Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman backtracked on his earlier calls to reveal the identities of Harvard students who blame Israel for attacks by the Hamas terrorist organization.
Ackman, who demanded that Harvard release the names of students whose organizations circulated a letter blaming Israel for the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, reversed course on Tuesday — despite a viral video that showed an unidentified individual near the campus of Harvard University declare his support for Hamas.
“I think they’re [Israelis] all dirty, dirty animals…They should be all exterminated, every single one of them,” the man, who is wearing a hood and a mask, says in the video as he argues with a woman. “And their kids, their mothers, their children, everybody — just like Hitler did.”
Ackman, who has been criticized by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers for demanding the release of names of anti-Israel students so that they be denied employment opportunities, replied to the video on his X social media account, writing: “Thinking about it more, identifying this racist anonymous thug and giving the world an economic incentive to find him isn’t the answer.”
The CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management wrote on Tuesday that he wants “a world where someone will sit down with this kid, and give him perspective on his hate speech.”
“Outing him will just increase the anger,” Ackman wrote. “Someone close to him that he respects needs to confront him and give him perspective.”
Harvard has come under fire for its handling of the letter circulated by pro-Palestinian groups that blame Israel for the carnage of Oct. 7.
Summers once again hit out at his alma mater, saying that it failed to adequately denounce the terrorist attacks.
“Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School have aggressively and effectively addressed issues raised by Hamas terror and subsequent anti-Semitic speech,” Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, wrote on his X social media account on Monday.
“The Harvard University response is not nearly as strong,” he wrote, adding: “This is very unfortunate at a time of moral crisis.”
Summers linked to a statement from Harvard Business School’s dean, Srikant Datar, who called Hamas’ actions “unconscionable” and “inconsistent with our most fundamental values.”
“The atrocities carried out were heinous and they have left the Israeli and Jewish members of our community, and all of us, reeling,” Datar wrote in his statement from last Tuesday.
The dean pledged that he and other administrators would be “investigating more deeply the concern I have heard that noxious elements of antisemitism persist on our campus and in our classrooms.”
Harvard’s campus has been roiled by the unfolding turmoil in Israel and Gaza.
An organization has even deployed a “doxxing truck” with a screen that beams the identities of student leaders of the pro-Palestinian group.
Ackman on Tuesday went on to blame social media for “amplifying the hate” while adding that TikTok should “probably be banned” because it was “massively manipulating public opinion.”
He cited a poll that found that “51% of the TikTok generation say that Hamas’ barbaric acts are justified.”