A Cornell University professor was caught on camera telling students that the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, which has left more than 1,400 dead, was “exhilarating” and “energizing.”
The comments were made at a pro-Palestine protest by Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at the top school in Ithaca, New York, and posted online Sunday by a student who called them “shameful.”
Two other informants also shared footage of Rickford’s impassioned speech with The Post. They declined to say when and where exactly the demonstration took place, but both said they were shocked by the brash comments.
The professor said the coordinated attack on October 7, in which militants broke through concrete walls and paraglided into Israel to indiscriminately murder civilians, “changed the balance of politics and destroyed the illusion of invincibility” of Israel, which has imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip. since the Hamas terrorist group took power there in 2007.
“That’s what they’ve done. You don’t have to be a supporter of Hamas to recognize it,” he stated.
Rickford later claimed that many Palestinians who were born into violence and oppression were able to “breathe for the first time in years” in the hours after the brutal massacre.
“It was exciting. It was exhilarating, it was energizing. And if they were not excited by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, the change of violence from power, then they would not be human. I felt excited,” Russell said to some approval from the students, the video shows.
A Cornell University professor was filmed telling students that the Hamas attack was “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Getty Images
The crowd then chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a common call for pro-Palestinian advocates to eradicate Israel and establish their own state. The phrase is considered anti-Semitic by the American Jewish Committee.
Rickford did not respond to an interview request from The Post and Cornell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russell Rickford, professor at Cornell University, speaking about the Hamas terrorist attacks.@samaberman / X
His explosive speech came after a director of diversity and inclusion at Cornell University came under fire for calling the Hamas attack a “resistance.”
“Fuck your fake outrage towards Palestine when you have literally remained silent about the violence perpetuated by Israel against Palestine every day,” Derron Borders of the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management wrote on Instagram on the day of the attack.
On Saturday morning last week, fighters from the Israeli Navy’s southern command were alerted following a notification of an infiltration attempt by sea. Israel Defense Forces
Borders later condemned the violence but said it was on par with Israel’s “state-sanctioned violence” against the Palestinian people.
Cornell’s Ivy League rival, Harvard University, made headlines last week when more than 30 student organizations co-signed a letter distributed by Harvard’s Palestinian Solidarity Groups that held Israel responsible for the terrorist attack.
Harvard’s president defended the students’ right to free speech, but several of the groups attempted to withdraw their support for the letter after business titans threatened to blacklist them from Wall Street.
The nonprofit news watchdog group Accuracy in Media drove a truck of billboards around the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus to mislead the students who supposedly signed the letter, labeling them “Harvard’s leading anti-Semites.”
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Source: vtt.edu.vn