’s China labor audit

A December 10, 2023 anti-Israel protest inside Harvard’s Widener Library.

On December 10, 2023, an anti-Israel protest inside Harvard’s Widener library during reading period was a key indication that, rather than getting better, the situation on that campus was deteriorating. A tweet I posted then about the protest garnered nearly half a million views. “Honestly in the culture of Harvard this is like desecrating the temple. Protest all you want on the sidewalk, inside Harvard yard, takeover Mass Hall, university hall. Yell whatever silliness you want outside. But do not protest *inside* Widener Library during reading period,” I wrote.

Later that same month, Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, wrote about the library protest in a piece for the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

“Imagine if you were an 18-year-old Jewish or Israeli student, or even a pro-Israel Catholic like me, and you wanted to study for your chemistry final in the Widener Reading Room on a Sunday morning,” Sen. Sullivan writes in the Wall Street Journal. “Imagine being confronted by this protest, obviously condoned by Harvard’s leadership and commandeered by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the group behind the notorious statement that holds ‘the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’ in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.

“Would you feel welcome in Harvard’s most famous library? Would you feel rattled, intimidated, and harassed by the anti-Israel banner screaming ‘Stop the Genocide in Gaza’?...”

Perhaps partially in response, when Alan Garber took over as interim president of Harvard after Claudine Gay was ousted under pressure, he and the Harvard deans issued a January 19 “Statement of the Interim President and Deans of Harvard University on University Rights and Responsibilities.” It said in part, “unless a particular School makes an explicit exception, demonstrations and protests are ordinarily not permitted in classrooms and other spaces of instruction; libraries or other spaces designated for study, quiet reflection, and small group discussion; dormitories, residence halls, or dining halls where students live and take their meals; offices where the work of the University is carried out; or other places in which demonstrations and protests would interfere with the normal activities of the University.” [emphasis added].

Now the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee—newly reinstated as an officially recognized Harvard student organization—is challenging Garber and the deans by announcing, for 11:45 am Saturday September 21, 2024, a “hands off Lebanon” “emergency Widener Study-in.” Instructions posted on social media advise participants to “silently walk-in the library once everyone gathers” and “enter and sit on the chairs and work insider the Loker reading room. Stick the flyers to the back of your laptops—we will provide tape.” And to “silently exit at 1 p.m.”

Will Harvard permit an inside-the-library anti-Israel protest after sending the whole community an email asserting that libraries are places for studying, not protesting?

Policy statements such as the one by Garber have been part of Harvard’s so-far fruitless effort to persuade federal courts and Congress that it is not a pervasively hostile environment for Jewish students in a way that deprives them their legal right to equal access to education.

A federal court hearing is scheduled for 2 p.m. Tuesday in Boston in one of the federal cases, Bauer v. Harvard. It’d be something if an event the weekend before the hearing provides additional material to support the claims by alumni that the university has been mismanaged in a way that erodes the value of their Harvard diplomas. It’ll be a test of whether Harvard is serious about a new focus on its teaching and research mission, or whether, instead, it is going to be another academic year of the campus serving as a visible backdrop for anti-Israel political activism.

Volkswagen in Xinjiang: An “independent audit” of a joint Volkswagen-SAIC SAIC Motor Corporation factory in Urumqi wasn’t so “independent” after all, because the law firm that conducted it “has significant ties” to the Chinese Communist Party, Adrian Zenz writes in a new report for the Jamestown Foundation.

“All law firms in Shenzhen, where Liangma is based, are required by government decree to engage in CCP party-building activities,” Zenz writes. “In July 2024, Liangma celebrated the CCP’s 103rd anniversary, during which employees sang the same patriotic song that Uyghurs detained for re-education have been forced to sing. ‘On the occasion of the “July 1” Founding Day of the Party, all Liangma Law party members sang the song ‘Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China,’ expressing their deep affection for the Party and praising the happy life brought by reform and opening up.”

“In short, it appears that Volkswagen, one of the world’s largest corporations, chose for its high-stakes audit a largely unknown PRC law firm with a foreign-facing shell-like counterpart, along with an equally unknown Western expert,” Zenz writes.

It seems reasonable to wonder whether any “social accountability standard” can be applied in any meaningful way in a communist country. But if there is to be a standard, it’s hard to see how compliance with it can be reliably monitored by a law firm whose members are compelled to sing “‘Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.”

The war against Israel is a war against capitalism: An enterprising reporter for the Harvard Salient, a conservative student publication, infiltrated a “Palestine 101” training session organized by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, an anti-Israel group recently restored to status as an officially recognized Harvard student organization. According to the Salient’s account: At the end of the session, the organizer, Lea Kayali, explained, “It is not just about Palestine, this is about everything…by planting the seeds here, we unmask the oppression of capitalism and imperialism everywhere.” 

As we’ve been saying frequently and consistently around here, the war against the Jews is a war against capitalism. Anyone who thinks these people are planning to stop with Israel is delusional.

Recent work: “What Is Hezbollah? Even After Three Tries, the New York Times Is Stumped,” is the headline over my latest piece for the Algemeiner.

Tom Friedman on Biden’s achievement: Thomas Friedman writes in his New York Times column about “a Biden administration whose signature foreign policy achievement has been its ability to build alliances.” 

Friedman claims, “That is Joe Biden’s greatest legacy, and it is a substantial one. In the Asian-Pacific, the Biden team used alliances to counterbalance China militarily and technologically. In Europe, it used them to counter the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the Middle East, it used them on April 13 to shoot down virtually all 300 or so drones and missiles that Iran fired at Israel. And in covert diplomacy, it gathered our allies for the complex, multination prisoner swap that freed, among others, the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, dishonestly jailed by Vladimir Putin.”

Count me as unimpressed. If Biden were as great an alliance-builder as Friedman claims, Russia might have have never invaded Ukraine to begin with, Iran might not have attacked Israel to begin with, and Russia might never have jailed Evan Gershkovich in the first place. The allies in World War II defeated the Axis powers of Japan and Germany. Biden’s idea of an alliance doesn’t seem to involve actual victories, just allowing the enemy country to keep fighting indefinitely.

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