Students at Cornell University asked administrators to take action against a professor who said he was “excited” by the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, which left more than 1,400 dead.
The comments were made by associate professor of history Russell Rickford on Sunday at an off-campus rally related to Cornell’s Students for Justice in Palestine group, according to an attendee.
Netanel Shapira, 21, a student with dual Israeli citizenship, filmed the viral clip of the demonstration outside campus. Shapira said he attended the event in an effort to “listen to both sides” and take the temperature of residents of the leafy liberal college town of Ithaca, New York.
Shapira, who studies economics and government at the university, said he had heard from classmates that associate history professor Russell Rickford was “not ashamed of his extremism” in the classroom, but was unprepared for his apparent full-throated endorsement of Hamas. . slaughter.
“This guy essentially openly said that he was happy, excited, enthusiastic, energized, right, about the murder of innocent civilians. The massacre of civilians and the rape of women,” Shapira said.
“There is no place for that anywhere for any group of people, then of course in that video at the end the crowd starts singing ‘From the River to the Sea’… in itself an anti-Semitic and genocidal chant.” .
Shapira and his friend left the rally shortly after the “small” crowd began calling for the eradication of Israel.
“How can you possibly feel safe? “That is like a textbook, the first steps towards inciting violence.”
Amanda Silberstein, 21, was “deeply upset” when Rickford’s comments first circulated in the university’s Jewish community groups.
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“Watching that video, my initial reaction was ‘this is a teacher, this is an educator, you know, students are supposed to internalize and respect, you know, the words that their teacher says,'” said the native of Englewood, New Jersey, who is studying hotel management and hospitality.
“It was really shocking and his words have meaning. This is not a distant idea; “We have seen it happen on the Columbia campus, at Harvard, at New York University,” she added, referring to other embraces of terrorism at top-tier schools in the region.
“If your teacher praises a group for doing something, you may admire that group and think it is the right course of action.”
Three Cornell University students told the Post on Tuesday that they were concerned that Russell Rickford’s comments would lead to hate crimes and violence on the leafy upstate Ivy League campus. Cornell University / Facebook
Neither Rickford nor Cornell SPJ responded to a request for comment from The Post, but the controversial professor spoke to The Cornell Daily Sun on Monday, where he refused to walk back his rhetoric.
“What I was referring to was that those first few hours, when they broke down the apartheid wall, seemed to be a symbol of resistance and, in fact, a new phase of resistance in the Palestinian struggle,” Rickford reportedly said.
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“We are very aware of the daily devastation, destruction and degradation caused by Israeli policies, caused by Israeli apartheid, caused by the occupation. So, in that context, this act of defiance of piercing the wall was a significant symbol,” the professor said, while adding that “he abhors[s] the murder of civilians.”
Silberstein said he was also “mourning” the 3,000 people in Palestine who had died amid retaliatory airstrikes, saying “no one wants to see innocent civilians killed.”
Israeli rescuers inspect the site of a damaged residential building after it was hit by a missile launched from the Gaza Strip towards Sderot on Tuesday.ATEF SAFADI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
However, he said it was “impossible to equate the IDF’s retaliatory actions with the brutal terror of Hamas, adding that “while the IDF’s sole mission is to protect the people of Israel, Hamas terrorists seek to eliminate all the Jews”.
Rickford’s words “can only exacerbate the risk of more violence and foster more animosity against 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 asking for the destruction of all its people, the displacement of its people,” he said.
“My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and the dream of a Jewish state is literally what kept him alive during Auschwitz and the death march. Being able to see that dream come true [in 1948] It made all his suffering worth it to him.”
Silberstein called on Cornell to “reevaluate [Rickford’s] position,” while criticizing the university for an initial “morally repugnant” email that was 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 the president of Cornell three days after the terrorist attack did explicitly condemn it.
Sam Aberman, the Cornell student who posted a clip of the speech on even celebrate a hateful A terrorist group, like Hamas, after committing unspeakable atrocities against innocent people creates an unsafe environment on college campuses.”
Shapira was more direct in his message to administrators, who called Rickford’s comments “reprehensible” in a statement to the Post on Tuesday afternoon.
“For me, this university cannot act in any other way than to dismiss [Rickford.] There is no other solution that satisfies us,” he stated.
“Any member of our community who has made such statements is not speaking for Cornell; in fact, they speak in direct opposition to everything we stand for at Cornell,” said Pollack and Board of Trustees President Kraig H. Kayser.
“The university is taking this incident seriously and is currently reviewing it in accordance with our procedures.”
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