The timing of the current torrent of articles and posts about Harvard's Kennedy School denying a fellowship to Ken Roth is most curious.
According to the initial article that started this all off in The Nation, Roth was denied his fellowship in the end of July 2022.
It took nearly six months for this news to hit the media.
What happened during those six months? Why didn't Roth lash out at the time - why was he silent for so long?
The answer can be seen in his history at Human Rights Watch.
HRW would issue many reports about human rights abuses worldwide. But only a subset of them would be turned into media events - with much longer reports, behind-the-scenes partnerships with other organizations, embargoed reports to be released on specific days to coincide with their splashy press conferences, and lining up sympathetic reporters and media outlets to publish their articles at the times that would maximize the impact of the campaign.
A large proportion of these campaigns would be against Israel. Relatively minor issues with questionable human rights dimensions, such as the fact that Booking.com and AirBnB listed Jewish-owned properties in the territories, would be promoted far more than actual deadly attacks in Syria or elsewhere.
In short, Ken Roth has a lot of experience creating campaigns that greatly exaggerate what he considers Zionist crimes.
A real victim of a real injustice does not have the luxury of creating a campaign to gain maximum publicity. They need to cry out and hope that a sympathetic person of prominence will help them get the message out to the world. Most of them fail, and real victims of real crimes are almost never heard from.
Here is an extensive definition of academic freedom. In no universe did Harvard's dean violate it.
In this case, all we know is the second-hand report that the reason for the decision was "anti-Israel bias" and "Roth’s tweets on Israel were of particular concern" - which no one can argue with! Any analysis of his own tweets, in his own words, proves Roth's bias beyond a doubt. This is why Roth and his defenders falsely claim that he wasn't chosen because he is a "critic of Israel," an absurd lie - there are plenty of critics of Israel at Harvard, including Stephen Walt himself, co-writer of the infamous Israel Lobby book, whose position includes the name of the supposed Harvard donor who (Massing guesses) didn't want Roth - yet he still holds that position 15 years after the book controversy.
If the rich Jews who fund Harvard have any say on the contents of Harvard's academic program, it sure isn't obvious how.
Contrast this with the billions of dollars that pour into US universities from Saudi Arabia and especially Qatar, specifically to influence them politically.
For a wealthy, connected and privileged man like Ken Roth, it is not enough to just move on when he doesn't get a job and find the next one (which he did, at another Ivy League school.) He has to use all of his expertise to get revenge at the people who insulted him: the dean at Harvard and the rich Zionist Jews whom he believes (with zero proof!) were behind the decision.
Roth made sure not only that they would promote his new jihad against the few Zionists left in academia - but that it would be a cover story.
Now the six month gap makes sense. Front page stories take time.
Note the irony of the illustration - Roth is the little guy, a victim of a God-like thumbs-down from Harvard. A little guy who has the connections to build a months-long campaign that gets him on the cover of The Nation!
The follow-on stories, some probably planted and the others naturally following what looks like news, were a fait accompli. So was his own account of the episode for The Guardian, where he again falsely claims that he didn't get the job "because of my criticism of Israel." That is not what The Nation reported.
He can't stop lying when it comes to Israel.
Roth, with half a million Twitter followers, has plenty of clout to do his own direct promotion as well. And he is tweeting about this as much as he used to tweet his monomaniacal anti-Israel campaigns.
And now he claims that this carefully choreographed campaign has created an "uproar." He's trying to make it self-fulfilling prophecy.
As with the AirBnB campaign, the Harvard story is based on an inversion of reality. Boycotting only Jewish-owned businesses really is discrimination, and not allowing universities full latitude in hiring staff is itself a violation of academic freedom.
Ken Roth is not the victim of an all-powerful Zionist lobby. He is a vindictive, pathetic yet extraordinarily privileged antisemite who has carefully plotted his revenge at the rich Jews whom he thinks sabotaged the only job in the world he felt was worthy of him.
And his actions today prove that Harvard was quite right in rejecting him.
