From bad to worse: The Harvard Law Review is facing multiple federal probes over reports, published in the Free Beacon, of racial discrimination at the journal. Its conduct in the face of those probes has only added to the furor.
The Review, our Aaron Sibarium reports, "retaliated against a student editor for allegedly leaking documents … and demanded, as part of the journal's disciplinary process, that he request their destruction." Those actions came as the journal "was under a document retention order" from the feds. As a result, they "verged on witness intimidation and could get the law review in even deeper trouble with the government," attorneys told Sibarium.
"What do they call it when a criminal tries to intimidate the witness?" said Jason Torchinsky, a former official in the Justice Department's civil rights division. "If you know someone is a witness in a federal investigation, and you try to intimidate them into stopping cooperation with the government, that in itself is its own offense."
Band-aid over a bullet hole: Racial discrimination isn't the only problem plaguing Harvard. There's also the issue of pervasive anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias on its campus—something the school pledged to combat in part by hiring a Professor in Residence in Modern Jewish Studies at its Divinity School. That professor, Harvard announced on Wednesday, is self-proclaimed "counter-Zionist" Shaul Magid.
For Magid, Zionism is "unjust" and can be "set aside" along with "Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past."
Magid's appointment did not land well with Rabbi David Wolpe, who spent a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard's Divinity School. Magid's views are "very fringe" and don't "represent anything like the mainstream view of the American Jewish community," Wolpe told us. "He is not an answer to the problem that Harvard has with their Jewish students or with the exclusion of mainstream views."
READ MORE: Harvard Hires ‘Counter-Zionist’ Professor in Effort To Fight ‘Anti-Israeli Bias’ in Classrooms
The radicals write their own history: Last spring, The People's Forum encouraged a group of anti-Israel activists gathered at its Manhattan office to re-create the "summer of 2020" in the name of the Palestinian "resistance." Hours later, rioters stormed and occupied a building on Columbia's nearby campus. A new documentary on Apple TV+, The Encampments, tells the one-sided story of those rioters—and it turns out The People's Forum played a big role in its creation.
The documentary was produced by BreakThrough Media, a nonprofit that serves the media arm of The People's Forum's primary benefactor, Neville Singham. The People's Forum and another Singham group "gave more than $1.4 million in grants and office space through 2023 to BreakThrough Media," our Chuck Ross reports. "The People's Forum and BreakThrough Media also share an address, according to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank housed at Rutgers University."
"The Singham network's involvement in both the protests and the documentary underscores the extent to which America's enemies see the anti-Israel campus movement as a means to destabilize the U.S.," writes Ross. "The NCRI report concluded that the Singham network serves as 'the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda.'"
In other news:
- Karine Jean-Pierre's Biden administration colleagues aren't done trashing her, with former White House economic adviser Tim Wu going as far as to call the first black lesbian press secretary "kinda dumb." We're old enough to remember when left-wing pundits insisted Republicans were dead wrong for questioning KJP's qualifications.
- The left-wing #Resistance is mobilizing to take the bold step of boycotting… popular D.C. restaurants like Le Diplomate. How will Trump recover?
- Columbia University's Mahmoud Khalil didn't just work for the terror-tied United Nations Relief and Works Agency—he received course credit for doing so, recent court filings show.