A Harvard Divinity School graduate selected by faculty members to speak at the school's commencement ceremony used her address to praise Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a classmate who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate.
"Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for us to arrive," the speaker, Zehra Imam, told the crowd Thursday while draped in a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. "Elom Tettey-Tamaklo … our friends [sic] and classmate who continues to show up not just for Palestine, but for each of us by extending to us the water we need in our most vulnerable moments. Together we must refuse to be ruled by the tyrants of our time because our liberations are intertwined."
Tettey-Tamaklo and his fellow Harvard graduate student, Ibrahim Bharmal, were captured on video, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, pushing, shoving, and surrounding a Jewish student during an October 2023 "die-in" protest, using keffiyehs to obscure their faces and block the student’s view. They faced assault charges over the incident, and a Suffolk County judge ultimately ordered them to perform 80 hours of community service and take an in-person anger management class as part of a pretrial diversion program. Soon after, Tettey-Tamaklo was made a class marshal for the divinity school’s graduation ceremony.
A committee of Harvard Divinity School students, faculty, and staff selected Imam—a Muslim Associate-Chaplin at MIT who has long pushed anti-Israel sentiment—as a student speaker for the commencement ceremony, according to a school spokesman. He said Imam deviated from her originally planned speech.
"Staff had no prior knowledge of the revised and given speech," the spokesman added. "Neither [Harvard Divinity School] nor Harvard condones the action taken by the students to deviate from the submitted and approved speech. The views and opinions expressed by the speakers during this ceremony are solely those of the individuals and do not reflect the official policy or position of HDS or Harvard University."
Imam’s anti-Israel sentiment is long known. Last year, she called on MIT to divest from Israel through a poem she read on a Turkish television show. She also joined a sit-in for "Palestinian freedom" at the university roughly a month after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
Imam also used her commencement speech to praise "the enormous hearts, unwavering courage, and profound wisdom" of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, Columbia University students facing deportation proceedings for leading anti-Semitic activism on campus.
Her speech comes at a precarious time for Harvard, with the Trump administration striking on multiple fronts over the Ivy League university’s failure to rein in campus anti-Semitism. The administration is aiming to strip Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, eliminate its tax-exempt status, and freeze billions of dollars in federal funding.
Harvard’s posture toward Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal has likely provided fodder for the Trump administration. The university refused to cooperate with the Suffolk County District Attorney's probe into the "die-in," according to the DA's office, and Bharmal was recently awarded a $65,000 Harvard Law Review fellowship.