Thursday, January 05, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
It is curious that a human rights academic cannot fit into her brain that both "HRW criticized other counties" and "HRW, and particularly Roth, exhibited a severe anti-Israel bias" could both be true.Elmendorf informed the Carr Center that Roth’s fellowship would not be approved.The center was stunned. “We thought he would be a terrific fellow,” says Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School.Sikkink was even more surprised by the dean’s explanation: Israel. Human Rights Watch, she was told, has an “anti-Israel bias”; Roth’s tweets on Israel were of particular concern. Sikkink was taken aback. In her own research, she had used HRW’s reports “all the time,” and while the organization had indeed been critical of Israel, it had also been critical of China, Saudi Arabia—even the United States.
Roth rejects such claims. Most people knowledgeable about Israel, he says, understand that NGO Monitor “is a profoundly biased source” that “has never found a criticism of Israel’s human rights record to be valid.” Roth thinks that Steinberg was “particularly incensed that I dared to criticize Israel even though I am Jewish and was drawn to the human rights cause by my father’s experience living in Nazi Germany.” His father escaped to New York in 1938 when he was 12, and Roth grew up hearing many “Hitler stories.”
According to people knowledgeable about the school’s programs, its administration is terrified of touching anything related to Palestine, and Palestinian voices have largely been silenced. That’s due not to any particular administrator, they say, but to “the ethos of the place” and the people who fund the Belfer Center.Prominent among those people is Robert Belfer, who has donated more than $20 million to the Kennedy School since the 1980s—money that has come from his family’s fortune.In addition to the Kennedy School, he and his wife, Renée, have given to an array of cultural institutions, medical research centers, private schools, universities, and Jewish and Israeli institutions. In a 2006 interview with the US Holocaust Museum, Belfer observed that most of his extended family (including his paternal grandparents) perished in World War II—a loss that gave him “a sense of identity” of “being Jewish, of being very supportive of Israel.”According to the 990 forms of his family foundation, between 2011 and 2015 Belfer gave more than $300,000 to the American Jewish Committee, on whose board of governors he sits. In 2018, he joined with the Anti-Defamation League to endow a new fellowship at the Belfer Center to study disinformation, hate speech, and toxic content online. Every year, the school hosts three ADL Belfer Fellows. In short, the primary funder of the Belfer Center has been a significant backer of two of the groups—the AJC and the ADL—that Peter Beinart cited as assailing human rights organizations because of their criticism of Israel.
So because Peter Beinart, who accuses Israel of Jewish supremacy and want to see the destruction of the Jewish state, says that the AJC and the ADL are anti-human rights - an absurd claim - that proves that one of their funders hates human rights as well.
[Belfer and his son] sit on the Dean’s Executive Board...The board’s chair, David Rubenstein, is the cofounder and former CEO of the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant.... The 16 members of the Dean’s Executive Board also include Idan Ofer and his wife, Batia. Idan is the son of Sammy Ofer, an Israeli shipping magnate who until his death in 2011 was one of Israel’s richest men. Worth about $10 billion, Idan has come under fire in Israel for moving to London to reduce his tax bill and for a lavish lifestyle highlighted by the €5 million party that he threw on the island of Mykonos for his 10th wedding anniversary.The Kennedy School dean cannot afford to lose the confidence of this board.
The article doesn't say a word about any ties between Ofer or Rubinstein to any Israeli or Jewish causes. It doesn't have to. Their names tell you all you need to know.
Also on the board are people with Muslim names like Hazem Ben-Gacem (apparently Tunisian) and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani (Iranian.) No reason to mention them, though.
And in case you think I'm being paranoid about the antisemitism underlying this article, it says this:
In 2018, the Kennedy School opened a renovated campus, made possible by a capital campaign that raised more than $700 million. Anchoring it were three buildings bearing the names Ofer, Rubenstein, and Wexner. “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Dean Elmendorf said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Oh my God - so many Jewish names - who shape Harvard's Kennedy School!
Rich Jews control Harvard's Kennedy School, and that's why the school opposes human rights.
What other evidence do you need?
(h/t Andrew P)
UPDATE: Stephen Walt, co-author of the widely criticized "The Israel Lobby", is still today the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. If Belfer was the nutty Zionist censor The Nation makes him out to be, and if the Kennedy School is so terrified of allowing critics of Israel to be there, why do they allow Belfer's name to be associated with someone whose anti-Israel positions are so well known? (h/t Ian)
