Cornell University students are urging administrators to take action against a professor who said he was “thrilled” by Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel that left more than 1,400 people dead.
The comments were made by associate history professor Russell Rickford Sunday at an off-campus rally related to Cornell’s Students for Justice in Palestine group, according to one attendee.
Netanel Shapira, 21, a student with dual Israeli citizenship, recorded a viral clip of the rally outside the campus. Shapira said she attended the event in an effort to “hear both sides” and to take the temperature of the leafy liberal college town of Ithaca, NY.
Shapira, who studied economics and government at the university, said she had heard from fellow students that associate professor of history Russell Rickford was “unashamed of his extremism” in the classroom, but was not prepared for his full-throated support of Hamas. mass killing.
“This man is openly saying that he is happy, excited, excited, energized, right, by the killing of innocent civilians. Massacre of civilians and rape of women,” said Shapira.
“There is no place for that anywhere for any group of people, so of course in the video at the end the crowd starts chanting ‘From the River to the Sea’.. itself an antisemitic and genocidal chant.”
Shapira and his friend left the rally shortly after a “small” crowd began calling for the annihilation of Israel.
“How can you feel safe? That is like a textbook, the first step to inciting violence.”
Amanda Silberstein, 21, was “absolutely disgusted” when Rickford’s statement first circulated in the university’s Jewish community group.
Follow The Post’s live blog for the latest news on Hamas attacks on Israel
“Watching the video, my initial reaction was ‘this is a professor, this is an educator, you know, students should appreciate and respect, you know, what their professor says,'” said the Englewood, NJ, native, who is studying hotel administration and hospitality.
“It was really shocking and his words had meaning. This is not a far-fetched idea; we’ve seen it happen on the Columbia campus, at Harvard, at NYU,” he added, referring to other embraces of violence at high schools in the region.
“If your professor praises a group for doing something, you might look at the group and think it was the right thing to do.”
Three Cornell University students told The Post Tuesday that they fear Russell Rickford’s remarks will lead to hate crimes and violence on the upscale Ivy League campus. Cornell University / Facebook
Neither Rickford nor Cornell SPJ responded to requests for comment from The Post, but the controversial professor spoke Monday to The Cornell Daily Sun, where he declined to repeat his rhetoric.
“What I mean is that in the first few hours, when they broke through the apartheid wall, it seemed to be a symbol of resistance, and indeed a new phase of resistance in the Palestinian struggle,” Rickford is reported to have said.
Want to help? Donate here to the UJA-Federation of New York’s emergency fund to provide critical aid to the people of Israel, working with a network of non-profit organizations helping Jewish communities around the world.
“We are acutely aware of the daily destruction, destruction and degradation caused by Israeli policies, caused by Israeli apartheid, caused by the occupation. So in that context, this act of resisting boring across the wall is an important symbol,” the professor said, adding he “hates it[s] the killing of civilians.”
Silberstein said that he also “mourns” the 3,000 people in Palestine who have been killed amid retaliatory airstrikes, saying “no one wants innocent civilians to be killed.”
Israeli rescuers inspect the site of a damaged residential building after it was hit by a missile fired from the Gaza Strip into Sderot Tuesday.ATEF SAFADI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
However, he said it was “impossible to equate the IDF’s retaliation with Hamas’ brutal violence, adding, “while the IDF’s sole mission is to protect the people of Israel, the terrorists of Hamas seek to exterminate all Jews.”
Rickford’s words “can only exacerbate the risk of violence and foster more hostility toward the Jewish community,” Silberstein said, also taking issue with the group’s “Free Palestine” chant.
“I think that calling for the destruction of Israel is calling for the destruction of all its people, the displacement of its population,” he said.
“My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and the dream of a Jewish state was exactly what kept him alive through Auschwitz and the death march. Being able to see that dream come true [in 1948] made all his suffering worth it.”
Silberstein called on Cornell to “reevaluate [Rickford’s] position,” while also slamming the university for an earlier “morally repugnant” email sent to all students by President Martha Pollack, which compared the terrorist attack to the recent “terrible earthquake in Afghanistan” without condemning Hamas.
An email sent to students by Cornell’s president three days after the terrorist attack explicitly condemned it.
Sam Aberman, the Cornell student who posted a clip of the speech at X that had gotten about 12 million views by Tuesday afternoon, told The Post that “allowing professors and other people in positions to support, promote, and even celebrate hateful terrorist groups, like Hamas, after they committed unspeakable atrocities on innocent people creating an unsafe environment on college campuses.”
Shapira was more direct in his message to the administrator, who labeled Rickford’s remarks “reprehensible” in a statement to The Post Tuesday afternoon.
“In my opinion, this university cannot act in any other way than firing [Rickford.] There is no other satisfactory solution,” he said.
“Any member of our community who has made such a statement does not speak for Cornell; in fact, they speak directly against everything we stand for at Cornell,” said Pollack and Board of Trustees Chair Kraig H. Kayser.
“The university takes this incident seriously and is reviewing it in accordance with our procedures.”
Categories: Trending
Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
